Chapter 2

"I don't know, Betty, I just don't know," answered Sam, as he lit a corn-cob pipe and leaned closer to me in a thoughtful manner. "Cows are such feminine things and so contrary. I don't know what I will do if I lose any more. I--I may get discouraged."

"Have you had a doctor?" I asked, briskly and unfeelingly, though I did take his big rough hand in my own and hold on to it with a sympathy that was not in my voice.

"No, I've sorter doctored them by a book I have. The only good veterinary doctor about here lives way over by Spring Hill, and it would take him a day to drive over and back, besides costing me about ten dollars. Still, I ought to get him. Buttercup is pretty sick," answered Sam, and I could see that his broad shoulders under his well-cut blue serge coat of last season seemed to sag with the weight of his animal responsibilities.

"I can take my car over to Spring Hill in less than an hour, get the doctor, and have you and the doctor out to those animals by ten. This moon will last all night; and you go get the apple-float from mother while I make Eph run out the car and jump into my corduroys. Come on, quick!" And as I talked I opened the gate, drew him in, and started leading him up the front walk by the sleeve of his coat.

"Not if I know myself, Betty, will I let you undertake such a red-cross expedition as that. They'll have to wait. I came in to call on you and whisper sweet nothings to you in the parlor while you tell me--"

"Eat the float in a hurry if you want it," I interrupted him, as I deposited him beside mother, who was still sipping a last cup of coffee with her jelly-cake, and went for my room and my motor clothes.

And it was one grand dash that Redwheels and I made out Providence Road and over Paradise Ridge down to Spring Hill in less than thirty-five minutes. In the moonlight the road was like a lovely silver ribbon that we wound up on a spool under the machine, and a Southern spring breeze seemed to be helping the gasoline to waft us on more rapidly in our flight as it stung our faces with its coolness, which was scented with the sap that was just beginning to rise against bark and bud in the meadows and woods past which we sped.

"It will be great to die together, won't it, Betty?" said Sam once as Redwheels ran a few yards on two wheels, then tried the opposite two before it settled back to the prosaic though comfortable use of four as we took a flying leap across a little creek ditch.

"We can't die sentimentally; we've got to get back to those suffering cows," I answered him, firmly, as I whirled into Spring Hill and stopped Redwheels, panting and hot, in front of the dry-goods, feed, and drug store. There I knew we could find out anything we wanted to know about the whereabouts or profession of any of the fifteen hundred inhabitants of the little old hamlet which has nestled under the hills for a hundred years or more. "Ask where the cow physician lives. Quick!"

And at my urge Sam sprang out and across the old, uneven brick pavement that lay between us and the store door. Then in less than two minutes he appeared with a round, red-faced, white-headed old man who wheezed chuckles as he talked.

His fear of the car was only equaled by his fascination at the idea of the long ride in it, which would be the first motor-driven sortie he had ever made out into life.

"Air ye sure, little missie, that you can drive the contraption so as not to run away with us? Old folks is tetchy, like a basket of pullet eggs," he said, as Sam seated him in the back seat and sprang to my side.

"I wish I had a rope to tie him in," he muttered, as he sank into his seat. "If you run as you did coming, we'll sure lose him. He'll bounce like a butter-ball."

"I'm not taking any risks," I answered, and it was with greatest mildness that we sauntered up Paradise Ridge and started down the other side. And as I drove along carefully my mind began to work out into the byways of the situation. I don't see how my athletic and executive generation is going to do its appointed work in its day if we are going to go on using the same set of social conventions that tied up our mothers. As we neared the cross-road that turned off to Sam's brier-patch I began to wonder how long it would take me to rush back into Hayesboro, bundle mother into Redwheels, and get back to the cows. It was just a quarter after nine o'clock, but I knew she would be sleepy and would have to be forced to come with me very gently and slowly. Still, I didn't see how I could go on out into the woods with only Sam and the Butterball which was wheezing out cow conversation to Sam that I was intensely interested in and ought to have been listening to rather than wasting force on foolish proprieties. I was about to turn and take Sam's advice on the matter when he suddenly laid his fingers on my arm and said:

"Stop a minute, Betty. What's that roosting on that stone wall?" And as he spoke he peered out toward a strange, huge bird sitting by the side of the road.

