Chapter 7

Mrs. Weaver made no response, but her expression was not favorable to such lax uncertainty.

"The way mother Moxom talked," she said to her husband that night, "you'd have thought she sided with Ethel."

Jason Weaver was far too much of a man to hazard an opinion on the proprieties in the face of his wife's disapproval, so he grunted an amiable acquiescence in that spirit of justifiable hypocrisy known among his kind as "humoring the women-folks." Privately he was disposed to exult in his daughter's spirit and good sense, and so long as these admirable qualities did not take her away from him, and paternal pride and affection were both gratified, he saw no reason to complain. This satisfaction, however, did not prevent his "stirring her up" now and then, as he said, that he might sun himself in the glow of her youthful temper and chuckle inwardly over her smartness.

"Well, Dot, how's Rob?" he asked jovially one evening at supper about a month later. "Does he still think he's worth running after?"

"I don't know whether he thinks so or not, but I know he is," asserted the young woman, tilting her chin and looking away from her father with a cool filial contempt for his pleasantries bred by familiarity. "He's well enough, but the old man that lives with him had a fall and broke his leg, and Rob has to take care of him."

Old Mrs. Moxom laid down her knife and fork, and dropped her hands in her lap hopelessly.

"Well, now, what made him go and do that?" she asked, with a fretful quaver in her voice, as if this were the last straw.

"I don't know, grandmother," answered Ethel cheerfully. "As soon as he's well enough to be moved, they're going to take him to the county hospital. I guess that's the poorhouse. But Rob says he's so old they're afraid the bone won't knit; he suffers like everything. Poor old man, I'm awful sorry for him. Rob has to do all the cooking."

The old woman pushed back her chair and brushed the crumbs from her apron.

"I guess I'll go upstairs and lay down awhile, Emma. I been kind of light-headed all afternoon. I guess I set too long over them carpet rags."

She got up and crossed the room hurriedly. Her son looked after her with anxious eyes. Presently they heard her toiling up the stairs with the slow, inelastic tread of infancy and old age.

"I don't know what's come over your mother, Jason," said his wife. "She hasn't been herself all summer. Sometimes I think I'd ought to write to the girls."

"Oh, I guess she'll be all right," said Jason, with masculine hopefulness. "Dot, you'd better go up by and by and see if grandmother wants anything."

Safe in her own room, Mrs. Moxom sank into a chair with a long breath of relief and dismay.

"The poorhouse!" she gasped. "That seems about as mortifying as to own up to your girls that you wasn't never rightly married to their father."

She got up and wandered across the room to the bureau. "I expect he's changed a good deal," she murmured. She took a daguerreotype from the upper drawer, and gazed at it curiously. "Yes, I expect he's changed quite a good deal," she repeated, with a sigh.

IV

"Why, mother Moxom!"

Mrs. Weaver sank into her sewing-chair in an attitude of pulpy despair.

"Well, I don't see but what it's the best thing for me to do," asserted the old woman. "The cold weather'll be coming on soon, and I always have more or less rheumatism, and they say Californay's good for rheumatism. Besides, I think I need to stir round a little; I've stayed right here 'most too close; and as long as Ethel has her heart set on going, I don't see but what it's the best plan. If I go along with her, I can make sure that everything's all right. If you and Jason say she can't go, why, then, I don't see but what I'll just have to start off and make the trip alone."

"Why, mother Moxom, I just don't know what to say!"

Mrs. Weaver's tone conveyed a deep-seated sense of injury that she should thus be deprived of speech for such insufficient cause.

"'Tisn't such a very hard trip," pursued the old woman doggedly. "They say you get on one of them through trains and take your provision and your knitting, and just live along the road. It isn't as if you had to change cars at every junction, and get so turned round you don't know which way your head's set on your shoulders."

Mrs. Weaver's expression began to dissolve into reluctant interest in these details.

"Well, of course, if you think it'll help your rheumatism, and you've got your mind made up to go, _some_body'll have to go with you. Have you asked Jason?"

"No, I haven't." Mrs. Moxom's voice took on an edge. "I can't see just why I've got to ask people; sometimes I think I'm about old enough to do as I please."

