Part 3

The son received ten cents a week for keeping the bedrooms supplied with coal. Several nights he had been routed out of bed, and made to stumble down to the coalhouse, while his father impatiently held the lantern, to do the neglected task. He was perpetually losing things. Hammers, saws, dewed in the morning grass, a saddle that he had forgotten to hang up,--these would furnish damning indictments of his carefulness.

To teach him responsibility, the three newly-purchased crates of Leghorns were put in his charge. Many a time a dried water-trough or a suspiciously pecked-up chicken-run, its last grain of corn consumed, brought him into trouble. Perhaps he had spent the afternoon whittling a dagger, or carefully cleaning an old horse-skull discovered under the green valley pines. He was very proud at the idea of possessing the chickens, and grew fond of them; but remembering to attend to them was a very different matter.

"I don't never have any time for myself, mother," he would complain, after a scene with Paul. "The Highland boys don't have to work all the time."

"Your father is very busy, Pell; if you don't help him, who will?"

Continued repetition of these negligences caused tingling reminders to be applied to the boy. Paul hated to whip his son; he almost despised himself for causing suffering to a smaller human; but what was he to do? Pelham grew familiar with the feel of his father's belt; and still did not, or could not, change his ways.

He could hardly remember when there had not been some friction between them. Consciously and unconsciously he patterned himself after his father in many things. Paul was jolly and companionable, whenever he wished to be; he was an unusually clean representative of a class that prided itself upon its chivalry and courage. These traits the boy followed.

Then, too, his father had shown him inordinate attention, as the first son, ever since his birth. This masculine approval, added to the adulation of adoring women relatives, exalted his already high opinion of himself, made him selfishly demand more than his share.

His mother's love, for instance,--there were times when he wanted to feel he had all of it. When his father was off on business trips, he became, young as he was, the head of the house. It fretted him to be reduced again to a humble subordinate position.

He could sleep in Mary's room, when Paul was away; this privilege he lost on the return. He hardly realized how this tinged his thoughts with dislike of the father. The parents had a vast, almost a godlike, part in his life,--as in the lives of all children. Whatever daily good or ill he received, came primarily from them; his own efforts counted only as they pleased or displeased the deities. What he did not receive, he blamed upon his father; and he often dwelt upon the happy home life should Paul die, or disappear. He could earn a living for mother, and make a loving home for her....

These things created an unseen and growing breach between the two.

When he first came to Adamsville, Paul had had to go out and make business for himself. He had allied himself to James Snell, a fidgety, pushing real estate operator who was familiar with the newcomer's success in Jackson. "The Snell-Judson Real Estate and Development Company" came into existence; Paul joined the Commercial Club, the Country Club, and met here as many people as he could. Before the winter was over, he found his hands full. Perpetual application to the complications of real estate problems throughout the county was wearing; which made him less liable than ever to put up with Pelham's shortcomings. As the spring grew on, and the matter did not mend, he called his son into his room early one morning. "You left the cow-gate unlatched last night, Pelham."

The boy sensed the gravity of his father's tone, and grew at once apprehensive. "I thought I shut it, father----"

"Peter had to spend an hour looking for them, this morning. This is the second time in a week."

The boy became voluble. "The other time, father, you know I told you----"

"Yes, you told me. You're always telling me. Did you take that scythe down to be sharpened yesterday?"

"I meant to--I'll take it this afternoon, sure."

"You'll take it before you go to school this morning."

"Father,--if I'm tardy,----"

"You can explain to Professor Gloster you made yourself late."

The boy's lip pouted; a whimper trembled behind it.

"Twice this week you've failed to hoe the spring garden. Do you know who watered your chickens last night?"

Pelham was silent. The list was growing too large to explain away, apt as he had become in excuses.

"I had a talk with your mother yesterday." The father sat on the edge of his bed, his eyes down, thumping a yard-stick against his left thumb.