I stopped just about opposite the object and Sam sprang out.

"You, Byrd Crittenden, where did you come from?" I heard Sam demand of the huddled bundle as he lifted it off the wall. It was attired in scanty night-drawers and a short coat, and shivered as it stood, first on one foot and then on the other.

"I ain't a-going to stay in no country with a hoot-owl, Sam. I'm going to somewhere that a lady lives at, too." And the manful little voice broke as the bunch shivered up against Sam's legs.

"Honest, Byrd, I thought you were asleep and wouldn't wake up till morning. You never did before; but when I go--go gallivanting, have I got to take you or not go?" And Sam's voice was bravely jocular.

"Bring him here to me, Sam," I cried out, quickly. "Come in here with Betty, Byrd." And I cuddled his long, thin, little legs down under my lap-blanket beyond the steering-gear. "You didn't forget Betty while she was away, did you?" I asked, as we snuggled to each other and I started the motor, while Dr. Chubb chuckled and Sam still stood in the middle of the moonlit road as if uncertain what to do next.

"Yes, I forgot you," answered Byrd, candidly, though I had adored him since his birth; "but I like to go see Mother Hayes and eat jelly-cake. Can I go home with you?"

"No. I'm going as fast as I can with you to your home to keep you from freezing to death," I answered, quickly adopting this recovered old friend in the double capacity of an excuse and a chaperon. "Just sit here in the seat by me and watch me get us all back to your house in a hurry. You sit with the doctor, Sam."

"Oh no, Betty," answered Sam, quickly. "It is only a little over a mile now, and the doctor and Byrd and I can walk it all right. You come out in the morning and--"

"I'm going on with the doctor to those cows, Sam, and if you want to go with us, get in quick," I answered, in a tone of voice I have used on Sam once or twice in our lives with great effect. He hopped in and I started at top speed.

"Hic-chew! Fine goer that," wheezed the doctor, and I didn't know whether he alluded to me or Redwheels. But there was evident relish of real pace in his voice, so I speeded up and shot away from the main road into the hard dirt lane in good style.

"I'm a bird--I'm a bird!" shouted the picked fledgling at my side as we whizzed under dark cedar boughs that waved funereal plumes over our heads, and over stumps and stones with utter disregard of the heavy new tires. One of the lessons I learned early is that men are timid of a woman's driving them in any vehicle, and I was surprised that I at last rounded the bend and drew up beside a long, low shed which Sam had calmly pointed out to me, without having had a single remonstrance from the back seat.

"Moo," came in a gentle, sad voice from the depths of the shed as we all began to disembark at the same time.

"Well, one is alive, anyway," said Sam as he set Byrd on the ground and held up his arms to me. "It's good to have you back, Betty," he whispered, in an undertone, as he turned me against his shoulder to set me down. "It 'll all go right now that you are here to--"

"Now tell us what to do, Doctor." I interrupted him determinedly, because I felt that it was not the occasion for friendly sentimentalities.

