Chapter 10

THE GROVE OF DESTINY

When I had got up in the morning and rounded up my cows I started a fire and began whistling. I was not in the habit of whistling much; but I wanted her to wake up and dress so I could get the makings of the breakfast out of the wagon. After I had the fire going and had whistled all the tunes I knew--_Lorena, The Gipsy's Warning, I'd Offer Thee This Hand of Mine,_ and _Joe Bowers_, I tapped on the side of the wagon, and said "Virginia!"

She gave a scream, and almost at once I heard her voice calling in terror from the back of the wagon; and on running around to the place I found that she had stuck her head out of the opening of the wagon cover and was calling for help and protection.

"Don't be afraid," said I. "There's nobody here but me."

"Somebody called me 'Virginia,'" she cried, her face pale and her whole form trembling. "Nobody but that man in all this country would call me that."

She hardly ever called Gowdy by any other name but "that man," so far as I have heard. Something had taken place which struck her with a sort of dumbness; and I really believe she could not then have spoken the name Gowdy if she had tried. What it was that happened she never told any one, unless it was Grandma Thorndyke, who was always dumb regarding the sort of thing which all the neighbors thought took place. To Grandma Thorndyke sex must have seemed the original curse imposed on our first parents; eggs and link sausages were repulsive because they suggested the insides of animals and vital processes; and a perfect human race would have been to her made up of beings nourished by the odors of flowers, and perpetuated by the planting of the parings of finger-nails in antiseptic earth--or something of the sort. My live-stock business always had to her its seamy side and its underworld which she always turned her face away from--though I never saw a woman who could take a new-born pig, calf, colt or fowl, once it was really brought forth so it could be spoken of, and raise it from the dead, almost, as she could. But every trace of the facts up to that time had to be concealed, and if not they were ignored by Grandma Thorndyke. New England all over!

If Gowdy was actually guilty of the sort of affront to little Virginia for which the public thought him responsible, I do not see how the girl could ever have told it to grandma. I do not see how grandma could ever have been made to understand it. I suspect that the worst that grandma ever believed, was that Gowdy swore or used what she called vulgar language in Virginia's presence. Knowing him as we all did afterward, we suspected that he attempted to treat her as he treated all women--and as I believe he could not help treating them. It seems impossible of belief--his wife's orphan sister, the recent death of Ann Gowdy, the girl's helplessness and she only a little girl; but Buck Gowdy was Buck Gowdy, and that escape of his wife's sister and her flight over the prairie was the indelible black mark against him which was pointed at from time to time forever after whenever the people were ready to forgive those daily misdoings to which a frontier people were not so critical as perhaps they should have been. Indeed he gained a certain popularity from his boast that all the time he needed to gain control over any woman was half an hour alone with her--but of that later, if at all.

"That was me that called you 'Virginia,'" said I. "I want to get into the wagon to get things for breakfast--after you get up."

"I never thought of your calling me Virginia," she answered--and I had no idea what was in her mind. I saw no reason why I shouldn't call her by her first name. "Miss" Royall would have been my name for the wife of a man named Royall. It was not until long afterward that I found out how different my manners were from those to which she was accustomed.

I never thought of such a thing as varying from my course of conduct on her account; and just as would have been the case if my outfit had been a boat for which time and tide would not wait, I yoked up, after the breakfast was done, and prepared to negotiate the miry crossing of the creek and pull out for Monterey County, which I hoped to reach in time to break some land and plant a small crop. We did not discuss the matter of her going with me--I think we both took that for granted. She stood on a little knoll while I was making ready to start, gazing westward, and when the sound of cracking whips and the shouts of teamsters told of the approach of movers from the East, even though we were some distance off the trail, she crept into the wagon so as to be out of sight. She had eaten little, and seemed weak and spent; and when we started, I arranged the bed in the wagon for her to lie upon, just as I had done for Doctor Bliven's woman, and she seemed to hide rather than anything else as she crept into it. So on we went, the wagon jolting roughly at times, and at times running smoothly enough as we reached dry roads worn smooth by travel.