"Why, of course, mother," soothed the daughter-in-law. "Would you go and see the girls before you'd start?"

"No, I don't believe I would," answered the old woman, her voice relaxing under this acquiescence. "They'd only make a fuss. They've both got good homes and good men, and they're married to them right and lawful, and there's nothing to worry about. Besides, I'd just get interested in the children, and that'd make it harder. I've done the best I knew how by the girls, and I don't know as they've got any reason to complain"--

"Why, no, mother," interrupted the daughter-in-law, with rising feathers, "I never heard anybody say but what you'd done well by all your children. I only thought they'd want to see you. I think they'd come over if they knew it--well, of course, Angie couldn't, having a young baby so, but Laura she'd come in a minute."

"Well, I don't believe I want to see them," persisted Mrs. Moxom. "It'll only make it harder. I guess you needn't let them know I'm goin'. Ethel and I'll start as soon as she can get ready. Seems like Rob's having a pretty hard time. He couldn't come after Ethel now if he wanted to. It wouldn't be right for him to leave that--that--old gentleman."

"Well, I wouldn't want the girls to have any hard feelings towards me."

"The Moxom girls ain't a-going to have any hard feelings towards _you_, Emma," asserted the old woman, with emphasis.

"She has the queerest way of talking about your sisters, Jason," Mrs. Weaver confided to her husband later. "It makes me think, sometimes, she's failing pretty fast."

V

As the road to the foot of the trail grew steeper, Rob Kendall found an increasing difficulty in guiding his team with one hand. His bride drew herself from his encircling arm reluctantly.

"You'd better look after the horses," she said, with a vivid blush. "What'll grandmother think of us?"

The young fellow removed the offending arm and reached back to pat the old lady's knee.

"I ain't afraid of grandmother," he said joyously. "Grandmother's a brick. If she stays out here long, she'll soon be the youngest woman on the mesa. I shouldn't wonder if she'd pick up some nice old gentleman herself--how's that, grandmother?" He bent down and kissed his wife's ear. "Catch me going back on grandmothers after this!"

"You haven't changed a bit, Rob," said Ethel fondly; "has he, grandmother?" She turned her radiant smile upon the withered face behind her.

The old woman did not answer. The newly wedded couple resumed their rapturous contemplation of each other.

"How's that funny old man, Rob?" asked Ethel, smoothing out her dimples.

"Old Mosey? He's pretty rocky. I'm afraid he won't pull through." Rob strove to adjust his voice to the subject. "I'd 'a' got a house down in town, but I didn't like to leave him. We'll have to go pretty soon, though. I'm afraid you'll be lonesome up here."

The old woman on the back seat leaned forward a little. The young couple smiled exultantly into each other's eyes, with superb scorn of the world.

"Lonesome!" sneered the girl.

Her husband drew her close to him with an ecstatic hug.

"Yes, lonesome," he laughed, his voice smothered in her bright hair.

The old woman settled back in her seat. The team made their way slowly through the sandy wash between the boulders. When they emerged from the sycamores, Rob pointed toward the cabin. "That's the place!" he said triumphantly.

The sunset was sifting through the live-oaks upon the shake roof. Two tents gleamed white beside it, frescoed with the shadow of moving leaves. Ethel lifted her head from her husband's shoulder, and looked at her home with the faith in her eyes that has kept the world young.

"I've put up some tents for us," said the young fellow gleefully; "but you mustn't go in till I get the team put away. I won't have you laughing at my housekeeping behind my back. Old Mosey's asleep in the shanty; the doctor gives him something to keep him easy. You can go in there and sit down, grandmother; you won't disturb him."

He helped them out of the wagon, lingering a little with his wife in his arms. The old woman left them and went into the house. She crossed the floor hesitatingly, and bent over the feeble old face on the pillow.

"It's just as I expected; he's changed a good deal," she said to herself.

The old man opened his eyes.

"I was sayin' you'd changed a good deal, Moses," she repeated aloud.

There was no intelligence in his gaze.

