God’s Green Country

A NOVEL OF CANADIAN
RURAL LIFE

By
ETHEL M. CHAPMAN

THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO
1922

To
The Memory of a Friend
whose Vision Saw an Arcadia
for Every Field of the Green Country
and
whose Brief Years of Sympathy and Service
were Given to Make it Real for
One Spot in Rural Ontario

CONTENTS

God’s Green Country

CHAPTER I.

“Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in their nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the West—
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.”

—Mrs. Browning.

Something was wrong—a little more than usual—at the Withers farm.

A spirit of foreboding seemed to hang in the quietness of the untravelled road past the gate, in the clamorous squeaks of the new litter of Tamworths in the barnyard, nosing sleepily into their mother’s side. It seemed to come up from the swamp in the spring night’s pollen-scented breath, like the air in a little close parlor after an anchor of hyacinths has been carried out on a coffin.

Billy felt the weight in the atmosphere, but he was too young to analyse it. Of all the old human emotions stirring the ten long bitter years

of his short life, fear had been the most exercised; and it was fear that troubled him now—fear of his father. Because it had been there always, he had never wondered about it. He knew that somehow, in spite of it all, he would grow up—then he would put the Swamp Farm and all he could forget about it as far away from him as possible. In the meantime, with the merciful forgetfulness of childhood, he enjoyed whatever passing pleasures came between. Just now he was down by the milk-house with little Jean, bending over her pathetic garden of four potato plants and a pansy. Billy had never had a garden for himself. It was too much like playing. Besides, as far back as he could remember he had had quite as much gardening as he wanted, taking care of the “hoed crops.” It was good, though, to see Jean take the potato top affectionately in her little cupped hands, proud that she had made it grow. Billy was glad she was a girl, so she could have time for such things. Not that he minded work, of course, he soliloquized. He remembered how he had begged daily to go to help his grandfather before he died.

It was working with his father that was disagreeable. Come to think of it, it was the dread of that more than anything else that was bothering him to-night. In the morning the potato planting started. It wasn’t difficult to get help just then, but for some reason of his own Dan

Withers had decided to take Billy out of school and “break him in” to farm work, just when he was getting ready to try the entrance, too, and the entrance meant such a long step towards qualifying for a job away from home!

Moreover, Billy liked to go to school. It was so different—to work where the teacher showed you how without calling you a stupid—oh, lots of names—and praised you sometimes. Remembering past experiences working with his father his heart sank. Somehow he was just beginning to wonder why, but not for years yet would he realize the injustice of being brought into the world entirely without his own willing, only to be made the prey of a chain of cruel circumstances. He couldn’t even see the reason for each individual tribulation. Only his mother knew that, generally, and because she knew and anticipated for the children, hers was a twofold suffering.

Dan Withers came out to the little sagging wooden porch and lit his pipe. Judging from his physique he might have managed the tillable acres of his Swamp Farm with one hand. Also he was not the caricatured work-driven, grasping type of farmer, bent and wooden-jointed and prematurely old, as a result of his struggle to wrest a living from the elements. He had the build of an athlete without the bearing—a laziness of movement and a slouch of the shoulders

that was almost insolent, except when he walked before a crowd. He could command a military spine the instant it seemed worth the effort. When the occasion required it the hard cunning in his little brown eyes could take cover, leaving them as soft and honest as a spaniel’s. The coarseness of speech that had become a habit in his own family could, with an effort, give way to a more refined vernacular, as eloquent as it was unnatural. He was not a farmer from choice; farm work irritated him. If some vocational expert could have taken him young enough, and put him on the stage, he might have developed into a master actor. As it was, his gift of address was divided among various implement agencies. The run-down farm was a hopeless sideline that supported the family.

Perhaps because Nature is always working to keep her balance and save the race, Mary Withers was made of an entirely different kind of clay. When she followed her husband out to the porch to-night it was under the strain of preparation for one of the thousand battles which, with her gentle, appealing logic, she tried to fight for her children. Her intercessions were never of any avail, but she was no strategist and she knew no other tactics. Moreover she had never been trained to fight. She had come to Dan with no experience outside the shelter of a rosemary, white-linen home, and he had taken the heart

out of her so suddenly and overwhelmingly directly after, that she was not likely to ever take any very radical initiative again.

She brought her mending to the porch with her. It was too dark to sew; but when she had to ask Dan for anything she always felt less nervous if she had something in her hands. It was hard to begin.

“The fall wheat yonder is coming on nicely,” she ventured cheerfully.

He pressed the hot tobacco into his pipe a little harder than was necessary.

“Oh, yes,” he conceded after some deliberation. “Things’ll come along nice enough, if a man slaves from one year’s end to the other without any help, like I’m fixed.”

“I thought perhaps you could get Jonas to help with the potatoes to-morrow. He isn’t working.”

“Oh, you did, did you? An’ while you were thinkin’ so active, did you think where the money was comin’ from to pay Jonas? I’ve throwed away enough good money hirin’ men. It don’t ever occur to you, I suppose, thet we’ve a boy of our own thet’s never done much to pay for his keep yet? He’s got to take holt now.”

“But he needs to be at school so badly, just now,” she ventured timidly. “The teacher called to-day to say she felt sure he’d pass this summer if he could get to school regularly from now on.”

“Well, you can tell the teacher for me, thet we ain’t makin’ no professor out o’ Bill. When I was ten year old I was harrowin’ an drivin’ team, doin’ a man’s work. There was no school for me except what I got in the winters. Spite o’ that, though, I ain’t such a fool as you take me for. I can see as far into a mill stone as them that picks it, an’ I ain’t more’n usual blind just now. You think what’s good enough fer me ain’t good enough fer Bill. You don’t care how hard I work so’s he can get to school an’ learn enough tomfoolery to get him a job thet he can clear out to, about the time he’s able to be some help. But you jest ain’t dealin’ with the right man. You’ve molly-coddled that young one long enough now. To-morrow he starts his career with me, an’ he’ll maybe think he’s struck fire an’ brimstone before the day’s over.”

It wasn’t a case for argument. The children were beginning to look up apprehensively, and Mary called them to come to bed. In the darkness of the kitchen when she was getting down the lamp, Billy waited to whisper: “He didn’t say I could go to school, did he?”

It was hard to look into the wistful, searching face and say “No.” It was harder when Billy turned away quickly and kept his face averted while he got the little tin basin to wash his feet. His mother’s hard, gentle hand rested for a moment on his shoulder and dropped away discouraged

at the quivering of the resolute little back. Her whole body ached to take him in her arms. He really wasn’t much more than a baby yet, but such expressions were denied her in the never-ending struggle to keep her emotions dammed back. Only the anxiety of love, the eagerness of service were busy in a thousand ways from the first stirrings of daylight until long after the family were asleep.

As she hung up the key of the clock Dan came in. At the entrance to the darkness of the little bedroom off the kitchen he stopped, slipping a brace over his shoulder, and looking back with a hard little glitter in his eyes inquired:

“C’n you git that fellow up to catch the horses by five o’clock? .... ’Cause if you can’t I kin.”

Another of the thousand bitter details!

In the morning Mary kindled the fire and busied herself about the kitchen as long as she dared before climbing the narrow stairs to Billy’s room. Then she hesitated. There was something so blue and drawn about the closed eyelids; already his hands were bent and calloused like a man’s.

“An’ him not much more’n a baby,” she murmured. It seemed nothing short of cruel to disturb him. Perhaps he would waken himself if she just kept looking at him.

But Billy didn’t waken. Once he twitched

nervously, but a boy consumed with the weakening fever of growth doesn’t waken easily after working the length of a man’s day, with “chores” afterwards. He had to be shaken several times before the slow, painful process began. It started somewhere in his dimmest consciousness, and gradually sent a long, slow quiver down through his healthy little muscles and back again, emerging in a gulping breath that seemed to shake his eyes open. Ordinarily he would have closed them again, but this morning the bewildering memory of something dreadful hanging over him brought him to, suddenly.

It wasn’t so bad once he got up. The smarting soon left his eyes, and the stiffness began to go out of his legs. They ached, of course, from the heels up, but that was from trying to keep up to the colts on the harrow yesterday. Then his mother had a berry turnover waiting for him to start out on. She had been telling him that, he remembered, while she tried to get him awake. So he took the halters in one hand and the turnover in the other and started out for the horses in a very philosophical frame of mind, considering everything. The dew on the grass was cool to his bare feet; the robins in the bushes as he passed didn’t seem to expect anyone so early, so from their reckless chattering he learned the location of many a new nest. He marked the places so he could show them to Jean. On the

hill in the pasture, where the sun was just coming up like a yellow half ball, the young cattle stood out like pieces cut out of black paper and pasted on; they looked funny when they moved. Then it was good to get up on old Nell’s broad grey back, and feel the shake of the friendly muscles under him. Altogether, if some miracle could have given him a father who would occasionally see eye-to-eye with him on things agricultural and personal, Billy would almost have played hookey from school for a life like this.

The forenoon seemed to be going uneventfully enough. Dan’s rather threatening admonition when they began the planting had been to “look sharp now” and not keep the horses standing, and Billy had determined to keep ahead of them at the sacrifice of any minor details. He had been shown just how far apart to drop the pieces, but when you see the furrow reaching up behind you like an unfriendly snake, and no escape before the end of the row; when the handle of the pail is cutting into the flesh of your arm and the bags of seed are rods down the field, there is a powerful temptation to make what you have go as far as possible. Suddenly the horses stopped and Dan came around to examine the planting.