If at any time in the three years that preceded that night I had foreseen the way I was to spend it I would have been justified in flatly refusing to carry out my horoscope. Suppose, for instance, while I was in the midst of the wonderful dinner Peter Vandyne's cousin, Count Henri de Berssan, gave me in Brussels, a week before the storm broke that carried him before cannon and bayonet, I had seen a mental picture of myself six months from that minute, out in the woods on the side of a Harpeth hill under an old cedar-pole shed with my jacket off, my embroidered blouse sleeves rolled to the shoulder, filling a tin can, which had a long spout to be poked down a cow's throat, with a vile, greasy mixture out of a black bottle, at the directions of a shirt-sleeved little man and a red-headed farmer in blue overalls, while a wisp of a boy writhed in and out and around and under a pathetic old Jersey cow, who was being rescued from the jaws of death. Now I wonder just what I would have done to escape such an experience? Slated myself for Belgian widowhood, perhaps, as a kinder fate, or stayed right there in New York to help Peter on "The Emergence." I wonder if Peter ever saw a dear, big-eyed, trustful old Jersey cow have medicine poured down her throat. It is called "drenching." I wish he could see it before he finishes that play. The sight produces a peculiar kind of emotion that might be worth recording in an all-comprehensive drama of American life. In fact, I know that what I felt at the end was worth recording in any kind of literature, by any kind of a poet--if we were equal to it. Old Dr. Chubb leaned breathlessly against a rough post, I staggered down on an upturned bucket, and Sam reached out his long, blue-overalled arms and embraced Buttercup's neck and buried his head on her patient shoulder, just as a faint streak of April dawn showed behind the oak-trees, for we realized then that the dreadful cramp was gone and that she could chew the wisp of hay offered by Byrd.

"Hic-chew! All out of the woods," wheezed Dr. Chubb, as he looked at old Buttercup and the two other young cows we had been working over all night, with as fine an exaltation of achievement as any I ever saw, not excepting that of an American man of letters I witnessed take his degree at Oxford.

But Sam's head was still bowed on old Buttercup's back and I went and stood beside him.

"Will I ever learn how to take care the right way of--of life?" he said under his breath, as he stood up straight and tall with the early light streaming over his great mop of sun-bronzed hair and the bare breast from which his open shirt fell away.

"I'll help you," I said, as I came still nearer and leaned against Buttercup's warm, yellow side so closely that she looked around from her meal from the Byrd's hand and mooed with grateful affection plus surprise to find us still standing by her so determinedly. "That is, if--if--I can learn myself."

"You haven't found out you are a woman yet, have you, Betty?" answered Sam, with a laugh that embarrassed me. I would have considered it ungrateful if it hadn't sounded so comfortable and warm out in the cold of the dawn--which had come before I realized that midnight had passed, about which time I had intended to go home. But how could a person feel guilty while playing Good Samaritan to a cow? I didn't.

Then, as the streak of new day widened into a soft pink flush over the tops of the bare trees that etched their fine twigs into an archaic pattern against a purple sky lit by the gorgeous flame of the morning star retreating before the coming sun, we all collected buckets and rags and bottles and sponges. In Indian file we were led by Sam around the hill, up a steep path that was bordered by coral-strung buck-bushes and rasping blackberry brush, and to his little farm-house perched on a plateau almost up to the top of the hill. It was long and low, with a wide red roof that seemed to hover in the whitewashed walls and green shutters; while white smoke from an old gray-rock, mud-daubed chimney melted away among the tree-tops into the lavender of the coming day. It looked like a great brooding white hen setting in a nest of radiant woods, and I felt like a little cold chicken as Sam led the way through the low, wide door for me to creep under the sheltering wings. In about two seconds we were all sheltered in complete comfort. At a huge fire that was a great glow of oak coals old Mammy Kitty, who had superintended Sam's birth and childhood, as well as "neighbored" mine, was gently stirring a mixture that smelled like the kind of breakfast nectar they must have in heaven, while she also balanced a steaming coffee-pot on a pair of crossed green sticks at one corner of the chimney. In the ashes I could see little mounds which I afterward found to be flaky, nutty com-pones, and I flew to kneel at her side with my head on her gaudy neckerchief.

"Dah, dah, dah, child," she crooned, as she smiled a queer, loving, old smile that showed me how glad she was to see me, but never another word did she utter. I almost never remember hearing Mammy say an articulate word; but all children and those grown up who have any child left in their hearts can understand her croon. It is cradle music--to the initiated.

"Mammy's rheumatism is mighty bad, but she can still shake up corn ash cake and chicken hash with the best," said Sam, coming over to warm his hands and tower above us, while Byrd volunteered to lead Dr. Chubb out to what he called the wash-up bench on the back porch.