So it was going to be the yard-stick! That wouldn't hurt,--not like the belt, or a hickory switch, anyway. Pelham began to frame his voice for the proper mingling of crying and entreaty. The more you seemed to be hurt, the less you got. Only, you had to take the first two or three quietly, or father would see through you.

The elder walked over to the bureau, and placed the measure beside the rose-shears and the spraying can. No, it was not going to be the yard-stick. The boy looked furtively around; there was no other weapon in sight.

Paul continued, "Your conduct bothers your mother as much as it does me. We don't know what to do with you. You're almost ten now ... old enough to be trusted. You know you can't be. Your mother thinks I ought to give you another chance. I promised her I would." His tones grew crisper, more biting. "I know what's the matter with you. You're dog mean. You think you can impose on me. I know it. And I'll have no more of this slovenly work-dodging around my place."

He had worked himself into a rage, by this time; but his tones were icily cold and correct. "This confounded laziness has got to stop. It's your job to stop it, do you hear? And if you don't do it within a week,--you know I mean what I say,--I'll thrash you every morning, until you do!"

He rose menacingly. Pelham shrank from him.

"I'm not going to touch you,--this morning. I promised your mother I wouldn't. But this is a last warning."

For the first few days, the son's conduct was unimpeachable. He attended strictly to his duties, and accomplished all of them passably. But one afternoon, he stopped at the foot of the hill to play ball with the East Highland boys, and entirely forgot to leave an order for linseed oil and chicken-feed at the food store near the livery stable. When Saturday came, he worked irritably around the tomato plants until eleven o'clock. Then he sneaked off to Shadow Creek with some boys from the Gloster School. He was back by four, and tried desperately to finish his tasks by nightfall; but several were forgotten entirely. When no punishment followed, he grew careless again.

Paul was detained at the office Monday night. Just before eleven, the telephone's tinkle aroused Mary. "Coming right away, dear."

With a start she wondered if Pelham's tasks had been performed. She made the rounds. Not a thing done! Skuttles empty, water-trough unfilled, and the hungry chickens pecking desperately among the hard pebbles in the run, after her light had aroused them. There would be time for her to do them, if she hurried....

She had hardly finished washing coal-grime and cracked cornmeal from her hands, when Paul's call sounded in front.

Through the opened front door came his faint voice. "Come down to the steps, Mary." She caught up the lantern, and picked her way down to him.

"I told that boy to oil these hinges, sure, this afternoon. And look at that pile of trash,--he hardly touched it. Here's the shovel. He hasn't done a single chore since I left the mountain."

Mary lighted the way back to the house, thoroughly upset.

Two mornings later, Paul called the boy. "Come into my room, Pelham." The boy followed, a sick feeling at his stomach.

His father twisted a hand within Pelham's shirt-collar, and snapped off his own belt. The loose end of the belt danced and stung against the boy's bare legs. His father's words came to him brokenly and explosively. "Pay no attention to what I say.... Your confounded negligence.... Continually soldiering on me. You're mean as gar-broth."

By this, Pell gave way entirely. The agonizing pain burnt his bare calves, and radiated up his legs. He punctuated the blows with sobbing explanations, and promises never to let it happen again. At the intensity of the pain, he tried to intercept the blows with his hands. Half of the time the lashings left red welts on his wrists and arms, and one stroke caught a little finger, twisting it back until he was sure it was broken.

"I'll teach you to impose on your father.... You won't obey me, will you?..."

At last it was over, and Pelham crumpled, sobbing and shuddering, against the footboard of the bed.

"Go down to the chicken-house, and attend to your work," his father ordered him. Paul Judson, torn with anger and self-disgust, turned back to the boy. "I'm going to thrash you every morning for a month. Maybe that will do you some good."

After a few minutes, gulping down the stinging memories and black bitterness against what he felt was rank injustice, Pelham limped out to his duties. As he watered the hens, and scattered cracked corn before the fuzzy yellow balls scratching around them, waves of self-pity flooded him. He wept into the chicken-trough and into his handkerchief, until it was a damp salt-smelly wad.