“Hev you dropped ’em all as far apart as this?” he asked. “I might ’a’ knowed I couldn’t trust you. Never saw the time yet that you wasn’t

a durn sight more bother than help. Well, you c’n just stake off these rows, an’ when we’re through plantin’ you c’n dig ’em up with the hoe, an’ plant ’em right. Mebby that’ll learn you a little more than goin’ to school fer a while.”

Just when the neighbors’ dinner bells began to call the men from the farther fields, Dan again called across the headland: “You’d better go to the barn an’ get some more seed. Save the prize Carmens here fer the last rows an’ mind to shut the gate after you or the sow’ll be in.”

Billy hitched old Nell to the stone-boat, shut the gate after him and went for the seed. When he came back the gate was still closed, but Tibby and her family were demolishing the last of the prize Carmens. When she found she had to leave, she made straight for the vulnerable spot in the stump fence that had given her entrance. Billy drove the pigs ahead of him and went after some rails. On the way he heard his mother ring the dinner-bell, saw, from many a furtive glance back, his father stop at the littered remains of the prize Carmens, look all around and start on to the barn. The most Billy could hope for was that his wrath might have cooled a little before he would have to meet him. By the time he had blocked the hole in the fence and brought Nell up to the stable his father had gone to the house, so he climbed up and put down the hay, dampened old Nell’s oats as usual, so she wouldn’t

choke on them, and with his little heart palpitating till he could hardly swallow, approached the house.

The savory steam of stewed chicken came out from the kitchen. When the meat supply ran low in the spring his mother killed off the old hens. She always made hot biscuits to break into the gravy and had the grandest pot pies ever to tide a fellow over a time like this. If they had it for dinner when he was at school she saved a drumstick and the gizzard for him. He was almost forgetting his soul’s anxiety in the urgent pressure of his animal wants.

Mary knew something of what had happened. In fact Dan had informed her without softening the details. Still, in spite of the morning’s “aggrevations,” he was eating his dinner with satisfactory relish when Billy came in. She met Billy at the door to ask cheerfully:

“How’d you get along?”

“Fine,” Billy answered with a disconcerting unsteadiness under the attempt.

“Well, just get washed now, and have your dinner while it’s hot. I have some nice pot pie here.”

But this was a little too much for Dan. To be ignored so brazenly in the face of the storm he had been brewing with inward satisfaction, to be treated as though he were no more than a figurehead in his own house! He had often declared

that there was a secret understanding, a conspiracy against him in his own family, and it was time to show where he stood now.

“You hain’t got no pot-pie fer him,” he interrupted. “He’ll git his belly full o’ something else ’sides pie when I’m through here.”

All at once Billy’s fortitude gave way. Perhaps because he was tired and hungry, his flesh quailed before the coming ordeal. “I didn’t leave the gate open,” he cried, wild terror in his eyes. “The pigs got in through the fence. I found the place.”

“You consarned little liar! You fool away the whole morning, spoil the whole patch with yer lazy tricks, thinkin’ I wouldn’t see ’em, then let the stock in to eat up the seed I’ve paid fer. I’ll just waken you up so’s I’ll warrant you’ll think twice before you try the like again.”

The rawhide was coming down from its hook; it had been kept in the house ever since Billy could remember.

“Now, Dan,” Mary pleaded with her hand on his arm—a gentleness of touch that always irritated him into a frenzy, “you aren’t fit to punish him now ... and he did his best.”

“You dictatin’ too, hey!” he stormed, pushing her off. “No wonder the young un’s no good with your eternal coddlin’ an’ interferin’. Stand out the way there.”

But the mother-tigress instinct was roused in

its helpless way. Still she clung to his arm. Only Billy seemed to have come to any self-control.

“Don’t, mummy,” he ordered calmly; “I c’n stand it.”

The nerve, the audacity of the proud little figure angered Dan more because it shamed him. If the boy had been a foot taller his father would have been cowed by the quiet reproach in the steady brown eyes, but Billy was only such a little handful of bones—something like a bird when you cover it with your hand and find it all feathers and skeleton and crushable, so he suffered the full punishment—the sickening, lithe, cutting, kind of blows that we have shivered to hear dealt to colts out in the far recesses of the green country, away from the danger of official interference. He emerged ridged, welted, white and tearless, with an ugly red streak across one cheek that somehow Dan wished wasn’t there. It made the rest of his face look so white and pinched and old for its years.

Potato planting had been suspended for the day. Without excuse or errand Dan had driven off to town. Straggling buggies began driving down the road—people, neighbors most of them, all dressed up like they went to church on Sundays, the sun shining pleasantly on the horses’ sleek backs and glittering over the bright parts of the harness. Billy climbed up to the vantage point of the gate post, and looked up the road

eagerly, as many another boy has watched for a circus parade. Yes, it was coming just over the hill—he could see the bright black top of it—the hearse. He remembered that this was the day of Mrs. Brown’s funeral, and he had heard his mother say she ought to go; maybe he could go with her.

He had been at old Mr. Hopkin’s funeral when he was quite small and had enjoyed it immensely. It had seemed just like a story to watch the people all moving around so still as if they expected something; to see the black box with its silver handles and the flowers all piled on top—he had wanted his mother to lift him up to see in, but she didn’t. Mr. Hopkins’ family were all there, fine, rich-looking men and women with their hair beginning to turn grey and children of their own almost grown up. And the people had sung “The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want.” It was just fine. You could almost see old Mr. Hopkins going down the green pastures with his long staff, just like he came out to salt the sheep, only not so bent over, and maybe with a long gown on like the charts showed at Sunday school. He would likely have found Mrs. Hopkins, who had died two years before, and they would sit under the trees and both be happier than they had been in all their lives. One of the daughters had said, “He never was the same since Ma died,” and Billy’s faith never questioned

the goodness of the angels in taking him to her. Altogether there was nothing sad about it, except that everyone would miss old Mr. Hopkins for a while.

But this funeral to-day would be different. There were children at Brown’s—some of them just babies. Mrs. Brown couldn’t be much older than his mother. People said she had consumption, and when Billy had called to ask hands to the threshing last fall he had seen her at the pump, and she looked so white and thin she had almost frightened him. When he asked if he could carry the water for her she couldn’t answer—just leaned on the pump and coughed and coughed. He had seen her helping her husband plant potatoes once too. She hadn’t looked so bad then, but that was a year ago. Well, she would be through now. He had heard his grandmother say once that there were “a thousand things worse than death.” Maybe it was true. He climbed stiffly down from the gate post and walked reflectively to the house.

Long before the hour, the Brown house was filled with people; others gathered in little knots about the yard. Men exchanged views of the crop prospects, and occasionally when the drone of the bees in the lilacs and the creak of the buggies in the lane ceased for a moment, a remark like “That sod field ought to go fifty bushel to the acre,” sounded irrelevantly across the

yard. The women talked only of the deceased—when she had taken the turn, how she had said good-bye to the children the last night and sent them off to bed with a smile, then gone completely out of her mind in the bitterness of it—and how hard it was going to be for Jim. He was just getting ready to build a barn too; a pile of gravel a few yards from the back door was evidence of its progress—it seemed hard, just when they were getting along so well. And he had done all for her that a man could do. He had even had her to the sanitarium; but it was no use—once you got consumption there was just one thing to wait for. They reviewed the lives and deaths of her ancestors to see where she had inherited it, but could find no trace of the trouble for three generations back. She had always been so smart and strong, too. Why, when she was first married she could do as much as any other two women in the neighborhood.

The old doctor, friend and terror of the community, stopped to shake hands with a strong, honest-looking young fellow leaning against the fence.

“Pretty hard, eh?” he remarked nodding towards the house.

“Sure is. It’s a bad thing to let get hold of you. I know from experience. I worked in the city for a couple of years in a wholesale house once. Got a notion I didn’t like farming, you

know, like lots of other young fellows do—and I believe if I’d stayed there a year longer, cooped up in a cage breathing the dust and smoke of the place, I’d never got back at all. But I got out of it in time. I’m out in the field now ten hours a day. I eat like a horse and I’ll bet you couldn’t find a spot on my lungs with the point of a needle. I’m always glad I was able to bring Hazel out to the farm. She gets tired of it sometimes, after always being in a store, but I tell her it’s the healthiest place this side of Switzerland—all the fresh air there is clean off the fields, and the best place in the world to bring up children.”

“Isn’t turning out very well for these kids here.”

“Losing their mother?—No.”

“There’s always that chance.”

“There is anywhere. What do you mean?”

“Just that nine women out of ten in these parts don’t have time to bring up their children; that if they were given half the care you give the milk critters the young ones would have a better chance to start with. The air may be good enough in the fields, but it’s no elixir after it’s been shut up all day in a house so badly heated that you have to keep the windows down tight to keep things from freezing. Did you ever see where they slept in there? A little room off the kitchen just big enough for a bed and the window

frozen down from summer to summer. I told Brown the danger, but he reckoned he got enough fresh air out doors all day, and if his wife had a cough it was no place for her in a draught. Besides, he said, she was prowling around so late at night sewing for the kids that the little time she was in bed didn’t matter much. Now he’s afraid he’s caught it from her, but he hasn’t. He’s in too healthy a shape to catch anything. It’s different with a woman, spent with the children coming and the long hours and the work that you couldn’t hire a girl to do. I’m not so sure of the children being safe; they’re none too strong to start with.”

