“Well, give me Iowa!” said Amos.
For a long while he rode in silence, but his thoughts were distinct enough for words. “What an amusing little scamp it was!”—thus they ran—“I believe he could mimic anything on earth. He used to give a cat and puppy fighting that I laughed myself nearly into a fit over. When I think of that I hate this job. Now why? You never saw the fellow to speak to him more than twice. Duty, Amos, duty. But if he is as decent as he’s got the name of being here, it’s rough—Hullo! River? Trees?” The river might be no more than the lightening rim of the horizon behind the foliage, but there was no mistake about the trees; and when Wickliff turned the field-glass, which he habitually carried, on them he could make out not only the river and the willows, but the walls of a cabin and the lovely undulations of a green field of corn. Half an hour’s riding brought him to the house and a humble little garden of sweet-pease and hollyhocks. Amos groaned. “How cursed decent it all looks! And flowers too! I have no doubt that his wife’s a nice woman, and the baby has a clean face. Everything certainly does combine to ball me up on this job! There she is; and she’s nice!”
A woman in a clean print gown, with a child pulling at her skirt, had run to the gate. She looked young. Her freckled face was not exactly pretty, but there was something engaging in the flash of her white teeth and her soft, black-lashed, dark eyes. She held the gate wide open, with the hospitality of the West. “Won’t you ’light, stranger?” she called.
“I’m bound for here,” replied Amos, telling his prepared tale glibly. “This is Mr. Brown’s, the photographer’s, ain’t it? I want him to come to the settlement with me and take me standing on a deer.”
“Yes, sir.” The woman spoke in mellow Southern accents, and she began to look interested, as suspecting a romance under this vain-glory. “Yes, sir. Deer you shot, I reckon. I’ll send Johnny D. for him. Oh, Johnny D.!”
A lath of a boy of ten, with sunburnt white hair and bright eyes, vaulted over a fence and ran to her, receiving her directions to go find uncle after he had cared for the gentleman’s horse.
“Your nephew, madam?” said Amos, as the lad’s bare soles twinkled in the air.
“Well, no, sir, not born nephew,” she said, smiling; “he’s a little neighbor boy. His folks live three miles further down the river; but I reckon we all think jest as much of him as if he was our born kin. Won’t you come in, sir?”
By this time she had passed under the luxuriant arbor of honeysuckle that shaded the porch, and she threw wide the door. The room was large. It was very tidy. The furniture was of the sort that can be easily transported where railways have to be pieced out with mule trails. But it was hardly the ordinary pioneer cabin. Not because there was a sewing-machine in one corner, for the sewing-machine follows hard on the heels of the plough; perhaps because of the white curtains at the two windows (curtains darned and worn thin by washing, tied back with ribbons faded by the same ministry of neatness), or the square of pretty though cheap carpet on the floor, or the magazines and the bunch of sweet-pease on the table, but most because of the multitude of photographs on the clumsy walls. They were on cards, all of the same size (not more than 8 by 10 inches), protected by glass, and framed in mossy twigs. Some of the pictures were scenes of the country, many of them bits of landscape near the house, all chosen with a marvellous elimination of the usual grotesque freaks of the camera, and with such an unerring eye for subject and for light and shade that the artist’s visions of the flat, commonplace country were not only picturesque but poetic. In the prints also were an extraordinary richness and range of tone. It did not seem possible that mere black and white could give such an effect of brilliancy and depth of color. An artist looking over this obscure photographer’s workmanship might feel a thrill like that which crinkles a flower-lover’s nerves when he sees a mass of azaleas in fresh bloom.
Amos was not an artist, but he had a camera at home, and he gave a gulp of admiration. “Well, he is great!” he sighed. “That beats any photographic work I ever saw.”