Morning after morning this kept up. Now it was in his own room, his father's, the stable, or by the spring duck-houses; now a slipper, a shingle, the hated belt, or a freshly cut withe. Once it was the stable broom, which broke over his back at the second stroke,--that morning the whipping ended abruptly. He wept, pleaded, excused himself, begged to have another chance; nothing could shake the stern will of his father, and the merciless schedule of pain.

Mary tried to keep busy at some place where she could not hear his cries. But they pursued her from room to room.

Pelham wore his stockings to school,--they hid the old bruises, and the fresh welts. Night after night he cried himself to sleep. And the mother, stealing in to see the children safely in bed, would feel all the agony seared on her heart, at the sight of the tear-channeled boyish cheeks. She worried and brooded over the favorite son, until bluish depressions pouched beneath her eyes, and a hard look came into them as they followed her husband around his home tasks. He, in turn, became boisterously loud-spoken, and made a vast amount of noise stamping on the halls and porches. It was a gruesome three weeks for all.

At the end of this period, Pelham could stand it no longer. He kissed his mother good night, clinging around her neck and pressing passionate kisses upon her lips,--it would be the last time he would ever receive this parting kiss, he told himself. Then he knotted up, in an old sweater, his clean shirts and a change of underclothes, three handkerchiefs, his stamp album, and "Grimm's Fairy Stories," and hid them under the bed. To-morrow he would leave home forever.

While his mother was seeing to the breakfast table, he slipped into her room, his eyes still red from the morning's session with his father. He unlocked her drawer, and took out of her purse the three one dollar bills he found. On the red book, he knew, he was entitled to more than eight dollars, but this would do. He slipped in a note he had written the night before, and hid the bulging sweater in a rock beside the front path.

Walking to school with Nell, he pledged her to silence and then told her he was going to run away that afternoon.

"That's wicked, Pell." Her wide eyes were horror-filled.

"Would you let them whip you every day of your life?" He turned on her fiercely.

"Where are you going?"

"To Jackson, or Columbus, or somewhere,--anything to get away from here. You'll look after my little chickies, won't you, sister?"

She promised.

The girls were dismissed for lunch at twelve, and as Pelham had only half an hour, their mother usually met them at the big gate, and walked back to the house with them. Nell waited till Sue had run ahead, then betrayed the morning's confidence with maternal conscientiousness.

Mary went at once to her drawer,--she guessed how Pelham had gotten funds. She put on her hat and hurried in to the office, carrying with her the boy's note.

Her lips were set, and her voice difficult to control, when she faced her husband across the bevelled glass that covered his desk. "Read this, Paul," handing him the crumpled message.

It was written painstakingly in the boy's unformed upright script, a youthful imitation of his father's distinctive hand:

"Dearest mother:--

I can not stand any moar whipings. Hollis can have my things wen he growes up. I will come back as soon as father is ded.

Affexionately your son, PELHAM JUDSON."

Before he had time to comment, the mother spoke. "You know I advised against this--this brutal, cold-blooded punishment of my son. This is what has come of it."

"Where is he?----"

She bit her lip to keep from crying. "He's gone; he may be dead, for all I know. He told Nell he might go to Jackson...."

"I'll go down to the station. He can't leave before the 4:17."

"Promise me you won't whip the baby any more...." Her voice shook, in spite of herself. "I'll go with you."

He shook his head. "I'll study it out.... I'd better go alone."

At the far end of the waiting-room,--it lacked half an hour to train-time,--he saw at once the slight figure. Pelham had invested in a bag of bananas, and was disconsolately eating the second. As he saw his father's figure approaching, he wilted weakly back in the seat.

"Going away, Pelham?"

"Yes, sir."

He was surprised at the lack of interest in his father's voice.

The older man sat down beside him, and spoke carefully. "As soon as you want to leave home, Pelham, you may. If you're going to Jackson, or anywhere else, father'll be glad to write on and see that you get a job of some kind. But you are pretty small to be starting out now."

The boy choked a wordless assent.

"I think you'd better come home to-night, and think over the matter. If you want to go to-morrow, I'll be glad to help."