The young man resented this.

“Ain’t you pretty hard on Brown?” he demanded. “You won’t find a harder workin’ or a kinder man to his family anywhere; nor a woman more contented or that took more pride in her home than she did. I don’t like to hear him talked about as if he was to blame for this. Nor she wouldn’t.”

The doctor’s eyes wandered up to the window with its patched, starched curtains, and row of tomato cans holding weary-looking geraniums. There were new coverings of wall-paper around the tins—a pitiful reminder of a woman’s struggle to keep her house to the last.

“No, she wouldn’t,” he agreed quietly. “She thought the sun rose and set on Jim and the

kids.... And I’m not blaming him. He thought this driving and saving now was going to make things easier later on, and he just got the habit and couldn’t stop. What you all need around here is a little more physiological common sense. How’s Hazel?”

The question seemed ill-timed.

“First rate,” the husband answered. “She’s over there.”

The doctor looked over to the girl who a year ago had left the smoke of the town for the haven of the green country. The plume in her chiffon hat sagged a little; her wedding dress hung a bit limp, her face seemed noticeably pale through the tan. Altogether, to his professional eye, she didn’t look as well as when she left the town.

In the house the service was beginning. Through the open door in the strained quiet of the drowsy afternoon, the voice of the minister came steadily in the melancholy cadence of the old text:

“Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.”

In his dumb, helpless way the father tried to comfort the oldest little girl, the only one of the children who could know anything of the meaning of their loss. He was no callous materialist. He was suffering the full agony of his first great

sorrow and he couldn’t see why it had been sent to him.

At the gate the doctor gripped the minister’s hand warmly. “That was a fine sermon,” he said. “Never heard better for a time like this. Ye didn’t talk as though you were glad of the chance to warn us of the agony of hell. ‘Man is of few days and full of trouble.’ ... It’s a great text. Now some day,” the doctor was neither amused or irreverent, “some Sunday, can’t you preach from it again, and tell ’em how to stretch the time out and make it happier? I could give you some facts. Bless your heart, man, it would be the most opportune sermon you ever preached in your life. If you were in a city church you’d be fighting sweat shops and child labor. You’ve got them here, just a little more hidden from the public.”

When it was all over, Billy trudged off up the road after his mother, trudged because he was stiff and sore from the day’s experiences, also because his feet hurt. His Sunday shoes had been too big for him once, but they pinched his feet terribly since he started to go barefoot. They were hard, sturdy, unyielding little cases. Billy hated to go to Sunday school on account of them—but he always took them off on his way home. He asked his mother if he could now, but she paid no attention. She was walking very fast, looking straight ahead of her. At last he caught her

skirt and she stopped quickly, bent down and put her arms tight around him, drawing in her breath in sharp little gasps. He was afraid she was going to cry. He had never seen her cry, and it frightened him.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, drawing away.

“Nothing. Just take them off, sonny, and how’d you like to go across the fields now and bring the cows? I’m a little anxious about Dolly.”

CHAPTER II.

“A billion elements go into the making of a boy, but there is one fundamental agent of his greatness or commonness—his mother.”—Will Levington Comfort.

Fears for Dolly were not ungrounded. Following the instinct of her kind, the aristocratic little Jersey had slipped away by herself on this particular afternoon. Billy found the rest of the cows waiting at the bars, lowing to be milked after a day on the heavy spring pasture. It was only necessary to let them into the lane and they started off home in a bobbing file. To find the missing cow was another proposition.

Billy knew the magnitude of the task, and planned his course with the ingenuity of a general. He would climb the hill first and inspect the cedar thickets; then he would come down through the gully where the rocks and thorns and hazel bushes made strange hiding places. If she wasn’t there he would have to inspect the fence into the neighbor’s woods. The pasture was rough and thickety, but he knew every foot of the ground—he had covered it on similar occasions before, and if he suffered some anxiety as to whether he could locate the cow

before dark, there was also a pleasant little thrill of adventure in the undertaking.

But Dolly wasn’t among the cedars, and she hadn’t found a shelter in the valley. The shadows were creeping out long and misty when Billy, with an unsteady feeling under his belt, turned his scrutiny to the line fence. Sure enough, there was a spot where the dead bush topping the ridge of piled up stones was trampled and broken. The high-strung little heifer had taken a dangerous climb to find a sanctuary worthy of her great moment. Beyond the break in the fence there wasn’t a clue to the direction she had taken—nothing but solid, damp woods, and it was getting dark. Then over the fields came two slow, familiar calls from the dinner bell. A warm flood of relief came over Billy; his mother was telling him to come home—maybe his father had come back and would hunt the cow.

Dan hadn’t come home yet. He was just driving into the yard when Billy came up. Besides, he had spent the afternoon in a rather noisy hang-out in town and was in no humor for hunting stray cattle.

“Chores all done?” he asked in the edged voice that the family had learned to listen for. Billy had never thought of chores. He remembered them now with a feeling of guilt. At the same time his quick senses observed the quietness of the pigs in the pen, the horses crunching their

hay in the stable. “Seems as if mother’s done them,” he replied. “I went from the funeral to get the cows. Dolly’s missing.”

“You mean to say you went off all afternoon when you knew that heifer needed watchin’? And you haven’t found her yet? Well, just git right back and stay till you do find her. Never mind about your mother callin’ you. You ain’t dealin’ with your mother now. What I’m telling’ you is not to show yourself back here till you find that cow, if it takes you till daylight.”

If the task of finding a hiding cow in the woods at night had seemed impossible before, it was the last thing Billy hoped for now, as he stumbled rapidly back over the humpy path through the stubble field, blinding, angry tears burning his eyes and a child’s bitter vengeance surging up inside of him and finding an outlet in strange, mad little curses. At the edge of the woods the feeling began to cool in a new sensation. Billy wouldn’t have admitted what it was, but the place was so still and dark and far away from everywhere, that the breaking of a dry twig under his feet set his pulses beating wildly. There were weird stories afloat in the neighborhood that the wood was a dark haunt of tramps, and ever since old Enoch, the half-witted brother of a neighbor, had wandered off and gotten lost in the heart of it and only his pitiful crying had brought the men with their lanterns, school children

had avoided it as the abode of all things lunatic and uncanny.

But Billy couldn’t avoid it now. With hands clenched and legs stiffened and cold he began his lone patrol, rustling the dead leaves as little as possible and stopping to listen every few seconds, as he groped deeper into the blackness. Once he called “Dolly,” but the hoarse, strained voice came whispering back from behind a hundred tree trunks. He didn’t move till they had finished. Once he stumbled against a rotten log, and a cat leaped almost from under his feet and shot in long lopes off into the bracken. Instinctively Billy broke off a dead limb—he had heard of ugly encounters with bush cats in the hungry season, and the consciousness that his presence of mind hadn’t entirely left him brought new courage. For the first time since he entered the wood he really remembered what he was there for. The blood began to circulate in his shaking limbs, and he found himself peering into the blackness and listening—not for “sounds” this time, but for Dolly.

Years after, in a wood in Flanders, on a night mercifully blacker than this, moving like a shadow among the willows, keeping his eyes raised from the pitiful staring eyes on the ground around him, and calling softly in a voice scarcely above the warm, scented wind off the field, his memory played him a strange trick. A

shutter in his brain seemed to click, revealing for an instant an old picture, as though this experience had happened to him before somewhere. Was the thing “getting” him as he had seen it get others? With a new terror in his drawn face he put his hand to his head and whispered, “Oh, God, not that!” Then over his bleared consciousness came a tinkling like a little bell, and a voice, clear, sweet and confident: “Billy, boy, it’s all right. I’m here.” And the tears came with a flood of relief and comfort, just as they had done years before when he stood in the woods of the old swamp farm, hearing her call and the tinkling of her milk pail. She had come to help him.

So are the hardest experiences made bearable by such a love, and the bitterest tragedies averted even through its memory.

It was a strong, free “Whoo-oo,” that the boy sent ringing through the woods now. It started a dozen little creatures scuttling back to their holes—and right beside him a crackling of dead underbrush, the sound of a short, quick trot, a low bellow either of fear or warning, then not five yards away from him, with lowered head and eyes blazing in the darkness stood the Jersey heifer.

Billy knew that for the moment the gentle, domesticated little beast was as dangerous as any of the wild cattle of the plains. A few minutes before he would have been paralyzed at

the vague shape in the darkness with its blazing eyes and low, threatening guttural sounds. Now, with the confidence inspired by his mother’s nearness, came a self mastery and a happy feeling of competence. He advanced steadily, ready to dart behind a tree if the cow showed any real sign of attack, calmly enough repeating, “Steady, Dolly; so, Boss.” Evidently the cow recognized and trusted him; he had petted her all her life; also he was not coming near her calf. She had hidden it in a spot quite safe from intrusion. Sure of that she was not averse to being friendly. There was nothing to do but to try to make her comfortable where she was for the night; that was why his mother had brought the milk-pail. With a knowledge acquired of experience she learned that the calf had fed itself; that meant that it was all right. Glowing like prospectors who have found a yellow vein and marked the place, they made their way out of the wood.

Down in the hollow a light twinkled in the kitchen window; it was nearly midnight and Billy found himself stumbling over the rough pasture field half asleep and decidedly out of temper.

“My, but I hate this place,” he stormed bitterly. “Soon’s I’m big enough to get away it won’t see much more of me, I can tell you.”