"For that matter, I expect I've changed a good deal myself," she went on. "I heard you'd had a fall, and I thought I'd better come out. You was always kind of hard to take care of when you was sick. I remember that time you hurt your foot on the scythe, just after we was married; you wouldn't let anybody come near you but me"--

"Why, it's Angeline!" said the old man dreamily, with a vacant smile.

"Yes, it's me."

He closed his eyes and drifted away again. The old wife sat still on the edge of the bed. Outside she could hear the sigh of the oaks and the trill of young voices. Two or three tears fell over the wrinkled face, written close with the past, like a yellow page from an old diary. She wiped them away, and looked about the room with its meagre belongings, which Rob had scoured into expectant neatness.

"He doesn't seem to have done very well," she thought; "but how could he, all by himself?" She got up and walked to the door, and looked out at the strange landscape with its masses of purple mountains.

"I've got to do one of two things," she said to herself. "I've just got to own up the whole thing, and let the girls be mortified, or else I've got to keep still and marry him over again, and pass for an old fool the rest of my life. I don't believe I can do it. They've got more time to live down disgrace than I have. I believe I'll just come out and tell everything. Ethel!" she called. "Come here, you and Rob; I've got something to tell you."

The young couple stood with locked arms, looking out over the valley. At the sound of her voice they clasped each other close in an embrace of passionate protest against the intrusion of this other soul. Then they turned toward the sunset, and went slowly and reluctantly into the house.

Lib

A young woman sat on the veranda of a small redwood cabin, putting her baby to sleep. The infant displayed that aggressive wide-awakeness which seems to characterize babies on the verge of somnolence. Now and then it plunged its dimpled fists into the young mother's bare white breast, stiffened its tiny form rebelliously, raised its head, and sent gleams of defiance from beneath its drooping eyelids.

It was late in March, and the ground about the cabin was yellow with low-growing compositae. The air was honey-sweet and dripping with bird-song. Inside the house a woman and a girl were talking.

"Oh, he's not worrying," said the latter. "What's he got to worry about? He lets us do all that. Lib's got the baby and we've got to bear all the disgrace. I"--

"Myrtie," called a clear voice from the veranda, "shut up! You may say what you please about me, and you may say what you please about him, but nobody's going to call this baby a disgrace."

She caught the child up and kissed the back of its neck with passionate vehemence. The baby struggled in her embrace and gave a little cry of outraged dignity.

Indoors the girl looked at her mother and bit her lip in astonished dismay.

"I didn't know she could hear," she whispered.

A tall young woman came up the walk, trailing her tawdry ruffles over the fragrant alfileria.

"Is Miss Sunderland"--She colored a dull pink and glanced at the baby.

"I'm Lib Sunderland. Won't you come in?" said Lib.

The newcomer sank down on the upper step and leaned against the post of the veranda.

"No. I don't want to see any one but you. I guess we can talk here."

The baby sat up at the sound of the stranger's voice and stared at her with round, blinking eyes. She drew off her cotton gloves and whipped her knee with them in awkward embarrassment. She had small, regular features of the kind that remain the same from childhood to old age, and her liver-colored hair rolled in a billow almost to her eyes.

"Maybe you'll think it strange for me to come," she began, "but I didn't know what else to do. I'm Ruby Adair."

She waited a little, but her statement awoke no response in Lib's noncommittal face.

"I don't know whether you know what they're saying over at the store or not," the visitor went on haltingly.

"No," said Lib, with dry indifference; "there ain't any men in our family to do the loafin' and gossipin' for us."

"Since you moved over here from Bunch Grass Valley, they're saying that Thad Farnham is the--is--you know he was in the tile works over there a year or more ago."

"Yes, I know." Lib's voice was like the crackling of dead leaves under foot.

"I think it's pretty hard," continued Miss Adair, gathering courage, and glancing from under the surf of her hair at her listener's impassive face; "him and me's engaged!"

Lib's eyes narrowed, and the velvety down on her lip showed black against the whiteness around her mouth.

"What does _he_ say?" she asked.

"What can he say?" Thad's fiancee broke out nervously, "except that it ain't so. But that doesn't shut people's mouths. Nobody can do that but you. I think"--she raised her chin virtuously and twisted her gloves tight in her trembling hands--"that you ought to come out plain and tell who the man is--I mean the--you know what I mean!"