Sometimes as I looked back, I could see her face with the eyes fixed upon me questioningly; and then she would ask me if I could see any one coming toward us on the road ahead.

"Nobody," I would say; or, "A covered wagon going the wrong way," or whatever I saw. "Don't be afraid," I would add; "stand on your rights. This is a free country. You've got the right to go east or west with any one you choose, and nobody can say anything against it. And you've got a friend now, you know."

"Is anybody in sight?" she asked again, after a long silence.

I looked far ahead from the top of a swell in the prairie and then back. I told her that there was no one ahead so far as I could see except teams that we could not overtake, and nobody back of us but outfits even slower than mine. So she came forward, and I helped her over the back of the seat to a place by my side. For the first time I could get a good look at her undisturbed--if a bashful boy like me could be undisturbed journeying over the open prairie with a girl by his side--a girl altogether in his hands.

First I noticed that her hair, though dark brown, gave out gleams of bright dark fire as the sun shone through it in certain ways. I kept glancing at that shifting gleam whenever we turned the slow team so that her hair caught the sun. I have seen the same flame in the mane of a black horse bred from a sorrel dam or sire. As a stock breeder I have learned that in such cases there is in the heredity the genetic unit of red hair overlaid with black pigment. It is the same in people. Virginia's father had red hair, and her sister Ann Gowdy had hair which was a dark auburn. I was fascinated by that smoldering fire in the girl's hair; and in looking at it I finally grew bolder, as I saw that she did not seem to suspect my scrutiny, and I saw that her brows and lashes were black, and her eyes very, very blue--not the buttermilk blue of the Dutchman's eyes, like mine, with brows and lashes lighter than the sallow Dutch skin, but deep larkspur blue, with a dark edging to the pupil--eyes that sometimes, in a dim light, or when the pupils are dilated, seem black to a person who does not look closely. Her skin, too, showed her ruddy breed--for though it was tanned by her long journey in the sun and wind, there glowed in it, even through her paleness, a tinge of red blood--and her nose was freckled. Glimpses of her neck and bosom revealed a skin of the thinnest, whitest texture--quite milk-white, with pink showing through on account of the heat. She had little strong brown hands, and the foot which she put on the dashboard was a very trim and graceful foot like that of a thoroughbred mare, built for flight rather than work, and it swelled beautifully in its grass-stained white stocking above her slender ankle to the modest skirt.

A great hatred for Buck Gowdy surged through me as I felt her beside me in the seat and studied one after the other her powerful attractions--the hatred, not for the man who misuses the defenseless girl left in his power by cruel fate; but the lust for conquest over the man who had this girl in his hands and who, as she feared, was searching for her. I mention these things because, while they do not excuse some things that happened, they do show that, as a boy who had lived the uncontrolled and, by association, the evil life which I had lived, I was put in a very hard place.

2

After a while Virginia looked back, and clutched my arm convulsively.

"There's a carriage overtaking us!" she whispered. "Don't stop! Help me to climb back and cover myself up!"

She was quite out of sight when the carriage turned out to pass, drove on ahead, and then halted partly across the road so as to show that the occupants wanted word with me. I brought my wagon to a stop beside them.

"We are looking," said the man in the carriage, "for a young girl traveling alone on foot over the prairie."

The man was clearly a preacher. He wore a tall beaver hat, though the day was warm, and a suit of ministerial black. His collar stood out in points on each side of his chin, and his throat rested on a heavy stock-cravat which went twice around his neck and was tied in a stout square knot under his chin on the second turn. Under this black choker was a shirt of snowy white, as was his collar, while his coat and trousers looked worn and threadbare. His face was smooth-shaven, and his hair once black was now turning iron-gray. He was then about sixty years old.

"A girl," said I deceitfully, "traveling afoot and alone on the prairie? Going which way?"