His mother was silent. She never used the evasive “You must not say such things.” Perhaps

the most eloquent part of her life was its quietness. Just now Billy felt his conscience twinge under it. Her patience was teaching him early to overcome the selfishness of youth. He knew that always hers was the greater suffering, but she never complained; so a bit sheepishly he added: “And I suppose that’s just when I might be able to save you and Jean some. But I could make lots of money then; we’d be independent; we could all go together.”

“Oh, no, sonny, we couldn’t do that. Things will be different. There’ll be a way for you and Jean. We’ll find one somehow. Maybe your father’ll see things differently after a while. I think that’ll be a fine calf of Dolly’s; likely almost a cream coat with black points and big soft, black eyes, like a young deer’s.”

“I think she was a fool to trail it away in there as if she thought we’d kill it. I’d have been gooder’n gold to it at home. It was just a chance that we found her at all, and I’m sure no one wants to go prowlin’ around the swamp at this time of the night.”

Then she told him what she knew of nature’s primitive laws handed down from Dolly’s wild ancestors—how the wild birds protect their young from preying enemies and why the old turkey hen, tame for generations, always tried to hide her nest. She also told him of whatever beautiful things she knew to look and listen for

in the woods at night, simple, wonderful lore that her father had given her on their walks through the woods to salt the cattle on Sundays. Before Billy had finished his bread and milk and crawled into bed he had resolved to explore that wood again. He wasn’t afraid of it now; it was a real outdoor theatre.

But long after he was asleep his mother lay awake on the lounge downstairs, listening to the heavy breathing in the next room and thinking. It had troubled her a good deal lately, this night thinking, always looking back and wondering just how present situations had come about. Life had sprung up around her so happily in her beautiful old home. Only to live and laugh and be happy—that was all that was expected of her, and if it didn’t seem enough, if she had visions, mysterious inward stirrings of something creative crying for expression, she generally kept them to herself. At last she suggested it timidly—she wanted to go to school, she wanted to do something. She didn’t know just what. How could she when she had never had a chance to see what there was to be done? But her father had laughed and petted her and said he guessed he could keep his only little girl. It was a pretty hard lookout if a man couldn’t protect his one pet lamb from being buffetted about in the world, fighting for a living with men, and losing their respect and her own womanliness by working at

a man’s job. And he added with unconcealed disappointment that it wasn’t like her to want such a thing when she could have the protection of her father’s home.

She didn’t realize then, of course, how miserably inadequate such a protection might be, but the argument silenced her. She felt keenly ashamed of herself—sort of in a class with the long-spurred hen cropping up every year, a menace to the social life and economic purpose of the flock. They seemed to think she wanted to “go into the world” for the mere joy of adventure or the hope of notoriety, either of which would almost have frightened her to death. But the uncontrollable little voice inside wouldn’t be quiet. It still cried out to create something, to be a part of the scheme that makes the world go round.

Then Dan came, Dan with his handsome face and buoyant, indomitable swing, a fine animal—and the time-old instinct leapt into a flame. There had never been anyone else, because there hadn’t been anyone else in the neighborhood, and she had never been out of it, and this seemed just what she had been waiting for. She wasn’t introspective, and she didn’t stop to analyze this feeling, of course. Apart from the tumultuous sway of it there were secret visions which she would not for worlds have revealed to anyone, but which brought her the only reassurance, “This is real”—a train of little white figures to

hold close for a while, then to send out into the world to do the things she had wanted to do. They would be just like Dan, of course, but they would be guided by the spark she had kept smouldering in her dreams for them.

Now that the dream had failed it never occurred to her that she had made a mistake. Dan was still her man; she couldn’t have imagined things otherwise, only she wondered what she could do, working single-handed and against odds, to give the children a chance. What if, in the fight ahead of her, she should go out as she had seen several of her neighbors go, coming up to the battle spent and tired out, trying desperately to hang on, then suddenly letting go because the overstrained vitality just snapped? Staring into the darkness she whispered over and over, “Oh, God, I can’t—not yet.”

CHAPTER III.

“I want to tell you how much I love you. I also want not to tell you at all, but to do something for you with my hands and feet, to make your bed, to pick lavender pine cones for you, to do something you would never know that I had done. For of the many ways of love, one of the dearest is to serve in silence, to celebrate and not be found out. Mothering is a great business on these lines.”—Dr. Richard Cabot in “What Men Live By.”

Summer had passed with the anxiety and toil of harvest, and the cheering presence of numberless bird colonies, living out the romances and cares of their family history in the meadow of the Swamp Farm. The sumachs in the fence corners were turning crimson before a plan that had long been evolving in Mary’s mind took definite direction. Dan had gone on a two days’ trip for one of his agencies. It might be the only opportunity she would have for secrecy. Nothing had ever before driven her to such drastic measures, but never before had she had so much at stake. She felt distinctly guilty as she evaded Billy’s few searching questions and looked away from the troubled appeal in Jean’s brimming eyes. For the first time in their lives she was leaving them; no wonder they had misgivings. She was almost frightened herself, at this new thing that could drive her to practise such deception.

Still she set out on her six mile walk to town with grim determination, walking fast to reach the railroad track before she should meet any one she knew on the travelled highway. By the time she came to the narrow board walk at the edge of the town she was hot and tired and white with excitement. Everyone seemed to be looking at her. She supposed they all knew Dan, but then there was no reason why they should associate her with Dan. It was a long time since they had been in town together, strangely enough, on a similar errand.

That was before Jean was born, and Dan had brought her in to the lawyer’s office. He had sold a town lot that her father had given her, and superficial as it might seem, it had been necessary for her to come to the lawyer’s office to put her name to the deed, and sign another paper applying the proceeds against the mortgage on the Swamp Farm. It was the first time Mary had put her name to any legal document except her marriage certificate, and she wished now that she had known more about what these papers meant with their dazzling red seals and nothing clear about them except the dotted line for her name.

She had another town lot, though. That was what had brought her out on such a questionable adventure to-day. Dan had sold it too, but when he came home with arrangements all made to take her to town the next day to sign the papers

again, she gave him the biggest surprise of his married life by saying she didn’t want to sell; she wanted to keep that lot—her father had given it to her.

And Dan had laughed, a very indulgent, unnatural laugh for Dan, and said she was “such a whimsical little woman.” However it was much better to sell the lot and turn the money into the farm where it would be safe for the children; so he had sold it. He wanted to make that quite clear; the lot was already sold; all that remained was to sign the papers.

And Mary with that quiet immovableness that sometimes takes possession of those gentle, pliable, unquestioning women, replied that she was sorry, but she wouldn’t sign the papers. She didn’t say why. She didn’t mention that the farm was running deeper into debt every year; that it was already proving more of an injury than a help to the children, and that in this remnant of her inheritance lay the only hope she had of ever giving them anything better. She just repeated slowly, a bit shakily, and looking down at the spout of her tea-pot, that she wouldn’t sign them.

And then Dan dropped his indulgent, protective attitude quite suddenly. He asked her “what in hell” she expected to do with the lot, then. Did she think she could look after it herself? She knew about as much about business

as a squaw. How was any woman to look after her interests in legal affairs where even a man had to keep his eyes open? And who would be expected to take care of such things for her if not her husband? He also enlarged upon a business man’s attitude toward women who cared to mix up in such things instead of keeping their place. Altogether he was very much annoyed over this unexpected check in his affairs. It was extremely humiliating to have to tell Harding that his wife, for sentimental reasons, didn’t want the lot sold; besides he needed the money. He had no doubt about getting it ultimately, of course. Several plans might be worked to that end, one of the most feasible being to take Billy out of school because there were no funds forthcoming to hire help. But even under the pressure of this, Mary was risking his further displeasure, and taking a venture that would have seemed madness to her a year ago.

The world seemed swimming around her when she entered the lawyer’s office, nervously tucking back the damp hair from her forehead, and painfully conscious of the years-old cut of her dress, the road-dust on her shoes, and her absolute ignorance of what to do. If the lawyer was surprised he didn’t show it. His practice was not very pressing in the sleepy little town, and he could afford time to put his clients at ease before proceeding to business.

“You mean,” he repeated when she had explained her errand, “that you have changed your mind about the lot; that you would like to see Harding this afternoon?”

She assented with inward panic at the thought of it. “Or would I need to see him? You couldn’t just—telephone him or something? I should be getting back, and I wanted to—it seems foolish—but I thought I would like to make my will.”

“I see. And you think if you had the lot turned into cash it would be easier to leave it as you want to? I’ll just ask Harding to come around. You feel that you know what the lot’s worth?”

“Why, I hadn’t thought much about that. Father paid five hundred for it, I think.”

“That was a long time ago. A dollar doesn’t go as far now. Do you remember just what Harding offered Mr. Withers this spring?”

“Six hundred.”

The lawyer’s mouth hardened a little. He had heard the offer made in his office, and had suspected that Dan wanted to reserve a few hundred for immediate use.

“Better ask for a thousand,” he advised casually, “and would you like to put the money out on a mortgage?”

“I’d rather put it in the bank. I want it where it can be got at. That’s why I came about the

will. I want it used for the children while they need it, before they come of age. I want it used to send them to school. That could be arranged, couldn’t it?”

“I guess so. What about your executor?”

“I hadn’t thought of that. How do they generally do?”

“A woman generally makes her husband her executor, but if there is any reason why you would rather have someone else——.”

