The Jack-Knife Man

Now he walked to the kitchen door and knocked, and Jane’s voice bade him enter. He took off his hat as he entered. His sister was sitting at the kitchen table where, despite the lateness of the hour, she had evidently just finished her breakfast. As she turned her head all Peter’s optimism fled, for Jane’s eyes were red with weeping. When her sorrows pressed heavily upon Jane she was a very fountain of tears. She threw up her hands as she saw Peter.

“Oh, mercy me, Peter Lane!” she cried in a heart-broken voice. “Look what you’ve come to at your time of life. Nothing to wear but old rags and horse blankets on back and foot! It does seem as if nothing ever went right for you since the day you were born. Just poverty and bad-health and trouble, and one thing after another.” She wiped her eyes to make room in them for fresh tears. “Every time I think of you, freezing to death in that shanty-boat, and going hungry and cold, I – it makes me so miserable – it makes me feel so bad – ”

“Now, Jane,” said Peter uncomfortably, “don’t cry! Don’t do it! It ain’t so bad as all that. Every time I come to see you, you just cry and carry on, and I tell you I don’t need it done for me. I’m all right. I get along somehow.”

“Never, never once, have I said an unkind word to you, Peter,” said Jane damply. “You shouldn’t upbraid me with it, for I know it ain’t your fault you turned out this way. I know you ain’t got the health to go to work and earn a living, if you wanted to. I do what I can to keep your house from falling down on my head. When I think what would become of this house if you didn’t have me to do what I can to mend it up – the roof’s leakin’ worse than ever.”

“As soon as spring comes, I’m going to get some shingles and shingle up the leaky places,” said Peter. “Maybe I’ll put a whole new roof on. Now, just listen to what I want to say, please, Jane.”

“It’s that makes me feel so awful bad, Peter,” said Jane, shaking her head. “You mean so well, and you promise so much, and you see things so big, and yet you ain’t got money to buy shoes nor clothes nor anything, and for all I know you might be lying sick without a bite to eat, and me having all I can do to hold body and soul together in a house like this. Time and again I’ve made up my mind to go and leave it, and I would if it wasn’t for you. I feel my duty by you, and I stay, but work in a house like this wears me to the bone. It does. To the bone!”

It may have worn some one to the bone but not Jane. She was one of those huge, flabby women who are naturally lazy; who sit thinking of the work they have to do but do not do it; and who linger long over their meals and weep into them. To Peter her tears were worse than Mrs. Potter’s sharp tongue, for Mrs. Potter’s reproaches were single of motive, while Jane’s tears were too apt to be a mask for reproaches more cutting than Mrs. Potter’s out and out hard words. Jane did not weep continually; she had the knack of weeping when tears would serve her purpose.

From time to time, as the spirit moved her, Jane went to town and did plain sewing. She had had a husband (but had one no more) and he had left her a little money which she had kept in the bank, drawing four per cent, regularly. It did not amount to much, only a couple of hundred dollars a year, but this she used most sparingly, leaving the greater part of the interest to accumulate. Perhaps she was sincere in her mourning for Peter, but she certainly did not want him in the house. As a provider Peter had never been a success – he was too liberal – and in his periods of financial stringency he had been known to ask Jane for money. Not that he ever got it, but it was a thing to be guarded against. Jane guarded against it with tears. In fifteen minutes of tearful reproaches she could make Peter feel that he was the most worthless and cruel of men. She had so often reduced him to that state that he had come to fall into it naturally whenever he saw Jane, and he was usually only too glad to escape from her presence again and go back to the river life. Tears proclaim injustice, and a man like Peter, seeing them, falls easily into the belief that he must be in the wrong, and very badly in the wrong. In flying from Jane he fled from the self-incrimination she planted in him. Now he sighed and took a seat on one of the kitchen chairs.

“Jane,” he said, “this house is my house, aint it?”

“You know it is, Peter,” she said reproachfully. “No need to remind me of that, nor that I ain’t any better than a pauper. If I was, it would be far from me to stay here trying to hold the old boards together for you. Many and many a time I wish you had health to live in this house, so I could go somewhere and live like a human being, and let you take care of this cow-pen – for it ain’t no better than that – yourself. It would be a blessed thing for me, Peter, if you ever got your health. I could go then.”

Peter moved uneasily, and frowned at the fresh tears.