The woman in the carriage now leaned forward and took part in the conversation. She was Grandma Thorndyke, of whom I have formerly made mention. Her hair was white, even then. I think she was a little older than her husband; but if so she never admitted it. He was a slight small man, but wiry and strong; while she was taller than he and very spare and grave. She wore steel-bowed spectacles, and looked through you when she spoke. I am sure that if she had ever done so awful a thing as to have put on a man's clothes no one would have seen through her disguise from her form, or even by her voice, which was a ringing tenor and was always heard clear and strong carrying the soprano in the First Congregational Church of Monterey Centre after Elder Thorndyke had succeeded in getting it built.

"Her name is Royall," said Grandma Thorndyke--I may as well begin calling her that now as ever--"Genevieve Royall. When last seen she was walking eastward on this road, where she is subject to all sorts of dangers from wild weather and wild beasts. A man on horseback named Gowdy, with a negro, came into Independence looking for her this morning after searching everywhere along the road from some place west back to the settlement. She is sixteen years old. There wouldn't be any other girl traveling alone and without provision. Have you passed such a person?"

"No, I hain't," said I. The name "Genevieve" helped me a little in this deceit.

"You haven't heard any of the people on the road speak of this wandering girl, have you?" asked Elder Thorndyke.

"No," I answered; "and I guess if any of them had seen her they'd have mentioned it, wouldn't they?"

"And you haven't seen any lone girl or woman at all, even at a distance?" inquired Grandma Thorndyke.

"If she passed me," I said, turning and twisting to keep from telling an outright lie, "it was while I was camped last night. I camped quite a little ways from the track."

"She has wandered off upon the trackless prairie!" exclaimed Grandma Thorndyke. "God help her!"

"He will protect her," said the elder piously.

"Maybe she met some one going west," I suggested, rather truthfully, I thought, "that took her in. She may be going back west with some one."

"Mr. Gowdy told us back in Independence," returned Elder Thorndyke, "that he had inquired of every outfit he met from the time she left him clear back to that place; and he overtook the only two teams on that whole stretch of road that were going east. It is hard to understand. It's a mystery."

"Was he going on east?" I asked--and I thought I heard a stir in the bed back of me as I waited for the answer.

"No," said the elder, "he is coming back this way, hunting high and low for her. I have no doubt he will find her. She can not have reached a point much farther east than this. She is sure to be found somewhere between here and Independence--or within a short distance of here. There is nothing dangerous in the weather, the wild animals, or anything, but the bewilderment of being lost and the lack of food. God will not allow her to be lost."

"I guess not," said I, thinking of the fate which led me to my last night's camp, and of Gowdy's search having missed me as he rode by in the night.

They drove on, leaving us standing by the roadside. Virginia crept forward and peeked over the back of the seat after them until they disappeared over a hillock. Then she began begging me to go where Gowdy could not find us. He would soon come along, she said, with that tool of his, Pinck Johnson, searching high and low for her as that man had said. Everybody would help him but me. I was all the friend she had. Even those two good people who were inquiring were helping Gowdy. I must drive where he could not find us. I must!

"He can't take you from me," I declared, "unless you want to go!"

"What can you do?" she urged wildly. "You are too young to stand in his way. Nobody can stand in his way. Nobody ever did! And they are two to one. Let us hide! Let us hide!"

"I can stand in anybody's way," I said, "if I want to."

I was not really afraid of them if worst came to worst, but I did see that it was two to one; so I thought of evading the search, but the hiding of a team of four cows and a covered wagon on the open Iowa prairie was no easy trick. If I turned off the road my tracks would show for half a mile. If once the problem of hiding my tracks was solved, the rest would be easy. I could keep in the hollows for a few miles until out of sight of the Ridge Road, and Gowdy might rake the wayside to his heart's content and never find us except by accident; but I saw no way of getting off the traveled way without advertising my flight. Of course Gowdy would follow up every fresh track because it was almost the only thing he could do with any prospect of striking the girl's trail. I thought these things over as I drove on westward. I quieted her by saying that I had to think it out.