“Certainly not.” Mary had come into possession of her dignity with remarkable suddenness. A bright red covered her face, but her head was up, and the eyes that had wandered all over the room in nervous embarrassment before, met the lawyer’s squarely with something of a challenge. She even held them there in the face of his amusement while she finished a bit lamely: “But I think I would rather leave it with you to take care of for them, if you would—Dan has so much to look after.”

Mary didn’t notice the weariness of the way home that night. A strange, new elation carried her aching feet over the bruising, irregular railroad ties. The whole dismal swamp seemed singing with the joy of a breaker passed. Only, when the stars began to come out over the trees, she wondered if the children would be afraid to stay alone, and quickened her steps. Several times she slipped her hand into her bag just to

feel the copy of the will that was to be their safeguard if anything happened. Once she took out her bank-book and peered through the faint moonlight at the dancing figures. She had never had a bank-book before. She had never known what it was to take a ten-dollar bill from a pile, and spend it with luxurious recklessness in white flannelette and nainsook and shirting and various colored calicoes for the children. Then she would gather up the parcels in her aching arms and hurry on again with a thrill of happy anticipation.

A section-man watching her thought her deranged, but Mary knew that she was just beginning to see clearly. She had learned that the laws relating to a woman’s property were not framed to be beyond a woman’s understanding, and the men hadn’t seemed to consider her out of her place. A hot wave went over her when she thought of her ignorance of the simplest parts of the procedure. They had been very kind about it, but some arrangement must be made to teach these things to Jean, and save her the agony of such embarrassment.

So it seems we have one of the great motive forces of human evolution—the ambition of individuals here and there to give their children the things they have missed themselves.

The days after this were filled with a mother’s provident setting of her house in order. Piles of

little garments took shape and received their distinguishing hand touches of smocking and embroidery in the cold, weary hours when everyone else was sleeping. When she smoothed them out the soft nap caught on her roughened hands like the clutch of something frail and clinging—something that needed her, and she prayed for life desperately, as though the waters were already covering her.

Then, one day in late November, when Dan had gone on an indefinite itinerary selling incubators, and Billy was trying to harvest the turnip crop, the dinner-bell called over the fields again. Something in the short, quick ring told him the call was urgent, but when he reached the house he could only stare with growing terror. His mother’s face and hair were wet with perspiration; her mouth was set hard and white at the edges; her eyes were bright like stars—full of suffering that could not be hidden even from the child. She was sorting through a basket of white stuff and as usual she stopped to reassure him.

“It’s all right, Boy. Just take the colt and run and tell Auntie Brown to come.”

Through all the hard things that had tried the boy’s courage and robbed him of the irresponsibility of childhood, he had never known what real fear was before. It seemed to make his limbs and voice powerless to urge the colt to his hardest run. Only one thing was clear to him—his

mother might die, and she was alone. It was miles farther to the doctor’s, but if only Auntie Brown were there! She was as good as a doctor, everyone said, and she was the only physician many of them knew.

Mrs. Brown saw him coming and opened the door before he stopped. She didn’t ask him what he came for. She just said she would go right down, and told him to go for the doctor, then called after him to ask if his father was at home, or when he was coming, but Billy didn’t answer. Already he was floating down the road on the horse’s neck. He might have told her, he reflected, that they didn’t know when his father was coming home; his trip had been delayed because he had to stay around until Nell’s colt came, but there was no time for gossiping now. Anyway, he couldn’t see why anyone should be concerned about where his father was at such a time as this.

The doctor wasn’t at home. His wife said she would telephone and send him right down from another case but to the boy, remembering the look in his mother’s eyes when he left her, it seemed as though the fates in general had conspired against him. When he reached home with his lathered, limping colt, the doctor hadn’t arrived yet and Mrs. Brown was worried. She wouldn’t let him see his mother, but she lifted the corner of a shawl from a white flannel bundle

in the rocking chair and Billy looked. He swallowed his astonishment and looked again, at the squirming, blind, uncomfortable little mite, and sighed. He felt much as he had done when a kindly-intentioned neighbor had unexpectedly thrust into his arms one cold day in winter, a very young, whimpering puppy, when he had no warm place to keep it, and the cows were dry—he couldn’t see how he was going to make it very comfortable. Perhaps, however, the dog had developed his sense of responsibility and protection, for he bent down till he could feel the baby’s breath in faint, warm little puffs against his face and from the depths of bitter experience, confided his sympathy.

“Poor little beggar,” he said. “Just startin’ out, ain’t you?”

The baby didn’t make much difference to the tenor of affairs in the household. When he was three days old his father came home and was glad to see him. A week later Billy discovered that the newcomer was going to get him into serious difficulties. Mrs. Brown had told him, with no uncertain meaning, that if he wanted to keep his mother he would have to help her a lot, and Billy was beginning awkwardly and heroically, because he hated it, to add several new chores about the house to his regular daily programme. On this afternoon he was riding the disc-harrow up the field toward the house

when his mother, who had been washing, came out with a basket of clothes. It occurred to Billy that he might hang out the clothes for her, and he brought down a storm of his father’s wrath by urging the horses over the half-frozen clods almost at a trot. He was so sure that his case was justified that he offered a spirited, if terrified, explanation, but Dan wasn’t interested in hanging out a washing. Out of all patience with Billy’s lack of judgment as a horseman, he demanded with finality, “Don’t you know that mare has a colt?”

Then one day, in the winter, the baby dropped out of the world as unceremoniously as he had entered. Dan was away on another business trip when the first heavy snowfall came and the young cattle had to be housed. As she had done in other years, Mary went out to help. The next day the baby had a cold. In a few days more he was fighting a losing battle with pneumonia. His father reached home in time to see him go.

Dan had been proud of the happy, laughing little fellow, with his strong little body and bright, dark eyes, just like his own. He had never cared to handle him much, and he had often sworn moderately when he cried in the night—not at the baby himself, just at the general conspiracy of domestic affairs to disturb a man’s sleep. But he had felt a real thrill of pride when anyone who came into the house exclaimed

at his sturdy, perfect little form, at his striking resemblance to his father. Now all this was slipping away under his eyes, and he could do nothing but stand there helpless. There was a hard bitterness in the set of his jaw, and it grew harder as he watched his wife’s pitiful, useless efforts and tearless submission. She had been with the baby day and night, through it all, and now, even as she felt the round, clinging arms slowly loosen from around her neck, she was glad his suffering was over. For the first time she seemed to notice that Dan was there. She looked up and waited.

“You killed him,” he said. “He hadn’t no chance to live. You just killed him. After you had deliberately gone out and waded in the snow for half a day when you knowed better—after you had give it to him, if you couldn’t save him yourself, why didn’t you get someone who could? Don’t look at me like that. If you’ve a spark of motherliness in you, cry or something.”

And, looking down at the little form, before the neighbors sent him out, Dan himself cried, freely and easily as one does at a pathetic play, until the women felt sure that the loss of his child had reformed him. Mary followed him out to the porch, pleading in dry, broken attempts. She reached out and almost touched him, but he folded his arms with a cruelty of aloofness and contempt that was almost dramatic. Then

a hard glitter came into his eyes, and in a steely voice, too low to carry into the house, he said:

“Keep away, will you. ‘Tain’t only the boy, there, but I can’t trust you. You’ve deceived me. I seen Harding yesterday.”

And Billy, watching and listening with a child’s intuition, saw his mother stagger against the door as she went into the house. The old smouldering hate possessed him wickedly; he had never wanted so much to be a man.

CHAPTER IV.

“He was a boy whose emotions were hidden under mountains of reserve; who could have stood up to be shot more easily than he could have said: ‘I love you.’ .... I have wondered what might have been if some one—some understanding person had recognized his gift, or if he himself as a boy had once dared to cut free. We do not know; we do not know the tragedy of our nearest friend.”—David Grayson.

An atmosphere like this does not nurture the most outwardly genial qualities in a boy. When Billy was sixteen he had encased his real personality in a reserve which few people could penetrate. The neighbors admitted that he was civil and steady, but they generally agreed that he was sullen. The premature work and responsibility of the farm may have stiffened his body and hardened his outlook, but it had not affected his growth. In spite of everything, sixteen years found him something of a giant with splendid physical possibilities waiting development, but for the present leaving him awkward, painfully conscious of his size, ashamed of his ignorance, galling under the tyranny and hopelessness of his environment, but keeping his reflections largely to himself. His saving force was his inherited ambition. It never let him rest, but since all the experience of his life had been gleaned, like the steadily decreasing crops, from the unproductive acres of the Swamp Farm, his ambition

lacked direction. On rare occasions he confided secret plans to his mother, but the plans were never practical and there was no prospect of ever working them out. A few books, good and otherwise, that had found their way into the house, were the best information he had of the world outside; but the “good” books his mother had brought from home years ago, and they dealt with problems of a different age altogether, problems solved and forgotten long since; the “other” books had mostly been left by an itinerant hired man, and they were far too new. With it all there was a growing discontent, discontent of the divine order really, but showing itself sometimes in very human guise.

An unrest, a discontent like this, is like to gnaw the heart out of a boy, leaving him a hollow reed to be played upon by any wind that blows. Out in the great open spaces of the green country, of course, we wouldn’t expect to find any insidious influence to mar a boy’s future, yet it came in one of the commonest ways.