“I wisht you wouldn’t cry, Jane,” he said. “I want to talk sort of business to you this morning.” He paused, appalled by the effect his revelation would be apt to have on Jane. It must be made, however, and he plunged into it. “I’ve got a boy. I’ve got a little feller about three years old that come to me one night when his ma died, and he ain’t got anybody in the world but me, Jane, to take care of him. I’ve had him some months, down at my boat, and he’s the cutest, nicest little tyke you ever set eyes on. Why, he’s – he’s no more trouble ‘round a place than a little kitten or a pup or something like that. You’d be just tickled to death with him. My first notion,” he said more slowly, “my first idee was to have him and me come here, so you could be a sort of ma to him, and I could be a sort of pa, so we’d make a sort of family, like. What he’s got to have is a good home, first of all, and a shanty-boat ain’t that. I see that. But I can see how easy-going I am, and how I might be an expense to you, for awhile anyway, so I thought, maybe, if you would take the boy in – now wait a minute, Jane! Wait a minute! You’re bound to hear me out.”

His sister had forgotten her sorrows in open-mouthed amazement as Peter talked, but as the startling proposal became clear she dabbled at her eyes, and sniffled. Peter knew what was coming – a new torrent of tears, an avalanche of sorrow.

“For Heaven’s sake shut up for a minute ‘til I get through!” he cried in exasperation. “You ain’t done nothing but weep over me since I was knee high. Give me a rest for one time. I don’t need weeping over. I’m all right. Ain’t I just said I’ll go away again?”

“You never understand me,” wept Jane.

“Yes, I do, too!” said Peter angrily. “I understand you good. All you want is to weep me out of house and home, and I know it. I’m a sort of old bum, and I know that, too, but I’ve been fair to you right along, and all I get for it is to be wept over, and I’m sick of it. You ain’t a sister, you ‘re a – a fountain. You ‘re an everlasting fountain. You let me come up and saw your wood, and you weep; and you let me make your garden, and you weep, and if you do give me a meal while I’m working for you it’s so wept into that my mouth tastes of salt for a week. I’ve put up with it just as long as I’m going to.”

“I’ll go,” said Jane, sniveling. “I’ll go. I never thought to get such unkind words from my brother!”

“Brother nothing!” said Peter, thoroughly exasperated. “What did you ever give me but shoves, wrapped up in sorrow and grief? What did you ever do but jump on me, and tear me to pieces, and pull me apart to show me how worthless I was, whilst you let on you was mourning over me? I guess I’ve had it done to me long enough to see through it, Jane, so you may as well shut off the bawling. You ain’t no sister – you ‘re a miser!”

“Peter Lane!”

“That’s what you are, a miser!” said Peter, rising from his chair. “You ‘re a weeping miser, and you might as well know it. That’s why you don’t want me ‘round, you ‘re afraid I might cost you a nickel sometime. For two cents I’d put you out of the house. You’d bawl some if you had to pay rent.”

Peter should have felt a sense of shame, but he did not. In some inexplicable way a huge weight seemed lifted from his chest. He felt big, and strong, and efficient. It was a wonderful thing he had discovered. He, who had for so many years, cringed before his sister’s cruelty was making her wince. He, Peter Lane, was not feeling worthless and mean. He was talking out as other men do. He was having a rage, and yet he was so self-controlled that he knew he could stop at any moment. He was not the tool of his anger, the anger was his instrument. His pale eyes blazed, but he ended with a scornful laugh.

Jane did not flare up. She dropped her head on her table and cried again, but with real self-pity this time.

“Now, it ain’t worth while to cry,” said Peter coldly. “I’ve said all I’ve got to say on that subject. All I’ve got now is a business proposition, and you can take it or not. If you want to take Buddy in and feed him and sleep him and treat him white, the way he deserves, I’ll pay you for it just as soon as I earn some money, and I’m going to get work right away. If you won’t do that you can take the house and have it, and I’m through with you.”

He stood with his hat in his hand, waiting. It seemed to him that Jane was waiting too long, that she was calculating the chances of getting her pay if she took the boy, and Peter knew his past record did not suggest any very strong probability of that.

“You’ll get your money,” he said. “I’m going to look for a job as soon as I go out from here. Don’t you be afraid of that. You won’t lose anything.”

Her reply came so suddenly that it startled

Peter. She jumped from her chair and stamped her foot angrily.

“Oh!” she cried, clinching her fists, while all her anger blazed in her face. “Hain’t you insulted me enough? Get out of my house! Don’t you ever come back!”