I looked up at Sam as he stood above me in a mingling of fire-glow and the early morning light with his low-beamed, deep-toned humble home as a background, and he--he loomed.

"I--I love this place," I positively gasped, as I moved still closer to Mammy and stirred the spoon in the pot of hash.

"Shelter, fire, a chicken in the pot, and a woman crouched on the hearth stirring it--what more could any man want or get, no matter how he worked?" answered Sam, as he looked down at me with the smolder in his blue-flecked hazel eyes to which Peter had once written a poem called "On the Gridiron."

"Yes, but what would you do if you didn't have Mammy?" I ventured back, as I bent across Mammy's knee and began to stir more vigorously while she shook up her coffee-pot and raked a few last coals over the cakes for their complete browning. "You always were a good provider, Sam," I added, under the excitement of the bubbling over of the coffee.

"Yes, locusts for hollyhock children and the wife of a summer day who--"

"Whew-shk! but my stomick have got a breakfas' notice," interrupted Dr. Chubb. He and the Byrd had come into the room as hungry as ravening wolves.

While Mammy stirred and shoveled off ashes I fed all three men to the point of utter repletion, feeding myself from Sam's plate as I brought the food back and forth. He didn't want me to wait on them, and I suppose that is the reason I insisted on it, and partly ate his breakfast while doing it, just as an act of defiance.

"You taught me to eat out of your hand, even when it was unspeakably dirty, and you had only saved me about two good bites and the core," I answered one of his remonstrances.

"But think of the pain it was to save even a third of a tea-cake in your pocket when your stomach was so near it," he answered as he finished the bottom half of a pone I had spread thick with the juicy hash before I had greedily eaten the upper crust.

"I'd rather eat my breakfast out of my own plate and let ladies eat they's. Sam has to tie up cows that eat out of other's stalls, and the old white rooster has to be put in a coop 'cause he gobbles the hen feed; but 'cause you are company he lets you do it," the Byrd remarked, all in one breath between two pieces of his pone. At which Dr. Chubb wheezed and chuckled delightedly and Sam roared.

"Women critters ain't ever so free with vittels as men; they have to kinder toll 'em along to nibble feed, and life, too," remarked the doctor of distressed animals as we all rose from the table just as the sun burst in on the situation from over Paradise Ridge.

And while he and the Byrd went to again look at the invalids, and Mammy Kitty removed the dishes into a little cupboard that served as butler's pantry and storeroom, Sam showed me the rest of his house--which consisted of his own room, that "leaned-to" the long living-room opposite that of Mammy Kitty, and a back porch. That little room made me feel queer and choky. It was neat and poor; and a narrow, old mahogany bed, that had always been in the Crittenden nursery, was pushed back under the low side. It had a shelf or two with a curtain of dark chintz under which farm clothes hung, a gun in the corner, a jolly little wood stove, and close beside Sam's bed was the young Byrd's cot with its little pillow my mother had made for him before he was ushered into the world on the day his mother left it. I could almost see the big rough hand go out to comfort the little fledgling in the dark. I choked still further, and turned hurriedly out on to the low, wide old porch that ran all the way across the back of the house and which apparently was bath-room, refrigerator, seed-rack as to its beams, and the general depositing-place of the farm; but not before I had remarked, hanging by his door, a grass basket I had woven for Sam to bring locust pods to the hollyhock family. Then I fled, only stopping to squeeze Mammy over her dish-pan and get my hat off the cedar pegs that stuck out of the side of the old chimney to serve just such a purpose.

I found Dr. Chubb and the Byrd, who was now attired in overalls of the exact shade and cut of Sam's, standing by Redwheels with their mouths and eyes wide open in rapture.

"Well, 'fore I die I've saw a horse with steel innards and rid it," remarked the old doctor. "Machines is jest the common sense of God Almighty made up by men, 'ste'd er animals made up by His-self. But I must git on, missie, or some critter over at Spring Hill will have a conniption and die in it fer lack of a drench or a dose."