"Yes," said Lib dully, "I know what you mean."

There was a little silence, broken only by the mad twitter of nesting linnets in the passion-vine overhead.

"Of course," resumed the stranger, "I wouldn't want you to think but what I'm sorry for you. You've been treated awful mean by somebody."

A surprised look grew in the eyes Lib fixed upon her visitor. The baby stirred in its sleep, and she bent down and rubbed her cheek against its hair.

"You needn't waste any time being sorry for me," she said.

"It's too bad," continued Miss Adair, intent upon her own exalted charity, "but that doesn't make it right for you to get other folks into trouble. You'd ought to remember that."

"If you think he's all right, why don't you go ahead and marry him?" asked Lib.

"My folks would make such a fuss, and besides I don't know as it would be just right for me to act like I didn't care, after all that's been said--and me a church-member!"

Miss Ruby bent her head a little forward, as if under the weight of her moral obligations.

"Has he joined the church?" inquired Lib in a curious voice.

"He's been going to the union meetings regular with me, and he's stood up twice for prayers, but I dunno 's they'd take him into the church with all these stories going about. You'd ought to think of that, too--you may be standing in the way of saving his soul."

"If his soul was lost, it would be awful hard to find," said Lib quietly.

Her listener's weak mouth slackened. "Wh-at?" she asked, with a little stuttering gasp.

"Oh, I dunno. Some things _are_ hard to find when they're lost, you know."

"And you'll speak up and tell the truth?" The visitor arose, gathering her flounces about her with one hand.

"If I speak up, I'll tell the truth, you can bet on that," said Lib.

Miss Adair waited an instant, as if for some assurance which Lib did not vouchsafe. Then she writhed down the walk in her twisted drapery and disappeared.

Thad Farnham and his father had been cutting down a eucalyptus-tree. The two men looked small and mean clambering over the felled giant, as if belonging to some species of destructive insect. The tree in its fall had bruised the wild growth, and the air was full of oily medicinal odors. Long strips of curled cinnamon-colored bark strewed the ground. The father and son confronted each other across the pallid trunk. The older man's face was leathery-red with anger.

"The story's got around that the kid's yours, anyway," he announced. "I don't care who started it, but if it's true, you'll make a bee-line for the widow's and marry the girl. D'you hear?"

Thad dropped his eyes sullenly and made a feint of examining the crosscut saw.

"I don't go much on family," continued old Farnham, "and I never 'lowed you'd set anything on fire excepting maybe yourself, but I'm not raising sneaks and liars, and what little I've got hain't been scraped together to fatten that kind of stock!"

"Who said I lied?"

"Nobody. But I'm going to take you over to face that girl and see what she says. If you don't foller peaceable, I'll coax you along with a hatful of cartridges. I hear you've been whining around the revival meetings. I never suspected you till I heard that!"

"I don't see why you suspect a feller for lookin' after the salvation"--

"Oh, damn your salvation!" broke in the old man.

"Well, I dunno"--

"Well, I _do_!" roared the father; "I know you can't make an angel without a man to start with, and I'll do what I can to furnish the man, seein' I'm responsible for you bein' born in the shape of one, and the preachers may put in the wing and the tail feathers if they can! Now start that saw!"

* * * * *

Old Farnham and his son sat in the small front room of the widow Sunderland's cabin. The old man's jaw was set, and he grasped his knees with his big hairy hands as if to steady himself.

Neither of the men arose when Lib came into the room with the baby. The old man's eyes followed her as she seated herself without so much as a glance at his companion.

"My name's Farnham," he began hoarsely. "This is my son Thad. You've met him, maybe?" He stopped and cleared his throat.

Lib did not turn her head.

"Yes, I've met him," she said quietly.

The old man's face turned the color of dull terra-cotta.

"They say he took advantage of you. I don't know. I wasn't much as a young feller, but I wasn't a scrub, and I don't savvy scrubs. I fetched him over here to-day to ask you if it's true, and to say to you if it is, he'll marry you or there'll be trouble. That don't square it, but it's the best I can do."