It was a hot afternoon by this time, and looked like a stormy evening. The clouds were rolling up in the north and west in lofty thunderheads, pearl-white in the hot sun, with great blue valleys and gorges below, filled with shadows. Virginia, in a fever of terror, spent a part of her time looking out at the hind-end of the wagon-cover for Gowdy and Pinck Johnson, and a part of it leaning over the back of the seat pleading with me to leave the road and hide her. Presently the clouds touched the sun, and in a moment the day grew dark. Far down near the horizon I could see the black fringe of the falling rain under the tumbling clouds, and in a quarter of an hour the wind began to blow from the storm, which had been mounting the sky fast enough to startle one. The storm-cloud was now ripped and torn by lightning, and deep rumbling peals of thunder came to our ears all the time louder and nearer. The wind blew sharper, and whistled shrilly through the rigging of my prairie schooner, there came a few drops of rain, then a scud of finer spray: and then the whole plain to the northwest turned white with a driving sheet of water which came on, swept over us, and blotted everything from sight in a great commingling of wind, water, fire and thunder.

Virginia cowered on the bed, throwing the quilt over her. My cattle turned their rumps to the storm and stood heads down, the water running from their noses, tails and bellies, and from the bows and yokes. I had stopped them in such a way as to keep us as dry as possible, and tried to cheer the girl up by saying that this wasn't bad, and that it would soon be over. In half an hour the rain ceased, and in an hour the sun was shining again, and across the eastern heavens there was displayed a beautiful double rainbow, and a faint trace of a third.

"That means hope," I said.

She looked at the wonderful rainbow and smiled a little half-smile.

"It doesn't mean hope," said she, "unless you can think out some way of throwing that man off our track."

"Oh," I answered, with the brag that a man likes to use when a helpless woman throws herself on his resources, "I'll find some way if I make up my mind I don't want to fight them."

"You mustn't think of that," said she. "You are too smart to be so foolish. See how well you answered the questions of that man and woman."

"And I didn't lie, either," said I, after getting under way again.

"Wouldn't you lie," said she, "for me?"

It was, I suppose, only a little womanly probe into character; but it thrilled me in a way the poor girl could not have supposed possible.

"I would do anything for you," said I boldly; "but I'd a lot rather fight than lie."

3

The cloud-burst had flooded the swales, and across the hollows ran broad sheets of racing water. I had crossed two or three of these, wondering whether I should be able to ford the next real watercourse, when we came to a broad bottom down the middle of which ran a swift shallow stream which rose over the young grass. For a few rods the road ran directly down this casual river of flood water, and as I looked back it all at once came into my mind that I might follow this flood and leave no track; so instead of swinging back into the road I took instantly the important resolution to leave the Ridge Road. By voice and whip I turned my cattle down the stream to the south, and for a mile I drove in water half-hub deep.

Looking back I saw that I left no trace except where two lines of open water showed through the grass on the high spots where cattle and wheels had passed, and I knew that in an hour the flood would run itself off and wipe out even this trace. I felt a sense of triumph, and mingled with this was a queer thrill that set my hands trembling at the consciousness that the prairie had closed about me and this girl with the milk-white neck and the fire in her hair who had asked me if I would not even lie "for her."

We wound down the flooded swale, we left the Ridge Road quite out of sight, we finally drew up out of the hollow and took to the ridges and hog-backs making a new Ridge Road for ourselves. Nowhere in sight was there the slightest trace of humanity or human settlement. We were alone. Still bearing south I turned westwardly, after rolling up the covers to let in the drying wind. I kept looking back to see if we were followed; for now I was suddenly possessed of the impulse to hide, like a thief making for cover with stolen goods. Virginia, wearied out with the journey, the strain of her escape, and the nervous tension, was lying on the couch, often asking me if I saw any one coming up from behind.