I left Sam and the Byrd standing in the sunshine at the gate of cedar poles that Sam had set up at the entrance of his wilderness, and I don't believe I would have had the strength of character to go until I had been introduced to every stick and stone on the farm if I hadn't wanted so much to find out all about cows from Dr. Chubb. I drove slowly and extracted the whole story from his enthusiastic old mind. What I don't know about the bovine family now is not worth knowing, and I believe I would enjoy undertaking to doctor a Texas herd. We parted with vows of eternal mutual interest, and I expect to cherish that friendship. It is not every day a girl has the chance to meet and profit by such wisdom as a successful seventy-year-old veterinary surgeon is obliged to possess.

As I went up the stairs to my room I met mother coming down to her half-after-eight breakfast, and she was mildly surprised that I had not come home at a proper time and gone to bed; but when she heard that I had been with Sam's sick cows all night she was perfectly satisfied, even pleased. Mother rarely remembers that I am a girl. She has thought in masculine terms so long that it is impossible for her to get her mind to bear directly on the small feminine proprieties.

"That's right, Betty, be a doer, no matter whom you do, even if it is Sam's cow," said daddy, when I had finished my eulogy of Dr. Chubb and beautiful old Mrs. Buttercup. Then he kissed mother and me and went on down to his office, while she followed him to the gate, crocheting and quite forgetting me.

Completely exhausted, but feeling really more effective in life than I ever had before, even at the Astor tea-table (because Peter had been perfectly well and Sam's cows hadn't), I took a magazine with an entrancing portrayal of a Belgian soldier apparently eleven feet tall on the cover and went out on the side porch to sit in the cool spring sunshine and pick up the pieces of myself. When I put myself together again I found that I made something that looked like an illustration to a farm article rather than the frontispiece to an American epic. Still, if for a friend I could grasp a farm problem with that executive enthusiasm, had I any reason to doubt that I would have any trouble in helping along an epic of American life? I decided that I would not, and settled down to find out about the eleven-foot Belgian before I crept off for a nap, when an interruption came and I had to prop my eyes open. It was Eph with a letter and the information that Redwheels had shed a bolt in its flight last night. I settled the bolt question with a quarter and turned to the letter. It was from Peter, and I knew by the amount of ink splashed all over the envelope that it must contain a high explosive splashed on the inside.

Peter Vandyne really is a wonderful man, and he will enrich American letters greatly after he has had time to live a lot of the things he has planned to write. Farrington, the great producer and dramatist, had read the first act of his epic and said good things about it, Farrington is not a friend of Peter's sister, Mabel, nor does he own or want to buy any of Judge Vandyne's stock in railroads or things. He's just really the dean of the American stage. Could anybody blame Peter if he had used ten pounds of paper, if paper comes by the pound, and a quart of ink telling about it? But he didn't; about five of the seven pages were all about me and Farrington. I never was so astonished. The morning I got home I had written Peter about how all my friends had been glad to see me, and the way the different ones had shown it, and Peter had read that part to Mr. Farrington and he had said that Peter ought to get me to supply some of the human comedy that Peter's play lacked. Peter knows so much about life from his literary researches that it goes off and hides from him when he sets out in search for it, and I understood immediately what the great dramatist meant, though Peter probably did not.

So weave some of your heart spells for me, dearest dear Betty [Peter wrote], I am sending you the manuscript of Act I and part of Act II, and I know you will read them carefully and let me know fully what you think of them. Criticize them from your splendid human viewpoint. The dear old governor has been rather hard on me of late, and I may have to go into the office yet. Death! Help, rescue me, dear, for to put a play across will be my salvation from his prejudices. I must do it this summer, and then--then by the new year perhaps I can lay the gems of success at your feet. May I come down and talk to you soon about it all? No one knows what's in my heart but you, my own Betty. May I come?

PETER.