In need of money to meet a debt to his incubator firm, it occurred to Dan that the swamp was full of cedar posts. It meant a lot of work to get the posts out and he had no fondness for the task of laying roads through a boggy stretch of woods and putting in the long hours teaming the posts to the railroad, but Billy could do one man’s work, and for the rest he could pick up a

force in town. The men were an unsteady crowd. They didn’t care to work many days at a time, and invariably left when they were most needed. Then one day a man called looking for a job. He was a Hercules for strength, quick and sure at his work as a professional lumberman. At night he turned a line of handsprings across the barn floor, and did a series of acrobatic stunts over the brace rod, calculated to fill the spectators with awe and amazement. Billy watched him with more amusement than admiration in his steady brown eyes; athletics had never been given a prominent place in his interests.

The man boarded in the house, of course. He was courteous and considerate in ways the other men had never thought of. He never passed the woodpile without bringing in an armful. He refused to leave his washing to be done. He stayed out of the house as much as possible—and Billy stayed with him. From the first time she saw him, Mary begged Dan to send him away.

Even when he had gone, she wasn’t reassured. Billy seemed different. He seemed uneasy and secretive. Often under the questioning of her kind eyes he would redden painfully and look away, and knowing that a boy of sixteen is getting beyond his mother’s understanding, she never forced her inquiries further.

Then the thing she had dreaded came. One bitter February morning, while she slept, Billy

came quietly downstairs. In the kitchen the lamp was turned low, and he peered across at the clock. It wasn’t quite three. He listened for a second to the two regular breathings in the little bedroom, and it seemed that one of them stopped. The thought that perhaps she suspected him made him feel like a thief, but, he reflected, when she got the note under his pillow she would know that he had meant it for the best, that he would come back, sometime. The thought of what she would have to endure in the while between almost made him give it up, but he reasoned that this was just what he had done times before. It was just “drivelling weakness,” as Lou had said. He looked around miserably, wishing he could do something to make her understand; that in some way he could soften the hurt of the discovery in the morning. Standing, shivering in the freezing kitchen, he realized that she had to endure this atmosphere for an hour or two every morning, and at the risk of being heard he lighted the fire. Then he picked up the tightly rolled grain bag that contained his worldly possessions, and went out. For a long time after, he remembered the frosty squeak of the door, the snapping of the frost, like pistols, in the trees, and the daylight peering cold and cheerless into the steely sky, as things following, watching and accusing him.

It was a short, quick run to the railroad to

catch the way-freight laboring up to town, a wait of two hours or more around the sheds there, then a ride on the local express to the Junction, where Lou was to meet him. The ride on the freight and the waiting at the sheds attracted no attention, and as he slid into the end seat of the passenger coach he was glad to find that there was no one there whom he knew. The only person in the car who seemed awake was a young man who looked steadily out of the window and seemed so indifferent to everything around him that Billy felt no fear of his curiosity. When he looked up some minutes later he caught the quiet, genial, interested gaze square on his face, and the young man rose and came down the aisle towards him.

It wasn’t just that the young man wanted a diversion. He may have looked bored enough while he stared out of the window at the light breaking over the frozen fields, but that was because he was a little discouraged with his job. He had been trying to figure out approximately how many bushels of grain his formalin solution had saved for the county that year, and whether all this extension work of the Department of Agriculture was worth while. He was on his way now to begin a short course with the young men farther up the county, in the intervals of which he might be required to test the milk from a few dairy herds, secure a few hired men for the

neighborhood, or talk about revenues from chickens, or strawberries to a gathering of women. It occurred to him that the boy who had just come in might be going up to join the class, and because he liked boys as individuals, and because there was something unusually promising in the keen, serious face and striking physique of this young man, he came to talk to him.

Billy had never heard of an agricultural short course. He had seen the agricultural office in town, but he had a very vague idea of what the “district representative” was doing there. He listened to the explanation of the short course with interest; then, as man to man, told candidly what he thought of farming and, naturally enough, why he was leaving it.

The Representative didn’t ask any questions, but he gathered that Billy was leaving home for the first time, to begin his independent career in a lumber-camp somewhere. He also saw that under the retiring, self-conscious exterior, was a live fuse of ambition, and an unmistakable pride.

“It won’t get you anywhere,” he said, when Billy asked what he thought of the lumber camp as a beginning, “and if you stay long enough, you won’t care whether it does or not. We’re having a course next month not so far from your place; come to that and see if you can’t find something worth while around home.

Come to the office on Saturday and I’ll tell you of a dozen fellows who have made good with a worse start than you have.”

The train was stopping at the Junction. “Sorry,” Billy replied, rising. “I have to meet a friend here.”

He took up his grain-bag, reddening. He had a momentary idea of leaving it under the seat, but it contained everything he had left.

“You can get a train back home in ten minutes,” the Representative suggested, with a friendly grip. “I’ll look for you Saturday.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t meet you sooner,” Billy replied calmly. “As it is, I’ve promised to go north. Anyway I think perhaps you don’t understand just how things are at our place.”

The Representative looked away and frowned with sympathy. “I know it’s rotten enough,” he said, “but if you want to play fair, why don’t you go back and put it right up to your father? You know this is pretty rough on the mother.”

And Billy, standing alone on the platform, wished the Representative had kept that last argument to himself. That was what had been his undoing every time before, and Lou had shown him quite clearly that he could never do anything for his mother by staying on the wretched farm where they could scarcely make enough to keep alive. Now this young man said he could show him how to make money out of the

place. He said that boys with a worse beginning had gone ahead right at home and made good, even realized their ambitions for themselves and made the right kind of homes for their families. Family considerations weren’t troubling Billy. He was just sixteen years old, and the social side of his nature had been sadly neglected. What he wanted was freedom to do something. Then, while Lou had persuaded him that he was not only a fool, but a weak one to stay at home, this agricultural fellow had somehow made him feel like a coward for running away.

The train for home was whistling nearer while Billy argued wildly. When it came around the bend he had about made his decision. He picked up his grain bag and sauntered coolly across to meet it, then he saw Lou coming, and waited.

It was not easy to dispose of Lou—he had met cases like this before; but Billy’s struggles from childhood, with a man’s work, crop failures, an unjust government and himself, had not been for nothing. Also, a certain dogged will-power, bred of these struggles, and their achievements, and more than ever dominant in the teen age, gave him an aversion to being “talked into” anything. The Representative hadn’t shown any effort at trying to persuade him. He had told him just what he thought without reserve and quite forcibly enough, it seemed; then he had left him to make his own decision, and it gave Billy no

little pride in himself to know that he was planning his own course. He felt, suddenly, above the wheedling, anxious tone of his former leader, who, he decided, didn’t have enough brains to keep his personal concern out of his argument. Exasperated at last, Lou swore openly at all “young milk-fed Rubes who would keep a man hanging around for weeks, not knowing their own minds, and then fail to come across at the last.”

And Billy laughed—laughed right into the threatening face with its hardened cunning, laughed for pure joy at the new spirit that had just awakened in him, laughed also because he had measured carefully the distance to the last car of the moving train. He caught it just in time to leave Lou clutching foolishly at the place where he had been.

Miles away the Representative had again relapsed into speculation as to whether his work was worth while.

It was only a few hours from the time Billy left the Swamp Farm until he walked up the lane again, but it seemed as though he had been in a new, bigger country for a long time. He saw the limits of his environment in a new perspective and they looked less binding. The feel of the familiar, worn little door-latch under his hand carried a distinct sense of being back in the right place. Mary, with a way women have

of watching the road while they work, had seen him coming. It wasn’t in her nature to cry out, or to take him in her arms. She just stood immovable, her breath coming fast, but in the glad welcome illuminating the drawn lines of her patient face the boy saw all the wonder of a mother’s unquestioning love, and he knew it would have been the same, however, or whenever he had come back—if she were still there. She didn’t ask him where he had been; she didn’t mention the note he had left; she only said:

“You haven’t had your breakfast.”

And Billy, because he was sixteen years old and practised in curbing his emotions, could not go to her. He just looked back as eloquently as he could, and asked:

“Where’s Jean?”

Jean was crumbled up on the bed in her little cold room upstairs, crying her heart out. Billy could manage with her more easily. He gathered her up and patted her back and smoothed her hair so awkwardly that it tangled about his fingers. He said he shouldn’t have done it, and then told her quite firmly to stop now right away; that he was back and he was going to stay. He was fast becoming a man.

Even Dan realized this when Billy met him in the stable for an interview. The plans he had been designing began to lose shape in the fearlessness of the new individual whom he had always

considered his child to mould as he liked. Billy’s experience had not given him much of the quality called business sense, so he didn’t ask much—a percentage of whatever profits he could show from the place above an estimate for previous years, and a chance to run a few sidelines of his own. Since this would not interfere with his own interests and would mean still having free labor on the farm, Dan was willing to grant it.

And Billy was happy. He couldn’t have told why. Practically, he was just where he had been before; only he had something to hope for. In the house the ham sizzling in the pan, the smell of turnips cooking for dinner and a spicy apple pie bubbling on the back of the stove, filled him with a very tangible comfort. The world had never seemed so near to heaven.

The agricultural course was full of promise. For some time Billy had been painfully reminded of his scant education. The few brief seasons in the local school, following the cramped and theoretical course of prescribed text-books, and his ill chosen reading afterwards, had not given him much that a young man would need. A class of twenty young farmers leaving their work to meet every day in a room above the local store was different; it had some purpose. The informal lectures and discussions were practical from the beginning. The taking of notes, the preparation

of a speech, was new and hard for every one of them, but they were all at the same disadvantage, which carried some encouragement.