Pelham rose obediently, clutching the draggled bundle, and slipped a confiding hand into his father's. Nothing was said about the whippings; they ceased.

V

When summer came, Pelham spent his vacation at Grandfather Barbour's home. He made the journey alone, in the conductor's care.

Joyfully he hopped out at the station, and drove up the leisurely oak avenue to the big house. He had his own cool little room again, fragrant with the honeysuckle blossoms beneath the window, and the scent of peach blossoms from the near end of the orchard.

Every summer that he could remember, he had spent with these adored grandparents. Edward Barbour and his young wife had come to Jackson two decades after the first Judson. At first their home had been only a large bedroom and dining-room. Then a porch had been added, and two more rooms to the south, where the orchard began now. The first pantry had been the piano box, connected by a shed to the kitchen and back porch. The north wing had followed, and the upstairs,--until now the sectional house fitted so well into the trees and vines, that it seemed to have sprouted and grown as easily and naturally as they.

His cousins, Alfred, his own age, and Lil, a year younger, came up every day while he stayed here; Uncle Jimmy's house was visible beyond the last pear tree, down nearer the Greenville Road.

There were strawberries in the garden, big luscious fruit soppy with the dew and gleaming like scarlet Easter eggs in the damp leaves.

He learned to help old Dick harness up the buggy, or watched 'Liza spurt the warm creamy milk pattering into the wide-mouthed pails.

After breakfast, Grandma let him trowel in the pansy or salvia beds,--her flowers were the talk of the neighbors,--and she gave him a little bed of his own, where portulacca, larkspur, sticky petunias, star-flowered cypress vines, and rose-geranium and heliotrope slips formed a crowded kaleidoscope of shape and color.

There were other occupations for restless mind and fingers. His father might have laughed at his sewing, and openly despised him for it. But Grandmother took time from her embroidery to teach him the briar-stitch and cat-stitch, and the quick decoration of the chain. His mother kissed the grimed, badly embroidered pansy and wild-rose squares that were folded into his occasional happy notes.

On rainy days the children played indoors. Spools,--was there ever such a house for spools! Grandmother had been saving them since the war. Endless cigar boxes rattled with spools of all sizes, big red linen thread ones, handy middle-sized ones, baby silk-twist bobbins. These were emptied upon the sitting-room floor: houses, trains, forts, whole cities flourished in the narrow boundaries of the rag carpet. Grandfather kept crayons, scissors, and a store of old Scribners' and Harpers', which were his without pleading. And parchesi boards, and backgammon--the place was a paradise to the boy.

He delighted in long rambles with his grandfather. The old gentleman, after the war, had combined managing his small farm with running the main village store in Jackson. He had long given up the latter; his simple, honest Christian methods of dealing with his neighbors had been supplanted by more up-to-date ethics, although the store's old name was preserved.

The two visited the corn and cotton fields behind the house, the level swards of the pebbly river, the solemn privetted walks throughout the cemetery. Here generations of dead Jacksonians restfully scattered into the prolific, dusty mother that gave them birth.

Pelham learned much on these walks,--the birds, trees, stories of dead heroes, episodes of the war, and the stirring times when the raiders had overrun the village. Grandmother had hidden two brothers, one wounded, for weeks in her cellar, all unknown to the Northern visitors who forced themselves upon her. The boy absorbed indiscriminately the accumulated store of eighty years of active life.

After supper, the sweet-faced grandmother would slip a knitted wrap over his shoulders, and walk out with him in the great oak-surrounded square before the house. She taught Pelham how to find the North Star, from the bottom of the Big Dipper; and then the Little Dipper, that had been twisted back until the Milky Way spilled from it. He learned to recognize the big Dragon waddling across the summer heavens, and many of the dwellers in the strange skyey menagerie. These were days and nights of wonder and beauty.

He longed to stay here forever, away from the acidity of his father's commands, and the ever-present fear of the belt. But as the autumn came, he wept his farewells and went back.