The country was getting more rolling and broken as we made our way down toward the Cedar River, or some large creek making into it--but, of course, journeying without a map or chart I knew nothing about the lay of the land or the watercourses. I knew, though, that I was getting into the breaks of a stream. Finally, in the gathering dusk I saw ahead of me the rounded crowns of trees; and pretty soon we entered one of those beautiful groves of hardwood timber that were found at wide distances along the larger prairie streams--I remember many of them and their names, Buck Grove, Cole's Grove, Fifteen Mile Grove, Hickory Grove, Crabapple Grove, Marble's Grove, but I never knew the name of this, the shelter toward which we had been making. I drove in between scattered burr oaks like those of the Wisconsin oak openings, and stopped my cattle in an open space densely sheltered by thickets of crabapple, plum and black-haw, and canopied by two spreading elms. Virginia started up, ran to the front of the wagon and looked about.

"Where are we?" she asked.

"This is our hiding-place," I replied.

"But that man--won't he follow our tracks?"

"We didn't leave any tracks," I said.

"How could we come without leaving tracks?" she queried, standing close to me and looking up into my face.

"Did you notice," said I, "that for miles we drove in the water--back there on the prairie after the rain?"

"Yes."

"We drove in the water when we left the road, and we left no tracks. Not even an Indian could track us. We can't be tracked. We've lost Gowdy--forever."

I thought at first that she was going to throw her arms about my neck; but instead she took both my hands and pressed them in a long clasp. It was the first time she had touched me, or shown emotion toward me--emotion of the sort for which I was now eagerly longing. I did not return her pressure. I merely let her hold my hands until she dropped them. I wanted to do a dozen things, but there is nothing stronger than the unbroken barriers of a boy's modesty--barriers strong as steel, which once broken down become as though they never were; while a woman even in her virgin innocence, is always offering unconscious invitation, always revealing ways of seeming approach, always giving to the stalled boy, arguments against his bashfulness--arguments which may prove absurd or not when he acts upon them. It is the way of a maid with a man, Nature's way--but a perilous way for such a time and such a situation.

That night we sat about the tiny camp-fire and talked. She told me of her life in Kentucky, of her grief at the loss of her sister, of many simple things; and I told her of my farm--a mile square--of my plans, of my life on the canal--which seemed to impress her as it had Rowena Fewkes as a very adventurous career. I was sure she was beginning to like me; but of one thing I did not tell her. I did not mention my long unavailing search for my mother, nor the worn shoe and the sad farewell letter in the little iron-bound trunk in the wagon. I searched for tales which would make of me a man; but when it grew dark I put out the fire. I was not afraid of Buck Gowdy's finding us; but I did not want any one to discover us. And that night I drew out the loads of chicken shot from my gun and reloaded it with buckshot.

I could not sleep. After Virginia had lain down in the wagon, I walked about silently so as not to rouse her, prowling like a wolf. I crept to the side of the wagon and listened for her breathing; and when I heard it my hands trembled, and my heart pounded in my breast. All the things through which I had lived without partaking of them came back into my mind. I thought of what I heard every day on the canal--that all women were alike; that they existed only for that sort of companionship with men with which my eyes were so ignorantly familiar; that all their protestations and refusals were for effect only; that a man need only to be a man, to know what he wanted, and conquer it. And I felt rising in me like a tide the feeling that I was now a man. The reader who has believed of me that I passed through that canal life unspotted by its vileness has asked too much of me. The thing was not possible. I now thought of the irregular companionships of that old time as inexplicable no longer. They were the things for which men lived--the inevitable things for every real man. Only this which agitated me so terribly was different from them--no matter what happened, it would be pure and blameless--for it would be us!

4

I suppose it may have been midnight or after, when I heard a far-off splashing sound in the creek far above us. At first I thought of buffalo--though there were none in Iowa so far as I knew at that time--and only a few deer or bear; but finally, as the sound, which was clearly that of much wading, drew even with my camp, I began to hear the voices of men--low voices, as if even in that wilderness the speakers were afraid of being overheard.