On the second day of the course they went to a farm for a class in stock-judging. Boys who would have wormed through a barbed-wire entanglement to get within touching distance of the prize animals at the provincial fair, but who might as well have hoped to enter a sacred temple as a show ring, could examine to their hearts’ content the most aristocratic specimens of Aberdeen-Angus lineage in the country. Added to their instruction in rules and principles they had the unstinted and practical advice of the man himself who had built up the herd, whose name was known to stockmen in every province of the Dominion.

When they had finished he took them to the house. There was a great, long living-room with red curtains and a log blazing in a brick fireplace, and his wife, in a big blue apron, her cheeks red from the warmth of the kitchen stove, gave them hot biscuits and coffee. The man’s voice boomed heartily through the house, and the baby from a quilt on the floor reached up to him. It was amazing the dexterity with which he could tuck the babe away, perfectly contented, in the hollow of his arm, and use both hands in expounding the points of various Panmures and Black Megs, with the history of their ancestors

from the oldest farms in Scotland. He made no effort to keep his business affairs out of his home, this man; the two were so intimately connected that their interests were common. Either would have failed long ago without the support of the other. His wife knew exactly what he was talking about. Her pride in the herd was about as great as his own; she had made little sacrifices and taken with him the risks involved in buying new, expensive stock. It was a fine kind of co-operation.

The warmth and peace and genuineness of it all filled Billy with a happy wonder. He forgot to be embarrassed, but he sat in a corner as much out of sight as possible, watching the restful air of content about the woman, and listening to the man’s enthusiastic forecast of the future of the breed in Canada. The stockman noticed his interest, and when they were ready to go he kept the rest waiting while he took him back to go more fully into the peculiar traits of a certain family. Then he asked:

“What do you keep at home?”

“Most anything,” Billy answered, with a grim little smile.

“You ought to get on with stock,” the expert remarked, sincerely. “Come to me when you start for yourself and I’ll give you a bargain on some better than these, if nothing happens.”

Billy looked at the square, curly little beasts

as a cripple stares at an athlete’s cup. Then he found all his wandering ambitions coming to a point. Some day he would have a herd of such cattle. He could see their perfect black shapes moving over a sunny field when the autumn frosts had turned the trees and pastures to a glorious gold and crimson background. They would be his, and when he had some of them graded up to a show standard, he himself would groom their curly hides till they shone; he could almost feel the shaking muscles of their broad, level backs as they stood under the hands of the judges. And there would be a house with red curtains and an open fire, where his mother would be safe and comfortable as long as she lived. He fervently hoped his father’s business would continue to take him away from home a lot.

At night he sat up late over a borrowed Aberdeen-Angus history. He sketched over all the paper in the house to show how certain individuals he had seen that day compared with types illustrated. He estimated with reckless optimism what it would cost to start a herd, and how long it would take them to pay for a house with a fireplace and red curtains. At intervals he would get up and walk around the table to work off his enthusiasm. There was nothing reserved about his plans now. His mother felt that her cup was full. She was sure her prayers

for his direction had been answered and she blessed “that agricultural young man” as an agent sent by Heaven.

CHAPTER V.

“What is a butterfly? At best
She’s but a caterpillar, drest.”

—Benjamin Franklin.

The dreams of our youth are long in coming true. When at last they do arrive we have worked so hard for them, watched them grow from such humble, unpromising beginnings, come through so much commonplace, grinding routine, that we do not recognize them as the reality of the vision that carried us up to the clouds years before.

The more definite Billy’s ideal became, the farther it receded, until at last it seemed so impossible that he said little about it. The only man whom he hoped to believe in it was the District Representative. He had helped him in the selection of a flock of sheep to trim down the rough corners of the neglected farm. He had used his influence to get him credit on a bunch of shaggy, bony calves to turn into the waste places in the spring, and had been the first person to laugh with him over the cheque in the fall. He had initiated him in the art of mixing cement, with the result that the stables, the cellar and the porch around the house were made dry and solid. He had surveyed for drains through a field that

had never grown much but bulrushes, and Billy had another two acres of black loam added to his tillable area. Oh, he was an all-round man, that Representative, with the tentacles of his office reaching out to a thousand sources for help, and placing it to the best of his knowledge wherever anyone in his territory wanted it.

It was the Representative who revealed to Billy at last that the thing he needed before he would ever be satisfied with anything else was more education. Billy knew that he wanted an education, but he also wanted the fields, the steady quieting toil of seed time and harvest, the care of the cattle, the directing of life and growth with all their mysteries and miracles, and their unfailing obediences to natural laws. He was a born farmer, but he would never be content to farm blindly, mechanically, as an animal follows prey, for an existence. The best solution for his case seemed to be the agricultural college.

A college year leaves considerable free time in the twelve months, and Billy managed somehow to keep the tillable acres of the farm under crop and to harvest what he planted. The first year initiated him into a dozen phases of learning that he had never heard of before. In the second year, partly by accident, partly through the insight of a few semi-professionals, it was discovered that he had some unusual athletic possibilities, and Billy loosened up from his grind

sufficiently to learn the hard, clean strain of rugby and hockey, and to warm up daily in the gymnasium. It opened up a new world for him. In his whole life he had never before learned to play, and as it put a new spring in his muscles, a new physical joy of living in his existence, it began to clear away the cloud that had sobered and darkened his outlook. It was in his third year, at the term’s closing dance before Christmas, that he had another awakening.

Up to this time, every attempt of his classmates to draw him across the girls’ campus had failed. The magic force had come to him on the rink that afternoon. A gay little figure in a white wool skating outfit, with a brave dash of crimson here and there, chasing a hockey puck down the ice, skated very close to him, lost the puck around his skates somehow, and as he returned it, she turned in his direction for a moment the most naive, childish gaze from a pair of wonderful blue eyes. At night, to the amazement of his friends, he went to the dance. The girl might be as unattainable as a royal princess—he was quite sure she was; yet, as millions of men had done before him, he took the trail of the impossible with a hope that really promised nothing.

She made the first picture he saw when he went in, standing like a rare bit of Italian china on a space of polished floor, the magnet of a train of sleekly-groomed, linen-bosomed young men.

Absently Billy was having a programme thrust upon him. Dazedly the admonition was being borne in on him that he would be expected to do his duty to the end, and distribute himself around well. Already he was entangled, introduced to a girl wearing a committee badge, and his escort deserted him.

The committee girl didn’t disturb his equilibrium at all. It wasn’t necessary to pay much attention to her; she didn’t seem to expect it. She was there for a purpose, to put people at ease, the rare individuals of the twentieth century youth who needed this ministration—and to shuffle them. She handled Billy’s case by reassuring him from the frankest and friendliest eyes he had ever looked into, then following the direction of his gaze, she led him directly to the regal little figure with its buzzing circle of attendants.

Miss Evison’s greeting was not so alluring as her wide baby stare in the afternoon. She turned her meaningless, drawing-room gaze toward him with the indifference due one of her innumerable courtiers, and even glanced with immovable correctness at his hand extended half way across the distance between them. Billy brought the hand back painfully. He had known better, of course, but it seemed such a humanly natural thing to do. Come to think of it, he had shaken hands with the committee girl too, but she must have met him half way, or something, because

he had never thought of it until now. There was something decidedly chilling, too, in Miss Evison’s clear, blase, very “nice girl,” how-do-you-do, and not being a connoisseur in the ways of women, he took it for a dismissal and turned to go.

Miss Evison had not anticipated this danger. He was walking right away from her, with his rare six feet of athlete, his good looks, and his whole unique farmerish appearance that would make such a striking background for the evening.

She had to think quickly and she was not accustomed to the process.

“I—I think I noticed you at the rink this afternoon?” she threw out desperately.

It was very bad, of course. She should never have admitted that she ever noticed anyone anywhere. It was a decided compromise from the standards she upheld so carefully, and the high tint of excitement in her cheeks deepened and burned at the mistake. Billy sincerely looked his gratitude for the recognition. It was so much more than he had expected from this queenly little personage, with the whole of her narrow little circumscribed world at her feet. He found something very sweet and womanly in the deepening color, in the maidenly lifting and lowering of her eyes—very wonderful eyes they seemed, large and long-lashed, with the beautiful, deep blue and little brown specks that Nature had

given them, and the thousand little tricks, flashes and mists and a half-closed dreaminess for which Nature was not responsible at all. They could never be called soft in their expression, but they could be very mysterious. Yet the girl was only twenty.

Billy was not a novice at dancing. He had spent many a night gliding over the candle-waxed floor in the town hall at home. He would never take Jean to these affairs; he hated their atmosphere himself, but he was very human in his fondness for the poetry of motion, and there was very little poetry of anything else in his life. From the time he entered the ball-room, it was his habit to dance constantly until he decided to stop—then he went home. Sometimes, for reasons of his own, he left earlier, but never because he was tired of the dance itself. Here the tone was different.

Unconsciously he attracted some attention by dancing three times in succession with the popular Miss Evison. She had demurred playfully over the second, and seriously over the third, but when Billy apologized for his selfishness, she gave it to him very sweetly. She even managed, though he would never have thought of suggesting it, to give him the second half of an extra, because it does give a certain prestige to a girl’s social standing to have to cut into her dances—and Billy made such a noticeable figure coming

across to claim this mere fragment of her evening, and covering her with confusion, in her effort to be nice to everybody.

