A WOMAN AND SHEEP
None had acquired a more general regard among the passengers than the Kansas Farmer. He bore no resemblance to the typical farmer as represented in the comic publications but was, on the contrary, a well-dressed, imposing looking man of middle age, a college graduate, as Stafford knew, and one who had selected his occupation because it appealed to him as, to their own and general good, it might appeal to hosts of others of the educated men of the country. Stafford and he had become friends, as was almost a matter of course, and it was the former who insisted that the Farmer bring to the front some curious experience of human nature in connection with farm life. "You are the tree we must tap now," he jested. "It's just because you are what you are that we want the thing. Inevitably, you, with your experience and associations, can tell us something of the inner being and its ways on a farm which will be edifying. Tell us the queerest and most unexplainable thing you remember in connection with such life and of one man or woman's part in it."
The farmer stroked his grizzled, close-cut beard and laughed:
"It seems to me that the element of love has entered with tolerable regularity into most of the narratives to which I have had the pleasure of listening here. That is right, certainly, and natural. What I'm going to tell is a love story, too, in its way. It is of a love which budded and bloomed but bore no fruit, for the oddest reason in the world. It is about a man who loved a woman and was won away by sheep. No, he wasn't exactly won away; he just forgot. It was the strangest thing I ever knew or heard of, but it is true. I know the man and his sheep myself, though I never saw the woman. This is
JASON'S LOVE STORY
A swamp oak stump is one of the most contumacious stumps in the world. It is usually big and its roots extend, like the arms of an octopus, in all directions save upward. Furthermore, having been bred to the wet, feeding on dampness when alive, the wood does not rot willingly. The upper portion of the stump absorbs the showers of heaven and endures the cracking heat of the sun apathetically and remains pretty much the same for a long time, while the roots lie solid in their dark bed, almost regardless of the years as men grow old. So it is that an otherwise cleared area of land occupied largely by swamp oak stumps is what the farmers in Michigan's Lower Peninsula call an unpromising place for present making of crops. It was such an area that Jason Goodell—who was in love—owned. He possessed eighty acres, an eighth of a section, with fifteen acres cleared—but for stumps. The young woman whom he loved was Melissa Trumbull, the eldest daughter of "old man" Trumbull, who was well-to-do.
The place where swamp oaks grow is of a sort to command respect. It has features. It is often a black ash swale. A swale is low ground, but not a swamp, crossed sometimes, at irregular intervals, by strips of higher ground referred to generally as beech ridges. In the lower ground thrive the black ash, the huge swamp oak, various moisture-loving bushes and luxurious growths of ferns. Up on the ridges grow the maple, the white ash, the beech, ironwood and birch and bushes which do not object to less damp soil, nannyberries elders and the like.
In the swale proper the growth underfoot is bush and there are hundreds of puddles where the frogs congregate in thousands, mostly the small, brown wood frog, not the big, green "kerplunk" sort of the ponds and streams. Here the raccoon finds what is, to him, a land flowing with milk and honey, for he agrees with a frog diet as a frog diet agrees with him; here upon dead white trunks the solitary log-cock, the great black, red-crested woodpecker, largest of his genus, in the region, hammers away like a blacksmith; here the hermit thrush sings sometimes; and here little streams are born, to trickle at first, then ripple and then leap, bubbling and noisy, into the sloping fields outside, to attain the dignity of brooks at last and join the undercreek.
On the beech ridges life is different. There the ruffed grouse struts about and feeds upon the nuts and berries; and there are the squirrels, black, gray and red. The grouse raise great families on the ridges and the wooing "drumming" of the males in spring is like nothing else in the world. It is the most distinctively wildwood sound there is. As for the squirrels, the black is no longer holding his own with the red and the gray. He is going like the Red Indian and the buffalo and no one can tell why. He was not born to civilization. The red and gray adapt themselves. Of such swale and ridge, so peopled, consisted (as has been said) the greater portion of the estate of Jason Goodell; excellent land but requiring much work in its subjugation.
Never better man for conquering a forest or making good soil yield the crops it has owed than this same brown-bearded Jason Goodell. Personally strong, six full feet in height, though a trifle stooping, and slouchy in his gait, thewed like a draft-horse, broad of forehead and strong of chin, with firm mouth and steady gray eyes, this man was one to accomplish things as thoroughly and doggedly as Victor Hugo's Gilliatt toiling sturdily at the wrecked ship. Like Gilliatt, too, Jason was toiling for love's sake. He had never spoken of his passion to Melissa Trumbull, but they had studied together in the little district school, had grown up together, had confided their plans and hopes to each other and, until Jason left the employ of old man Trumbull and began work on his own "eighty," had been almost constantly together. To Jason, reticent, and timid as well, in a matter of this sort, it never occurred to make a definite engagement, and to Melissa, black-eyed, gingham-clad, buoyant and with plenty of work to do, the situation doubtless presented itself with the same aspect. No pledged word, though, could have made the matter more fixed and serious than it was, at least to Jason. What need of words? The first thing to do was to make a home for the occupancy of two young married people.