"I'm always lookin'," said one, "to find some of these damned movers campin' in here when we come in with a raise."

"If I find any," said another, "they will be nepoed, damned quick."

This, I knew--I had heard plenty of it--was the lingo of thieves and what the story-writers call bandits--though we never knew until years afterward that we had in Iowa a distinct class which we should have called bandits, but knew it not. They stole horses, dealt in counterfeit money, and had scattered all over the West from Ohio to the limits of civilization a great number of "stations" as they called them where any man "of the right stripe" might hide either himself or his unlawful or stolen goods. "A raise" was stolen property. "A sight" was a prospect for a robbery, and to commit it was, to "raise the sight," or if it was a burglary or a highway robbery, the man robbed was "raked down." A man killed was "nepoed"--a word which many new settlers in Wisconsin got from the Indians[9].

[9] This bit of frontier argot was rather common in the West in the 'fifties. The reappearance in the same sense of "napoo" for death in the armies of the Allies in France is a little surprising.--G.v.d.M.

In a country in which horses constitute the means of communication, the motive power for the farm and the most easily marketable form of property, the stealing of horses was the commonest sort of crime; and where the population was so sparse and unorganized, and unprovided with means of sending news abroad, horse-stealing, offering as it did to the criminally inclined a ready way of making an easy living, gradually grew into an occupation which flourished, extended into other forms of crime, had its connections with citizens who were supposed to be honest, entered our politics, and finally was the cause of a terrible crisis in the affairs of Monterey County, and, indeed, of other counties in Iowa as well as in Illinois.

I softly reached for my shotgun, and then lay very quiet, hoping that the band would pass our camp by. There were three men as I made them out, each riding one horse and leading another. They had evidently made their way into the creek at some point higher up, and were wading down-stream so as to leave no trail. Cursing as their mounts plunged into the deep holes in the high water, calling one another and their steeds the vilest of names seemingly as a matter of ordinary conversation, they went on down-stream and out of hearing. It did not take long for even my slow mind to see that they had come to this grove as I had done, for the purpose of hiding, nor to realize that it might be very unsafe for us to be detected in any discovery of these men in possession of whatever property they might have seized. It did not seem probable that we should be "nepoed"--but, after all, why not? Dead men tell no tales, cattle as well as merchandise were salable; and as for Virginia, I could hardly bring myself to look in the face the dangers to which she might be exposed in this worst case which I found myself conjuring up.

I listened intently for any sound of the newcomers, but everything was as silent as it had been before they had passed like evil spirits of the night; and from this fact I guessed that, they had made camp farther down-stream among the trees. I stepped to the back of the wagon, and putting in my hand I touched the girl's hair. She took my hand in hers, and then dropped it.

"What is it?" she whispered.

"Don't be scared," I said, "but be very still. Some men just went by, and I'm afraid they are bad."

"Is it that man?" she asked.

"No," said I, "strangers--bad characters. I want them to go on without knowing we're here."

She seemed rather relieved at that, and told me that she was not frightened. Then she asked me where they went. I told her, and said that when it got lighter I meant to creep after them and see if they were still in the grove.

"Don't leave me," said she. "I reckon I'm a little frightened, after all, and it's very lonesome in here all alone. Please get into the wagon with me!"

I said nothing. Instead I sat for some time on the wagon-tongue and asked myself what I should do, and what she meant by this invitation. At last I started up, and trembling like a man climbing the gallows, I climbed into the wagon. There, sitting in the spring seat in the gown she had worn yesterday, with her little shoes on the dashboard, sat Virginia trying to wrap herself in the buffalo-robe.

I folded it around her and took my seat by her side. With scarcely a whisper between us we sat there and watched the stars wheel over to the west and down to their settings. At last I felt her leaning over against my shoulder, and found that she was asleep; and softly putting my arms about her outside the warm buffalo-robe, I held her sleeping like a baby until the shrill roundelays of the meadow-larks told me it was morning.

Then after taking away my arms I awakened her.