Peter put on his hat. He paused when his hand was on the door-knob, his face deathly white.

“If you ever get sick, Jane,” he said, “you can leave word at George Rapp’s Livery stable. I’ll come to you if you are sick,” and he went out, closing the door softly.

Buddy was waiting where Peter had left him.

“I’m making a funny snake for you, Uncle Peter,” he said.

“Well, I should think you were!” said Peter, summoning all his cheerfulness. “That’s just the funniest old snake I ever did see, but you better let Uncle Peter have your jack-knife now, Buddy. We’ll get along.”

He gathered the boy, who obediently yielded the knife, into his arms.

“I’m going to see Aunt Jane, now,” said the boy contentedly.

“No, I guess we won’t go see your Aunt Jane to-day, Buddy,” said Peter, holding the boy close. “Put your head close up against Uncle Peter’s shoulder and he can carry you better. You ain’t so heavy that way.”

Buddy put his head on Peter’s shoulder and crooned one of Booge’s verses contentedly. They walked a long way in this manner, toward the town. From time to time Peter shifted the boy from one shoulder to the other, and once or twice he allowed him to walk, but not far. He wanted to feel Buddy in his arms.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Peter as they entered the outskirts of the town, “if I had to go on a trip right soon. I can’t seem to think of any way out of it.”

“I like to go on trips with you, Uncle Peter,” said Buddy.

“Well, you see, Buddy-boy,” said Peter, “this here trip I can’t take you on, so I’ve got to leave you with a man – a man that looks a good deal like that kazoozer man, but you mustn’t be afraid of him, because all he is going to do is to take you for a ride in a horse and buggy out to where you’ll stay. It may be some time before I see you again, but I want you should remember me. I guess you will, won’t you?”

“Yes, Uncle Peter.”

“That’s right! You just remember Uncle Peter every day, but don’t you worry for him, and some day maybe I’ll come and get you. I’ve got a lot of work to do first that you wouldn’t understand, such as building up a new man from the ground to the top of his head, but I’ll get it done some time, and I’ll come for you the first thing after I do. You want I should, don’t you?”

“Yes” said Buddy.

For the rest of the way to town Peter held the boy very close in his arms, and did not think of his tired muscles at all. He was thinking of his perfidy to the trusting child, for he was without money and without it he could see nothing to do but deliver the boy to Briggles and the Unknown.

XIV. A RAY OF HOPE

THE Marcy’s Run Road, on which Peter’s sister lived, led into Riverbank past the cemetery, and near the cemetery stood a group of small stores. One of these, half grocery and half saloon, was even more unkempt than the others, but before its window Peter stopped. A few small coins – the residue after his purchasing trip of the day before – remained in his pocket, and in the window was a square of cardboard announcing “Hot Beef Soup To-day.”

Hot beef soup, when a man has tramped many miles carrying a heavy child, is a temptation. Buddy himself would be glad of a bowl of hot soup, and Peter opened the door and entered.

The store was narrow and dark. A few feet, just inside the door, were occupied by the scanty stock of groceries, tobacco and cheap candy, and back of this was the bar, with two small tables in the space before it. The whole place was miserably dirty. It was no gilded liquor palace, with mirrors and glittering cash-registers. The bar was of plain pine, painted “barn-red,” and the whole arrangement was primitive and cheap. Beyond the bar room a partition cut off the living room, and this completed “Mrs. Crink’s Place.”

Mrs. Crink had a bad reputation. During the stringent prohibition days she had run a “speak-easy” without paying the town the usual monthly disorderly house fine, and had served her term in jail. After that she was strongly suspected of boot-legging whisky, and she had purchased this new place but a few days since. She was a thin, sour-faced, angular woman, ugly alike in face and temper. When Peter opened the door a bell sounded sharply, but the high voice of Mrs. Crink in the living room drowned the bell. She was scolding and reviling at the top of her voice – swearing like a man – and a child was sobbing and pleading. Peter heard the sharp slap of a hand against a face, and a cry from the child, and Mrs. Crink came into the bar room, her eyes glaring and her face dark with anger.

“Well, what do you want?” she snarled.

“I’d like to get two bowls of soup for me and the boy, if it ain’t too much trouble,” said Peter.

“Everything’s trouble,” whined Mrs. Crink. “I don’t expect nothing else. A woman can’t make a living without these cranks tellin’ her what she shall and what she shan’t. Shut up that howlin’, you little devil, or I’ll come in there and bat your head off.”