There was a tense stillness in the little room. The baby gave a squeal of delight and kicked a small red stocking from its dimpled foot. The old man picked it up and laid it on Lib's lap. She looked straight into his face for a while before she spoke.

"I guess you're a good man, Mr. Farnham," she said slowly. "I wouldn't mind being your daughter-in-law, if you had a son that took after you. I think the baby would like you very well for a grandpap, too. The older he grows, the more particular I'm getting about his relations. I didn't think much about anything before he came, but I've done a lot of thinkin' since. I guess that's generally the way with girls."

She turned toward Thad, and her voice cut the air like a lash.

"Suppose you _was_ the father of this baby, and had to be drug here by the scruff of the neck to own it, wouldn't you think I'd done the poor little thing harm enough just by--by _that_, without tackin' you onto him for the rest of his life? No, sir!" She stood up and took a step backward. "You go and tell everybody--tell Ruby Adair, that I say this child hasn't any father; he never had any, but he's got a _mother_, and a mother that thinks too much of him to disgrace him by marrying a coward, which is more than she'll be able to say for _her_ children if she ever has any! Now go!"

For Value Received

A soft yellow haze lay over the San Jacinto plain, deepening into purple, where the mountains lifted themselves against the horizon. Nancy Watson stood in her cabin door, and held her bony, moistened finger out into the tepid air.

"I believe there's a little breath of wind from the southeast, Robert," she said, with a desperate hopefulness; "but the air doesn't feel rainy."

"Oh, I guess the rains'll come along all right; they gener'lly do." The man's voice was husky and weak. "Anyway, the barley'll hold its own quite a while yet."

"Oh, yes; quite a long while," acquiesced his wife, with an eager, artificial stress on the adjective. "I don't care much if the harvest isn't earlier'n usual; I want you to pick up your strength."

She turned into the room, a strained smile twitching her weather-stained face. She was glad Robert's bed was in the farthest corner away from the window. The barley-field that stretched about the little redwood cabin was a pale yellowish green, deeper in the depressions, and fading almost into brown on the hillocks. There had been heavy showers late in October, and the early sown grain had sprouted. It was past the middle of November now, and the sky was of that serene, cloudless Californian blue which is like a perpetual smiling denial of any possibility of rain.

"Is the barley turning yellow any?" queried the sick man feebly.

Nancy hesitated.

"Oh, not to speak of," she faltered, swallowing hard.

Her husband was used to that gulping sob in her voice when she stood in the door. There was a little grave on the edge of the barley-field. He had put a bit of woven-wire fence about it to keep out the rabbits, and Nancy had planted some geraniums inside the small inclosure. There were some of the fiery blossoms in an old oyster can at the head of the little mound, lifting their brilliant smile toward the unfeeling blue of the sky.

"There's pretty certain to be late rains, anyway," the man went on hoarsely. "Leech would let us have more seed if it wasn't for the mortgage." His voice broke into a strained whisper on the last word.

Nancy crossed the room, and laid her knotted hand on his forehead.

"You hain't got any fever to-day," she said irrelevantly.

"Oh, no; I'm gettin' on fine; I'll be up in a day or two. The mortgage'll be due next month, Nancy," he went on, looking down at his thin gray hands on the worn coverlet; "I calc'lated they'd hold off till harvest, if the crop was comin' on all right." He glanced up at her anxiously.

The woman's careworn face worked in a cruel convulsive effort at self-control.

"It ain't right, Robert!" she broke out fiercely. "You've paid more'n the place is worth now; if they take it for what's back, it ain't right!"

Her husband looked at her with pleading in his sunken eyes. He felt himself too weak for principles, hardly strong enough to cope with facts.

"But they ain't to blame," he urged; "they lent me the money to pay Thomson. It was straight cash; I guess it's all right."

"There's wrong somewhere," persisted the woman, hurling her abstract justice recklessly in the face of the evidence. "If the place is worth more, you've made it so workin' when you wasn't able. If they take it now, I'll feel like burnin' down the house and choppin' out every tree you've planted!"