Chapter 12

IN DEFENSE OF THE PROPRIETIES

Virginia and I arrived in Waterloo about two days after we left the Grove of Destiny, as my granddaughter Gertrude insists on calling the place at which we camped after we left Independence. We went in a sort of rather-guess way back to the Ridge Road, very happy, talking to each other about ourselves all the while, and admiring everything we saw along the way.

The wild sweet-williams were in bloom, now, and scattered among them were the brilliant orange-colored puccoons; and the grass even on the knolls was long enough to wave in the wind like a rippling sea. It was a cool and sunny spell of weather, with fleecy clouds chasing one another up from the northwest like great ships under full sail running wing-and-wing before the northwest wind which blew strong day and night. It was a new sort of weather to me--the typical high-barometer weather of the prairies after a violent "low." The driving clouds on the first day were sometimes heavy enough to spill over a scud of rain (which often caught Virginia like a cold splash from a hose), and were whisked off to the southeast in a few minutes, followed by a brilliant burst of sunshine--and all the time the shadows of the clouds raced over the prairie in big and little bluish patches speeding forever onward over a groundwork of green and gold dotted with the white and purple and yellow of the flowers.

We were now on terms of simple trust and confidence. We played. We bet each other great sums of money as to whether or not the rain-scud coming up in the west would pass over us, or miss us, or whether or not the shadow of a certain cloud would pass to the right or the left. People with horse teams who were all the time passing us often heard us laughing, and looked at us and smiled, waving their hands, as Virginia would cry out, "I won that time!" or "You drove slow, just to beat me!" or "Well, I lost, but you owe me twenty-five thousand dollars yet!"

Once an outfit with roan horses and a light wagon stopped and hailed us. The woman, sitting by her husband, had been pointing at us and talking to him.

"Right purty day," he said.

"Most of the time," I answered; for it had just sloshed a few barrels of water from one of those flying clouds and forced us to cover ourselves up.

"Where's your folks?" he asked.

"We ain't too old to travel alone," I replied; "but we'll catch up with the young folks at Waterloo!"

He laughed and whipped up his team.

"Go it while you're young!" he shouted as he went out of hearing.

We were rather an unusual couple, as any one could see; though most people doubtless supposed that there were others of our party riding back under the cover. Virginia had not mentioned Buckner Gowdy since we camped in the Grove of Destiny; and not once had she looked with her old look of terror at an approaching or overtaking team, or scuttled back into the load to keep from being seen. I guess she had come to believe in the sufficiency of my protection.

2

Waterloo was a town of seven or eight years of age--a little straggling village on the Red Cedar River, as it was then called, building its future on the growth of the country and the water-power of the stream. It was crowded with seekers after "country," and its land dealers and bankers were looking for customers. It seemed to be a strong town in money, and I had a young man pointed out to me who was said to command unlimited capital and who was associated with banks and land companies in Cedar Rapids and Sioux City,--I suppose he was a Greene, a Weare, a Graves, a Johnson or a Lusch. Many were talking of the Fort Dodge country, and of the new United States Land Office which was just then on the point of opening at Fort Dodge. They tried to send me to several places where land could be bought cheaply, in the counties between the Cedar and the Iowa Rivers, and as far west as Webster County; but when I told them that I had bought land they at once lost interest in me.

We camped down by the river among the trees, and it was late before we were free to sleep, on account of the visits we received from movers and land men; but finally the camp-fires died down, the songs ceased, the music of accordions and fiddles was heard no more, and the camp of emigrants became silent.

Virginia bade me good night, and I rolled up in my blankets under the wagon. I began wondering, after the questions which had been asked as to our relationship, just what was to be the end of this strange journey of the big boy and the friendless girl. We were under some queer sort of suspicion--that was clear. Two or three wives among the emigrants had tried to get a word with Virginia in private; and some of the men had grinned and winked at me in a way that I should have been glad to notice according to my old canal habits; but I had sense enough to see that that would never do.

Virginia was now as free from care as if she had been traveling with her brother; and what could I say? What did I want to say? By morning I had made up my mind that I would take her to my farm and care for her there, regardless of consequences--and I admit that I was not clear as to the proprieties. Every one was a stranger to every one else in this country. Whose business was it anyhow? Doctor Bliven and his companion--I had worked out a pretty clear understanding of their case by this time--were settling in the new West and leaving their past behind them. Who could have anything to say against it if I took this girl with me to my farm, cared for her, protected her; and gave her the home that nobody else seemed ready to give?