Until his return from that first absence at Jackson, he did not realize how the mountain had claimed him. He maintained a mild, glowing regard for the grandparents' plantation; it was free from the irksome paternal irritations that scarred his home days. But its appeal did not go down to the deepest parts of him.

With the mountain it was different. Not merely Hillcrest Cottage, although he felt bound to every board and stone of it; not even merely the Forty Acres, the family name for the fenced, pathed, and parked half of the original eighty on which the house stood; but the whole mountain, its rises and unexpected hollows, and the thicketed valleys that drooped sharply away toward the East,--he responded to all of these. The rest of the Judsons had taken the cottage and the Forty as their home. But this was only a small part of home to the eldest son.

The mountain became his castle, his playground, his haven of refuge, the land of his fancy. He was its child, and it was his mother.

He got along better with his father that winter. Diligent application to his school work and his tasks at home was the price of liberty on the mountain. Two weekday afternoons, and Sunday after midday dinner, were allowed him. He filled every minute of these respites.

The little Barbour cousins spent Thanksgiving week with the children. Pelham showed them all the treasured spots on the mountain. To them, even the walk up the hill was an adventure, as they explored the long sloping dummyline road, through stiff palisades of golden rod and Flora's paint-brush, the stalks silver-dusty from the nipping November winds, and ready to scatter at the tentative poking of a rotting stick, or the breath of a skimmed stone.

One wonderful picnic they had to Shadow Creek, before the relatives returned home. All drove over in a wagon to the deserted mill dam, Aunt Sarah, grumbling her good-humored threats to return to Jackson and leave "dis mountain foolishness," riding along to mind the children. Jimmy learned the first few swimming strokes in the cool, brownish pond; Pelham and the older girls had long been going in regularly with their father, and were fast becoming expert.

A baby came in April,--another boy, named Edward after Mary's father. This kept the mother from joining their rambles, so it was necessary for Pelham to devise the games without her resourceful assistance.

Here the boy's impelling imagination, added to his knowledge of fairy stories, came to his aid. All the myth-creating urge of the past moved in him. He peopled the varied crests and valleys with these volatile companions, visible only in the dusk out of the corner of a friendly eye. The V-shaped slope from the gap to the railroad was Dwarfland; Hollis was their prince. Crenshaw Hill, clear to the Locust Hedge, was Yellow Fairyland; a chum, Lane Cullom, a year older than Pelham, assumed leadership over these beings. Black-haired Nell, when she could be got to play, was the princess of the Black Fairies, whose haunts were in the outcrop before Hillcrest Cottage. Sue was anything needed to complete the story,--a mere mortal, the queen of the moon-fairies, or of the rock gnomes. Pelham, himself, in crimson outing flannel cloak, was the king and lord of the Red Fairies. They were the real spirits of the mountain, and of fire, and came in their red chariots down the flaming lanes of the sunset sky, to battle for their dispossessed heritage against all the forces of night and darkness.

The fights were not all bloodless. On one of these assaults, as he charged with brittly reed lances up the precipitous quartz quarry, he stumbled and drove a stiff bit of stubble into a nostril. It bled furiously, until his stained handkerchief was the hue of his crimson mantle. But even the three stitches which the doctor took were only an incident in the noble warfare.

The endless sieges, ambuscades, tourneys and adventures filled volumes--literally volumes; for Pelham wrote, on folded tablet paper, a history of the fairy occupation of the mountain, copiously illustrated with pencil and crayon. It was one of the regrets of his later years that this history had disappeared completely; even its details vanished from his memory.

Always he directed the sports. They varied with his invention; spear-tilting at barrel hoops around the circle of the daisy bed, bow and arrow warfare at Indian enemies hulking and skulking behind pokeberry bushes, cross-country running to Shadow Creek and back, when he became interested in this at the high school,--these were only a few of the games.

His name-giving had a curiously permanent effect. Dwarfland never lost the title he gave it, nor Billygoat Hill, where he and Lane surrounded a patriarchal billy and almost caught him.