She went into the living room and brought out the two bowls of soup, placing them on one of the small tables. Peter lifted Buddy into a chair. Mrs. Crink began wiping off the beer-wet bar.

“I wonder if you could let me have about a dime’s worth of crackers and cheese?” he asked, and Mrs. Crink dropped the dirty rag with which she was wiping the bar.

“Come out here, and shut up your bawlin’, and swab off this bar,” she yelled, and the door of the back room opened and a girl came out. She was the merest child. She came hesitatingly, holding her arm before her face, and the old hag of a woman jerked up the filthy, wet rag and slapped her across the face. It was none of Peter’s business, but he half arose from his chair and then dropped back again. It made his blood boil, but he had not associated with shanty-boat men and women without learning that in the coarser strata of humanity slaps and blows and ugly words are often the common portion of children. He would have liked to interfere, but he knew the inefficiency of any effort he might make, and like a shock it came to him that it was for things like this that Briggles rescued, – or pretended to rescue – little children. It was not so bad then, after all. If he must give up Buddy there would be some compensation in telling Briggles of this poor child, who deserved far more the attention of his Society. All this passed through his mind in an instant, but before he could turn back to his bowl of soup Buddy uttered a cry of joy and, scrambling from his chair, ran across the floor toward the weeping girl.

“Oh! Susie! Susie! My Susie!” he shouted and threw himself upon her.

The impetus of his coming almost threw the child off her feet, and she staggered back, but the next instant she had clasped her arms around the boy, and was hugging him in a close, youthful embrace of joy.

“My Buddy! My Buddy!” she kept repeating over and over, as if all other words failed her, as they will in an excess of sudden surprise. “My Buddy! My Buddy!”

The woman stared for an instant in open-mouthed astonishment, and then her eyes flashed with anger. She reached out her hand to grasp the girl, but Peter Lane thrust it aside.

His own eyes could flash, and the woman drew back.

“Now, don’t you do that!” he said hotly.

“You git out of my store, then!” shouted Mrs. Crink. “You take your brat and git out!”

“I’ll get out,” said Peter slowly, “as soon as I am quite entirely ready to do so. I hope you will understand that. And I’ll be ready when I have ate my soup.”

The woman glared at him. She let her hand drop behind the bar, where she had a piece of lead pipe, and then, suddenly, she laughed a high, cackling laugh to cover her defeat, and let her eyes fall. She slouched to the front of the shop for the crackers and cheese and Peter seated himself again at the small table, and looked at the children.

“Where’s Mama?” he heard the girl ask, and Buddy’s reply: “Mama went away,” and he saw the look of wonder on the girl’s face.

“Come here,” Peter said, and the girl came to the table.

“I guess you ‘re Buddy’s sister he’s been tellin’ me about, ain’t you?” said Peter kindly, “and I’m his Uncle Peter He’s been staying with on a shanty-boat. Your ma” – he hesitated and looked at the girl’s sweet, clear eyes – “your ma went away, like Buddy said, Susie, but you don’t want to think she run away and left him, for that wouldn’t be so, not at all! She had to go, or she wouldn’t ‘ve gone. I guess – I guess she’d ‘ve come and got you. Yes, I guess that’s what she had on her mind. She spoke of you quite a little before she went on her trip.”

“I want you should take me away from here,” said the girl suddenly.

“Well, now, I wish I could, Susie,” said Peter, “but I don’t see how I can. Maybe I can arrange it – ” He poised his soup spoon in the air. “Did Reverend Mr. Briggles bring you here?”

“Not here,” said Susie. “Mrs. Crink didn’t live here, then.”

“Well, that’s all the same,” said Peter. “I just wanted to enquire about it. You’d better eat your soup, Buddy-boy. Well, now, let me see!”

Peter stared into the soup, as if it might hold, hidden in its muggy depths, the answer to his riddle.

“Just at present I’m sort of unable to do what I’d like to do myself,” he said. “I’d like to take you right with me, but I’ve got a certain friend that was quite put out because I didn’t bring your ma to – to see her when your ma stopped in at my boat, and I guess maybe” – Mrs. Crink was returning with the crackers and cheese, and Peter ended hurriedly – “I guess maybe you better stay here until I make arrangements.”

It was a strange picture, the boy eating his soup gluttonously, Peter Lane in his comedy tramp garb of blanket and blanket-strips, and the little girl staring at him with big, trustful eyes. Mrs. Crink put the crackers and cheese on the table.

“If you’ve got through takin’ up time that don’t belong to you, maybe I can git some work out of this brat,” she snapped.

“Why, yes, ma’am,” said Peter politely. “It only so happened that this boy was her brother. We didn’t want to discommode you at all.”

Susie turned away to her work of swabbing the bar, and Peter divided the crackers and cheese equally between himself and Buddy.

“I don’t care much to have tramps come in here anyway,” said Mrs. Crink. “I never knew one yit that wouldn’t pick up anything loose,” but Peter made no reply. He had a matter of tremendous import on his mind. He felt that he had taken the weight of Susie’s troubles on his shoulders in addition to those of Buddy, and he had resolved to ask Widow Potter to take the two children!

The parting of the two children had for them none of the pathos it had for Peter. When Buddy had eaten the last scrap of cracker he got down from his chair.

“Good-by, Susie,” he said.

“Good-by, Buddy,” she answered, and that was all, and Peter led the boy out of the place.

There are, in Riverbank, alleys between each two of the streets parallel with the river, and Peter, now that he had once more resolved not to allow Briggles to have Buddy, took to the alleys as he passed through the town. The outlandishness of his garb made him the more noticeable, he knew, and he wished to avoid being seen. He traversed the entire town thus, even where a creek made it necessary for him to scramble down one bank and up another, until the alleys ended at the far side of the town. There he crossed the vacant lot where a lumber mill had once stood, and struck into the river road.

The boy seemed to take it all as a matter of course, but Peter kept a wary eye on the road, ready to seek a hiding-place at the approach of any rig that looked as if it might contain the Reverend Briggles, but none appeared. A farmer, returning from town with a wagon, stopped at a word from Peter, and allowed him to put Buddy in the wagon and clamber in with him. They got out again at Mrs. Potter’s gate.

The house was closed, and the doors locked. Peter tried them all before he was convinced he had had the long tramp for nothing, and then he led Buddy toward the barn. As he neared the barn the barn door opened and a man came out, carrying a water bucket. He stared at Peter.

“Mrs. Potter is not at home, I guess?” said Peter.

“Nope,” said the man. “Anything I can do for you?”

“It’s business on which I’ll have to see her personally,” said Peter. “She wasn’t expecting I’d come. Is she going to be back soon?”

“Well, I guess she won’t be back to-day,” said the man. “She only hired me about a week ago, so she ain’t got to telling me all her plans yet, but she told me it was as like as not she’d go up to Derlingport to-day, and maybe she might come home to-morrow, and maybe not till next day. Want to leave any word for her?”

“No,” said Peter slowly, “I guess there’s no word I could leave. I guess not. I’m much obliged to you, but I won’t leave no word. Come on, Buddy-boy, we got to go back to town now, before night sets in.”

“Where are we going now, Uncle Peter?” asked the boy.

“Now? Well, now we ‘re going to see a friend I’ve got. You never slept in a great, big stable, where there are a lot of horses, did you? You never went to sleep on a great big pile of hay, did you? That’ll be fun, won’t it, Buddy-boy?”

“Yes, Uncle Peter,” said the child cheerfully, and they began the long, cold walk to town.

XV. AN ENCOUNTER

THAT horse,” said George Rapp, slapping the colt on the flank, “is as good a horse as you can get for the money in ten counties, and you won’t find anybody that will offer what I do in trade for your old one. Nowhere.”

“You’d say that anyway, George Rapp,” said Mrs. Potter. “You ain’t here to run down what you want to sell. Seems to me the colt acts skittish.”

“What you said you wanted was a young horse,” said Rapp with a shrug. “I don’t know what you want. You want a young horse, and this is young, and you don’t want a skittish horse, and all young horses are more or less that way.”

“What I want is a young, strong horse – ” Mrs. Potter began.

“You’ve told me that a million times and two, and if you tell me it again I’ll know it by heart well enough to sing it,” said Rapp. “There he stands, just like you say – a young, strong horse.”

“A skittish animal like this colt ain’t fit for a woman to drive,” said Mrs. Potter.

“And you ought to have a driver to drive him, as you said about ten thousand times before,” said Rapp with good-natured tolerance, “but Peter Lane ain’t come up to town yet, if that’s what you’re working round to.”

“Oh, get along with you!” said Mrs. Potter. “I got a hired man now.”