"Do you ever go to church?" asked Virginia. "It's Sunday."

"Is there preaching here to-day?" I asked.

"Don't you hear the bell?" she inquired.

"Let's go!" said I.

We were late; and the heads of the people were bowed in prayer as we went in; so we stood by the door until the prayer was over. The preacher was Elder Thorndyke. I was surprised at seeing him because he had told me that he and his wife were going to Monterey Centre; but there he was, laboring with his text, speaking in a halting manner, and once in a while bogging down in a dead stop out of which he could not pull himself without giving a sort of honk like a wild goose. It was his way. I never sat under a preacher who had better reasoning powers or a worse way of reasoning. Down in front of him sat Grandma Thorndyke, listening intently, and smiling up to him whenever he got in hub-deep; but at the same time her hands were clenched into fists in her well-darned black-silk gloves.

I did not know all this then, for her back was toward us; but I saw it so often afterward! It was that honking habit of the elder's which had driven them, she often told me, from New England to Ohio, then to Illinois, and finally out to Monterey Centre. The new country caught the halt like Elder Thorndyke, the lame like the Fewkeses, the outcast like the Bushyagers and the Blivens, the blind like me, the far-seeing like N.V. Creede, the prophets like old Dunlap the Abolitionist and Amos Thatcher, and the great drift of those who felt a drawing toward the frontier like iron filings to a magnet, or came with the wind of emigration like tumble-weeds before the autumn blast.

I remembered that when Virginia was with me back there by the side of the road that first day, Elder Thorndyke and his wife had come by inquiring for her; and I did not quite relish the idea of being found here with her after all these long days; so when church was out I took Virginia by the hand and tried to get out as quickly as possible; but when we reached the door, there were Elder Thorndyke and grandma shaking hands with the people, and trying to be pastoral; though it was clear that they were as much strangers as we. The elder was filling the vacant pulpit that day by mere chance, as he told me; but I guess he was really candidating a little after all. It would have been a bad thing for Monterey Centre if he had received the call.

They greeted Virginia and me with warm handclasps and hearty inquiries after our welfare; and we were passing on, when Grandma Thorndyke headed us off and looked me fairly in the face.

"Why," said she, "you're that boy! Wait a minute."

She stepped over and spoke to her husband, who seemed quite in the dark as to what she was talking about. She pointed to us--and then, in despair, she came back to us and asked us if we wouldn't wait until the people were gone, as she wanted us to meet her husband.

"Oh, yes," said Virginia, "we'll be very glad to."

"Let us walk along together," said grandma, after the elder had joined us. "Ah--this is my husband, Mr. Thorndyke, Miss--"

"Royall," said Virginia, "Virginia Royall. And this is Jacob Vandemark."

"Where do you live?" asked grandma.

"I'm going out to my farm in Monterey County," I said; "and Virginia is--is--riding with me a while."

"We are camping," said Virginia, smiling, "down by the river. Won't you come to dinner with us?"

3

Grandma ran to some people who were waiting, I suppose, to take them to the regular minister's Sunday dinner, and seemed to be making some sort of plea to be excused. What it could have been I have no idea; but I suspect it must have been because of the necessity of saving souls; some plea of duty; anyhow she soon returned, and with her and the elder we walked in silence down to the grove where our wagon stood among the trees, with my cows farther up-stream picketed in the grass.

"Just make yourselves comfortable," said I; "while I get dinner."

"And," said the elder, "I'll help, if I may."

"You're company," I said.

"Please let me," he begged; "and while we work we'll talk."

In the meantime Grandma Thorndyke was turning Virginia inside out like a stocking, and looking for the seamy side. She carefully avoided asking her about our whereabouts for the last few days, but she scrutinized Virginia's soul and must have found it as white as snow. She found out how old she was, how friendless she was, how--but I rather think not why--Virginia had run away from Buck Gowdy; and all that could be learned about me which could be learned without entering into details of our hiding from the world together all those days alone on the trackless prairie. That subject she avoided, though of course she must have had her own ideas about it. And after that, she came and helped me with the dinner, talking all the time in such a way as to draw me out as to my past. I told her of my life on the canal--and she looked distrustfully at me. I told her of my farm, and of how I got it; and that brought out the story of my long hunt for my mother, and of my finding of her unmarked grave. Of my relations with Virginia she seemed to want no information. By the time our dinner was over--one of my plentiful wholesome meals, with some lettuce and radishes and young onions I had bought the night before--we were chatting together like old friends.

"That was a better dinner," said the elder, "than we'd have had at Mr. Smith's."

"But Jacob, here," said grandma, "is not a deacon of the church."

"That doesn't lessen my enjoyment of the dinner," said the elder.

"No," said Grandma Thorndyke dryly, "I suppose not. But now let us talk seriously. This child"--taking Virginia's hand--"is the girl they were searching for back there along the road."

"Ah," said the elder.

"She had perfectly good reasons for running away," went on Grandma Thorndyke, "and she is not going back to that man. He has no claim upon her. He is not her guardian. He is only the man who married her sister--and as I firmly believe, killed her!"

"I wouldn't say that," said the elder.

"Now I calculate," said Grandma Thorndyke, "and unless I am corrected I shall so report--and I dare any one to correct me!--that this child"--squeezing Virginia's hand--"had taken refuge at some dwelling along the road, and that this morning--not later than this morning--as Jacob drove along into Waterloo he overtook Virginia walking into town where she was going to seek a position of some kind. So that you two children were together not longer than from seven this morning until just before church. You ought not to travel on the Sabbath!"

"No, ma'am," said I; for she was attacking me.

"Now we are poor," went on Grandma Thorndyke, "but we never have starved a winter yet; and we want a child like you to comfort us, and to help us--and we mustn't leave you as you are any longer. You must ride on with Mr. Thorndyke and me."

This to Virginia--who stretched out her hands to me, and then buried her face in them in Grandma Thorndyke's lap. She was crying so that she did not hear me when I asked:

"Why can't we go on as we are? I've got a farm. I'll take care of her!"

"Children!" snorted grandma. "Babes in the wood!"

I think she told the elder in some way without words to take me off to one side and talk to me; for he hummed and hawed, and asked me if I wouldn't show him my horses. I told him that I was driving cows, and went with him to see them. I now had six again, besides those I had left with Mr. Westervelt back along the road toward Dubuque; and it took me quite a while to explain to him how I had traded and traded along the road, first my two horses for my first cows, and then always giving one sound cow for two lame ones, until I had great riches for those days in cattle.

He thought this wonderful, and said that I was a second Job; and had every faculty for acquiring riches. I had actually made property while moving, an operation that was so expensive that it bankrupted many people. It was astonishing, he insisted; and began looking upon me with more respect--making property being the thing in which he was weakest, except for laying up treasures in Heaven. He was surprised, too, to learn that cows could be made draught animals. He had always thought of them as good for nothing but giving milk. In fact I found myself so much wiser than he was in the things we had been discussing that when he began to talk to me about Virginia and the impossibility of our going together as we had been doing, it marked quite a change in our relationship--he having been the scholar and I the teacher.

"Quite a strange meeting," said he, "between you and Miss Royall."

"Yes," said I, thinking it over, from that first wolf-hunted approach to my camp to our yesterday of clouds and sunshine; "I never had anything like it happen to me."

"Mrs. Thorndyke," said he, "is a mighty smart woman. She knows what'll do, and what won't do better than--than any of us."

I wasn't ready to admit this, and therefore said nothing.

"Don't you think so?" he asked.

"I do' know," I said, a little sullenly.

"A girl," said he, "has a pretty hard time in life if she loses her reputation."

Again I made no reply.

"You are just two thoughtless children," said he; "aren't you now?"

"She's nothing," said I, "but a little innocent child!"

"Now that's so," said he, "that's so; but after all she's old enough so that evil things might be thought of her--evil things might be said; and there'd be no answer to them, no answer. Why, she's a woman grown--a woman grown; and as for you, you're getting a beard. This won't do, you know; it is all right if there were just you and Miss Royall and my wife and me in the world; but you wouldn't think for a minute of traveling with this little girl the way you have been--the way you speak of doing, I mean--if you knew that in the future, when she must make her way in the world with nothing but her friends, this little boy-and-girl experience might take her friends from her; and when she will have nothing but her good name you don't want, and would not for the world have anything thoughtlessly done now, that might take her good name from her. You are too young to understand this as you will some day----"

"The trouble with me," I blurted out, "is that I've never had much to do with good women--only with my mother and Mrs. Fogg--and they could never have anything said against them--neither of them!"

"Where have you lived all your life?" he asked.

Then I told him of the way I had picked up my hat and come up instead of being brought up, of the women along the canal, of her who called herself Alice Rucker, of the woman who stole across the river with me--but I didn't mention her name--of as much as I could think of in my past history; and all the time Elder Thorndyke gazed at me with increasing interest, and with something the look we have in listening to tales of midnight murder and groaning ghosts. I must have been an astonishing sort of mystery to him. Certainly I was a castaway and an outcast to his ministerial mind; and boy as I was, he seemed to feel for me a sort of awed respect mixed up a little with horror.

"Heavenly Father!" he blurted out. "You have escaped as by the skin of your teeth."

"I do' know," said I.

"But don't you understand," he insisted, "that this trip has got to end here? Suppose your mother, when she was a child in fact, but a woman grown also, like Miss Royall, had been placed as she is with a boy of your age and one who had lived your life----"

"No," said I, "it won't do. You can have her!"

4

I really felt as if I was giving up something that had belonged to me. I felt the pangs of renunciation.

We walked back to the wagon in silence, and found Virginia and Grandma Thorndyke sitting on the spring seat with grandma's arm about the girl, with a handkerchief in her hand, just as if she had been wiping the tears from Virginia's eyes; but the girl was laughing and talking in a manner more lively than I had ever seen her exhibit. She was as happy, apparently, as I was gloomy and downcast.

I wanted the Thorndykes to go away so that I could have a farewell talk with Virginia; but they stayed on and stayed on, and finally, after dark, grandma rose with a look at Virginia which she seemed to understand, and they took my girl's satchel and all walked off together toward the tavern.

I sat down and buried my face in my hands, Virginia's good-by had been so light, so much like the parting of two mere strangers. And after all what was I to her but a stranger? She was of a different sort from me. She had lived in cities. She had a good education--at least I thought so. She was like the Thorndykes--city folks, educated people, who could have no use for a clodhopper like me, a canal hand, a rough character. And just as I had plunged myself into the deepest despair, I heard a light footfall, and Virginia knelt down before me on the ground and pulled my hands from my eyes.

"Don't cry," said she. "We'll see each other again. I came back to bid you good-by, and to say that you've been so good to me that I can't think of it without tears! Good-by, Jacob!"

She lifted my face between her two hands, kissed me the least little bit, and ran off. Back in the darkness I saw the tall figure of Grandma Thorndyke, who seemed to be looking steadily off into the distance. Virginia locked arms with her and they went away leaving me with my cows and my empty wagon--filled with the goods in which I took so much pride when I left Madison.

With the first rift of light in the east I rose from my sleepless bed under the wagon--I would not profane her couch inside by occupying it--and yoked up my cattle. Before noon I was in Cedar Falls; and from there west I found the Ridge Road growing less and less a beaten track owing to decreasing travel; but plainly marked by stakes which those two pioneers had driven along the way as I have said for the guidance of others in finding a road which they had missed themselves.

We were developing citizenship and the spirit of America. Those wagon loads of stakes cut on the Cedar River in 1854 and driven in the prairie sod as guides for whoever might follow showed forth the true spirit of the American pioneer.

But I was in no frame of mind to realize this. I was drawing nearer and nearer my farm, but for a day or so this gave me no pleasure. My mind was on other things. I was lonelier than I had been since I found Rucker in Madison. I talked to no one--I merely followed the stakes--until one morning I pulled into a strange cluster of houses out on the green prairie, the beginning of a village. I drew up in front of its blacksmith shop and asked the name of the place. The smith lifted his face from the sole of the horse he was shoeing and replied, "Monterey Centre."

I looked around at my own county, stretching away in green waves on all sides of the brand-new village; which was so small that it did not interfere with the view. I had reached my own county! I had been a part of it on this whole wonderful journey, getting acquainted with its people, picking up the threads of its future, now its history.

Prior to this time I had been courting the country; now I was to be united with it in that holy wedlock which binds the farmer to the soil he tills. Out of this black loam was to come my own flesh and blood, and the bodies, and I believe, in some measure, the souls of my children. Some dim conception of this made me draw in a deep, deep breath of the fresh prairie air.