In the intervals when she was away from him, Billy stood in the shadows and watched her with a sober tenderness, something akin to worship. She was as remote as the stars, he knew, yet a moment before he had felt her soft, clingy scarf blowing against his face. She was so sort of set apart, so uncertain, so alluringly feminine, from the transparent drape about her white shoulders, and the American Beauties trembling against her with every breath, to her frail, little high-heeled shoes, and he thought happily that she would always need a man to take care of her, to work for her, and to give her these things. Then he came back to earth heavily. He thought of the bleak little, weather-worn house on the Swamp Farm, with the fire now covered up for the night in the chilly kitchen, and the oil lamp turned low. To-morrow night he would be back, it would be Christmas Eve, and until the last few hours the thought of it exalted him. Now it hovered like the proverbial little cloud darkening his skies.

He began to make his way out of the gymnasium with its confusion of crashing music, delicate tinted dresses, gay shaded lights and gliding figures trailing their white shadows after them along the polished floor. Then it occurred

to him that he might see Miss Evison again on the pretext of saying good-night.

Miss Evison wasn’t accustomed to this ceremony from the rank and file of the college body. She was rather surprised, but she was too much occupied to be much interested. The diversion was a senior student who was considered exceedingly “interesting” that term, and who had been inattentive enough the last while to set a special premium on his society.

“Oh, going? I’m sorry!” she flipped off in the clear, smooth staccato that always came when she had no point in particular. She didn’t offer him her hand, of course not—and Billy went out vaguely unhappy.

The train for home would leave in the afternoon. There were many things Billy could have done with the morning, but he paced moodily among the term’s wreckage in his room. About ten o’clock a crowd of girls passed the window and a crimson scarf flying from a white skating outfit brought him to, suddenly. The next minute he was unstrapping his trunk and groping for his skates.

Miss Evison in her skating rigs seemed far more of a flesh and blood creation than when she was made up for the evening. She was less formal, too, and Billy felt more sure of himself. They had made one circle of the rink when a new crowd of students came in. Billy didn’t know

them; they belonged to a clique by themselves. They could steer a toboggan down a hill, or balance a tea-cup with the dexterity of long practice. Why they had chosen agriculture as a profession was a mystery, but from the standpoint of tearooms, flowers and theatres, they were very select young men. As she passed them with her new attendant, Miss Evison observed that their attention was casual and it set her thinking. She realized that perhaps she had been overdoing things. It was one thing to let the attentions of a very good-looking and unknown young man create a sensation at a dance, and quite another matter to keep up the acquaintance.

After rapid consideration, she cut right into Billy’s enthusiastic account of the carnival after the last hockey match with a sister college. She didn’t interrupt him rudely, of course. If you’re just socially cultivated enough you can do anything without being rude.

“I had almost forgotten,” she said, “this is the last skate of the year. A lot of the people I know are here, and I don’t want to be—exclusive.”

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I should have thought, but it seemed such a little time.”

It had been a little time, scarcely five minutes, and it occurred to her that possibly he had more intuition than she suspected. It was not at all what she desired, that this boy from the country, whom she had chosen to be nice to, should question

anything she wanted to do, whether it was right or not.

“Perhaps the men here are too appreciative of trifles,” she remarked stiffly. “It may be different in the country.”

Billy took her back silently. Things were very different in the country; if she only knew how different, he surmised, she would despise him even more. Turning dazedly to go off the ice he ran right into the committee girl.

It was fortunate that the speed of his arms measured up pretty well with the force of his body, otherwise the girl might have had a bad fall. As it was, there was a blue mark on her shoulder that she kept hidden for some days. The fear that it might be there troubled Billy not a little. He dropped his hand and stood there terrified.

“Thank you,” she said, “I was just about gone,” and then she laughed, just naturally laughed at his confusion, laughed with a frank, reassuring kindness in her friendly eyes, and just as unconcernedly as he had met her the night before, Billy found himself skating down the ice with her. He found himself talking to her without restraint and quite on a level. Then she introduced him to a crowd of the finest girls he had ever known. Altogether, he was having a very good time. He had almost forgotten the agony it gave him to see Miss Evison sweep past, listening

with rapt attention, evidently, to the social oratory of the “interesting” man, when a thin little voice beside him almost whispered—

“Was I terribly horrid?”

If she had been alluring before in her many variable little moods, she was irresistible when she put all that childish appeal to be forgiven into her misty eyes and pouting mouth. Billy looked and wondered. He couldn’t see that she had done much to require forgiveness, but it made him very happy to have her come back; so he laughed into her troubled eyes as one does to a penitent child, and answered:—

“I think you were. How far will you come now to make up for it?” Considering his inexperience, he was playing up to her lead very well.

She would go any distance. She would even skate with him a little while after the others had all gone—if he had time before his train left. She told him in broken, embarrassed little phrases, that she was impulsive, that she guessed she was spoiled, but she was always sorry after she had been rude; she would do anything to make up, she wanted always to be kind, because she just couldn’t stand it not to have people love her.

And Billy replied gallantly that he didn’t see how anyone could help it.

They had the ice to themselves now, and as they swept down the clear, wide stretch they

were unutterably happy. At least Billy was. He didn’t know that the sudden change in her attitude was due to the fact that he had established his favor with the best girls of the college that morning. If he had known he might have appreciated the kindness of the committee girl even more.

Miss Evison explained her high spirits on the ground that she was going home that night. Mother and Dad had both written that they were dying to see her—that was the worst of being an only child. She had an inkling that Dad was getting her a little runabout for Christmas, sort of a bribe to keep her from wanting to go back to the city next year. Oh, yes, they had a farm—just a hobby, of course. Oh, no, they didn’t live on it. They had a house in the nearest town; there were several congenial families living there, and it was near enough to the city to go in to a show when there was anything really good. But, oh, she loved the country—just loved it.

And what did she think of the college? She loved it, too. She would be sorry when her year was up. She had met some of the dearest girls, and she had had a perfectly lovely time. She hadn’t wanted to come in the first place, but Dad had just insisted; he said she was going far too fast at home—it really was hard to get an evening in, because there were some very nice people in the town, for the size of it, and she was so fond

of company and excitement. She could just live on it. She told him, with the naivete of a child, of her many amusing culinary disasters, after she had begun to study household science; how the last time she was at home she had insisted on getting tea on the maid’s afternoon off; how the souffle had fallen flat and she had forgotten to put the cream of tartar in the biscuits.

When she suddenly remembered that she had an engagement in the afternoon, Billy took off her skates something after the manner of a slave kneeling at the feet of the Queen of Sheba.

“Just to think,” she chattered, “our last skate this year, and I’ve talked all about myself. The next time you must tell me all about your affairs, and your holidays, and everything.”

Billy smiled and looked away. He realized painfully how difficult it would be to tell this beautiful, irresponsible, “delicately-reared” girl anything about himself or his holidays or anything.

When he opened the Hall door for her she drew from her muff her smooth, supple little hand without even its glove, held it out to him warmly, and left him thrilling from the contact. She rushed upstairs glowing; she had had a glorious time and there were a thousand more glorious times ahead of her—not with Billy—oh, dear no. She confided to a circle of her dearest girl friends that he was “all right in an agricultural setting,” he was “awfully handsome in

his lumbering yeoman style,” he was “splendid to have looking at you with his sober eyes, as though you were a Madonna, or an actress, or something,” but Billy “transplanted to a circle of the class of people a girl would want to live with—heavens!”

And Billy, rushing for his train, staring out at the flying white fields, or figuring on the back of the latest market report of beef cattle, was possessed of one thought. He must make his plans work out; he must be ready to turn things into money fast; he must be successful in some way or other; and he wasn’t thinking of the folks at home this time. He didn’t notice the old familiar landmarks until the train stopped at the home station.

Jean was there to meet him. She had her arms around his neck almost before he reached the platform, and would not let him go till he had fairly crushed the breath out of her.

“And how’s everything?” he asked.

“Just fine—only Mother!”

“Is anything wrong?”

“No, I guess not. She just doesn’t seem very well sometimes.”

Somehow the news filled Billy with foreboding; he could only picture some awful change. He was impatient to get home, yet, so suddenly awakened from his dream of other things, he felt like a stranger as they neared the old place.

How little and lonely the house looked in the thickening dusk with the lamplight making red squares of the windows—the frost already creeping out from the edges of the panes, and the white smoke floating up from the two little chimneys. There was a fire in the parlor to-night—a sign of festivity for his homecoming.

The horse had scarcely turned in at the lane when the kitchen door opened, and in the light flooding out, Mary stood waiting with the lantern, on duty as usual. She seemed very frail and little as she hurried to meet him, very pathetic too, with her face lifted shyly, not knowing just what to expect, aching to express her love, but fearful of doing the wrong thing. They grow away from their mothers so fast, these men-children; they get so involved in things outside that the mother who stays at home trembles for the time when they will have ceased to need her.

As she bustled around in happy confusion putting the finishing touches to the supper, Billy struggled to adjust himself. The ceiling of the little room seemed very close to his head, the walls very confining as he paced about, but he noticed that the floor was scrubbed white, that the curtains had been laundered until they fairly bristled out into the room. His foot disturbed a rag mat with some yellow birds hooked into it, and when he got down to straighten it, some good fortune prompted him to observe: