Rancho Del Muerto and Other Stories of Adventure from «Outing» by Various Authors

“That’s pound cake, M’ri,” cried Silas, aghast, holding his knife and fork upraised in mute horror. She went on cutting thick slices, humming under her breath.

“Might I, marm,” asked the stranger, pleasantly, “put this slice of ham and cake and this cup of milk aside, to eat bymeby?”

“How many meals do you eat in a evening?” growled Silas, awestruck at such an appetite; “an’ I want you to know this ain’t no tavern.”

“Do eat a bite yourself, marm,” said the stranger, as Maria carried the filled plate to the cupboard. The impudence of a tramp actually asking the mistress of the house to eat her own food, thought Silas. “We’ve eat our supper,” he hurled at the stranger.

“I couldn’t tech a mite,” said Maria, beginning to clear up, and as he was through eating, the stranger gallantly helped her while Silas smoked in speechless rage.

“I’m used to being handy,” explained the tramp. “I allus helped wife. She’s bin dead these twenty years, leaving me a baby girl that I brought up.”

“You was good to her?” asked Maria wistfully; the stranger had such a kind voice and gentle ways.

“I done the best I could, marm.” Doubting his senses, Silas saw Maria bring out the haircloth rocking-chair with the bead tidy from the best front room. “Lemme carry it,” said the tramp politely. “Now set in’t yerself, marin, an’ be comfurble.” He took a wooden chair, tilted it back and picked up the cat. Maria, before she sat down, unmindful of Silas’s bewildered stare, filled one of his pipes with his tobacco.

“I know you smoke, mister,” she smiled.

“Wal, I do,” answered the tramp, whiffing away in great comfort. “‘Pears to me you’re the biggest-hearted woman I ever see.”

She laughed bitterly. “There wan’t a cluser woman in Corinth than me, an’ folks’ll tell you so. I turned my own son outer doors.”

“It was part my fault, Mri, an’ you hush now,” pleaded Silas, forgiving even her giving his tobacco away if she would not bring out that family skeleton.

“I’ve heered you was cluse,” said the stranger, “an’ thet you sent Jim off because he went to circuses in Bath, an’ wore store clothes, an’ wanted wages to pay for ‘em.”

“All true,” said Maria, “an’ he wanted to ride the horse, an’ was mad at workin’ him so hard.” She went on then, and told how the old animal had come home.

“An’ me thinkin’ the critter was a speerit,” said the stranger in a hushed voice. “Beat’s all what a dumb brute knows!”

“I thought mebbe,” went on Maria, twisting her thin fingers, “as Jim might be comin’ home this time. They says things happens curious when folks is goin’ ter die – ”

“Your good fur a good meny years, M’ri,” said Silas, pitifully.

“There’s folks in this wurld,” said the stranger, his kindly face growing sad and careworn since the mother’s eager words, “that ain’t men enuff, an’ comes to charity to the end – ”

“That there be,” assented Silas.

“And as can’t bring up their folks comfurble, nor keep ‘em well an’ happy, nor have a home as ain’t berried under a mortgage they can’t never clear off.”

“Ay, there’s lots of ‘em,” cried Silas, “an’ Mis Lowell was a twitting me this very night of bein’ mean.”

“An’ this good home, an’ the fields I passed thro’, an’ the lane where the old hoss come a gallopin’ up behind me, is paid fur, no mortgage on a acre?”

“There never was on the Lowell prop’ty; they’ll tell ye thet ennywhere,” said Silas.

“We uns in the South, where I come from,” said the stranger, shading his face with his bony hand, “ain’t never forehanded somehow. My name is Dexter Brown, marm, an’ I was alius misfortinat. I tell you, marm, one day when my creditors come an’ took the cotton off my field, thet I’d plarnted and weeded and worked over in the brilin’ sun, my wife says – an’ she’d been patient and long-sufferin’ – ‘Dex, I’m tired out; jest you bury me in a bit of ground that’s paid fur, an’ I’ll lie in peace,’ an’ she died thet night.”

“Mebbe she never knowed what it were to scrimp an’ save, an’ do without, an never see nawthin’, till all the good died in her,” muttered Maria.

“Part o’ my debt was wines an’ good vittles fur her, marm.”

“I’ll warrant!” said Maria quickly, “an’ she never wept over the graves of her dead children, an’ heered their father complainin’ of how much their sickness hed cost him. Oh, I tell you, there’s them that reckons human agony by dollars an’ cents, an’ they’re wus’n murderers!”

“M’ri!” cried Silas.

“Mebbe, marm, you are over-worrited ternight,” said the stranger softly; “wimmen is all feelin’, God bless ‘em! an’ how yer son loved ye, a tellin’ of yer bright eyes an’ red cheeks – ”

She turned to him with fierce eagerness. “He couldn’t keer fur me, I wan’t the kind. I don’t mind me of hardly ever kissin’ him. I worked him hard; I was cross an’ stingy. He sed to me, ‘There’s houses that is never homes, mother.’ I sneered an’ blamed him for his little present.” She ran and brought the vase. “I’ve kept that, Mr. Brown, over twenty years, but when he give it to me, bought outer his poor little savin’s, I scolded him. I never let him hev the boys here to pop corn or make candy; it was waste and litter. Oh, I know what he meant; this was never a home.”

“But he only spoke kind of ye alius.”

“Did you know Jim? Been gone this ten year, an’ never a word.”

Silas, a queer shadow on his face, looked eagerly at Brown.

“I did know him,” slowly and cautiously – “he was a cowboy in Texas, as brave as the best.”

“He could ride,” cried Maria, “as part of a horse, an’ Tige was the dead image of that Washington horse in the pictur, an’ Jim used to say thet girl there in the blue gown was his girl – the one with the bouquet; an’ I used to call him silly. I chilled all the fun he hed outer him, an’ broken-speerited an’ white-faced he drifted away from us, as far away as them in the graveyard, with the same weary look as they hed in goin’.”

“An’ he took keer of much as a hundred cattle,” said Silas; “they has thet meny I’ve heerd, in Texas?”

“They has thousands; they loses hundreds by drought – ”

“Wanter know?” cried Silas, his imagination refusing to grasp such awful loss.

“Wal, I knowed Jim, an’ he got mer-ried – ”

“Merried!” from both the old parents. “He did. He says, ‘I wunt write the home-folks till I’m well off, for mother will worrit an’ blame me, an’ I hain’t money, but Minnie an’ I love each other, an’ are satisfied with little.’”

“Minnie,” the mother repeated. “Was she pretty?”

“Woman all over you be, to ask thet, an’ she was,” said Brown, sadly; “with dark eyes, sorter wistful, an’ hair like crinkled sunshine, an’ a laugh like a merry child, fur trouble slipped off her shoulders like water off a duck’s back.”

“An’ they got prosperous?” asked Silas uneasily.

“They was happy,” said Brown with gentle dignity; “they was alius happy, but they lived under a mortgage, an’ it was drift from pillar to post, an’ ups an’ downs.

“An’ they’re poor now,” muttered Silas, visions of Jim and his family to support coming to him.

“Hush!” cried Maria. “Tell me, sir, was there children? Oh, the heart hunger I’ve had for the sound of a child’s voice, the touch of baby hands. You an’ me grandpa and grandma, Sile! an’, my God! you think of money now.”

“Set calm,” pleaded Brown, “for I must hev courage to tell ye all.”

“An’ they sent ye to tell us they was comin’?” asked Silas, judging of their prosperity from the shabby herald.

“They asked me to come, an’ I swore it. There’s a queer blight as creeps inter our country, which without thet might be like everlasting Paradise. Ourn is a land of summer an’ flowers, but up here in this ice-bound region, the air is like water in runnin’ brooks, it puts life an’ health in ye.”

“There’s the blight o’ consumption here. We’re foreordained to suffer all over this airth,” muttered the woman.

“But there it comes in waves of trouble – in awful haste – an’ takes all at once, an’ them that’s well flees away and the sick dies alone. So the yellow fever come creepin’ inter my home, fur Minnie was my child – the daughter I’d keered fur; an’ fust the baby went from her arms, an’ then little Silas (arter you, sir). Then Minnie sickened, an’ her laugh is only an echo in my heart, for she died and was berried, the baby in her arms, and Jim was took next – an’ he says” (only the ticking of the clock sounded now, never so loud before): “‘I want you, dad,’ (he called me dad) ‘to go to my old home in Maine. I want you to tell my father I named my dead boy for him, and I thought of his frugal, saving life with pain, and yet I am proud that his name is respected as that of an honest man, whose word is his bond. I’ll never go up the old lane again,’ says Jim, ‘nor see mother standing in the door with her bright eyes and red cheeks that I used to think was like winter apples. And the old horse, she said she’d care for, I won’t see him again, nor hear the bells. In this land of summer I only long for winter, and dad, if I could hear those hoarse old jolly bells I’d die in peace. Queer, ain’t it? And I remember some rides I took mother; she wan’t afraid of the colt, and looked so pretty, a white hood over her dark hair. You go, dad, and say I was sorry, and I’d planned to come some day prosperous and happy, but it’s never to be. Tell mother to think of me when she goes a Sunday afternoon to the buryin’-ground, as she used to with me, and by those little graves I fek her mother’s heart beat for me, her living child, and I knew, though she said nothing, she cared for me.’ He died tell-in’ me this, marm, an’ was berried by my girl, an’ I think it was meant kind they went together, for both would a pined apart. So I’ve come all the way from Texas, trampin’ for weary months, for I was poor, to give you Jim’s words.”

“Dead! Jim dead!” cried Silas, in a queer, dazed way. “M’ri,” querulously, “you alius sed he was so helthy!”

She went to him and laid her hand on his bowed head.

“An’ we’ve saved an’ scrimped an’ pinched fur strangers, M’ri, fur there ain’t no Lowell to have the prop’ty, an’ I meant it all fur Jim. When he was to come back he’d find he was prosperous, an’ he’d think how I tried to make him so.”

“The Lord don’t mean all dark clouds in this life,” said the stranger. “Out of that pestilence, that never touched her with its foul breath, came a child, with Minnie’s face and laugh, but Jim’s own eyes – a bit of mother an’ father.”

The old people were looking at him with painful eagerness, dwelling on his every word.

“It was little May; named Maria, but we called her May for she was borned three year ago in that month; a tiny wee thing, an’ I stood by their graves an’ I hardened my heart. ‘They drove her father out; they sha’n’t crush her young life,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep her.’ But I knowed I couldn’t. Poverty was grinding me, and with Jim’s words directin’ me, I brought her here.”

“Brought her here!” cried the poor woman.

“Ay! She’s a brave little lass, an’ I told her to lie quiet in the basket till I told her to come out, fur mebbe you wan’t kind an’ would send us both out, but I found your hearts ready fur her – ”

With one spring Maria reached the basket and flung open the lid, disclosing a tiny child wrapped in a ragged shawl, sleeping peacefully in her cramped bed, but with tears on her long lashes, as if the waiting had tried her brave little soul.

“Jest as gritty,” said Brown, “an’ so good to mind; poor lass!”

Maria lifted her out, and the child woke up, but did not cry at the strange face that smiled on her with such pathetic eagerness. “Oh, the kitty!” cried May. “I had a kitty once!” That familiar household object reconciled her at once. She ate the cake eagerly and drank the milk, insisting on feeding the ham to the cat.

“Him looks hungry,” she said.

“We’ve all been starved!” cried Maria, clasping the child to her heart.

Such a beautiful child, with her merry eyes and laugh and her golden curls, a strange blossom from a New England soil, yet part of her birthright was the land of flowers and sunshine. Somehow that pathetic picture of the past faded when the mother saw a blue and gilt vase in the baby’s hand – Jim’s baby’s.

“It’s pitty; fank you!” said the little creature. Then she got down to show her new dress and her shoes, and made excursions into the pantry, opening cupboard doors, but touching nothing, only exclaiming, “Dear me, how pitty!” at everything. Then she came back, and at Brown’s request, with intense gravity, began a Spanish dance she had learned when they stopped at San Antonio, from watching the Mexican senoritas. She held up her little gown on one side and gravely made her steps while Dexter whistled. The fire leaped up and crackled loudly, as if it would join her, the cat purred, the tea-kettle sung from the back of the stove, and little snowflakes, themselves hurrying, skurrying in a merry dance, clung to the win dow-pane and called other little flakes to hasten and see such a pretty sight. Maria watched in breathless eagerness, and Silas, carried beyond himself, forgetting his scruples, cried out: “Wal, ef that don’t beat all I ever see! Come here, you little chick!” holding out his silver watch.

With a final pirouette she finished with a grave little courtesy, then ran to Silas: “Is there birdie in der?” and he caught her up and kissed her.

When the old lane is shady in summertime, and golden-rod and daisies crowd the way, and raspberries climb the stonewall, and merry squirrels chatter and mock the red-breasted robins, and bees go humming through the ordorous air, there comes a big white horse that looks like Washington’s in the picture; and how carefully he walks and bears himself, for he brings a little princess who has made the old house a home. Such a fairylike little thing, who from her sunshine makes everybody bright and happy, and Silas’ grim old face is smiling as he leads the horse, and Maria, with her basket of berries, is helped over the wall by Dexter Brown, who always says he must go but never does, for they love him, and he and Silas work harmoniously together. And grandma’s eyes are brighter than ever and her cheeks as red.

“What comfortable folks they air gittin’ to be,” say the neighbors, “kinder livin’, but I dunno but goin’ a berryin’ a hull arternoon is right down shiftless.”

Winter is over and forever gone from that household on the hill; the coming of gracious, smiling spring in a sweet child’s presence has made eternal sunshine in those ice-bound hearts.

CYNTHY’S JOE, By Clara Sprague Ross

I DON’T think he’ll be sech a fool as to p’int fer home the fust thing he does.” The speaker, a young man with a dull, coarse face and slouching air, knocked the ashes from a half-smoked cigar with his little finger, which was heavily ornamented with a large seal ring, and adjusted himself to a more comfortable position.

“I dun’no which p’int o’ the compass he’d more naterally turn to,” observed another; an elderly man with a stoop in his shoulders, and a sharp, thin face that with all its petty shrewdness was not without its compensating feature – a large and kindly mouth. The third man in the little group was slowly walking back and forth on the platform that ran across the station, rolling and unrolling a small red flag which he held in his hands. He turned with a contemptuous “umph” to the young man, remarking as he did so, “‘Tain’t mostly fools as goes to prison. Joe Atherton prob’ly has as many friends in this section o’ the kentry as some who hain’t been away so much.”

“Joe was a good little boy,” pursued the old station-master; “he wuz allers kind to his mother. I never heard a word ag’in him till that city swell came down here fer the summer and raised blazes with the boy.”

“If there ain’t the Squire!” exclaimed a hitherto silent member; “he’s the last man as I should jedge would come to the deepo to welcome Joe Atherton.”

A stout, florid, pompous individual slowdy mounted the platform steps, wiping his forehead with a flaming red silk handkerchief, which he had taken from his well-worn straw hat. “Warm afternoon, friends,” he suggested, with an air of having vastly contributed to the information of the men, whose only apparent concern in life was an anxiety to find a shady corner within conversational distance of each other.

The Squire seated himself in the only chair of which the forlorn station boasted; he leaned back until his head was conveniently supported, and furtively glanced at a large old-fashioned watch which he drew from his vest pocket.

“Train’s late this a’ternoon, Squar’,” said the man with the red flag. “I reckon ye’ll all hev to go home without seein’ the show; ‘tain’t no ways sartin Joe’ll come to-day. Parson Mayhew sed his time was up the fust week in September, but there’s no tellin’ the day as I knows on.”

A sustained, heavy rumble sounded in the distance. Each man straightened himself and turned his head to catch the first glimpse of the approaching engine, With a shriek and only a just perceptible lessening of its speed, the mighty train rushed by them without stopping, and was out of sight before the eager watchers regained the power of speech.

Five minutes later the red flag was in its place behind the door, its keeper turned the key and hastened to overtake his neighbor, who had reached the highway. Hearing the hurrying footsteps behind him, the man turned, saying triumphantly, “I’m right-down, glad he didn’t come.”

“So be I; there’s an express late this evenin’ that might bring him down. I shall be here if Louisy’s so as I kin leave her.”

“Wa’al,” returned the other, “I shan’t be over ag’in to-night, but you jest tell Joe, fer me, to come right ta my house; he’s welcome. Whatever he done as a boy, he’s atoned fer in twenty years. I remember jest how white and sot his face was the day they took him away; he was only a boy then, he’s a man now, gray-headed most likely; the Athertons turned gray early, and sorrow and sin are terrible helps to white hair.”

The old man’s voice faltered a little; he drew the back of his hard, brown hand across his eyes. Something that neither of the men could have defined prompted them to shake hands at the “Corners”; they did so silently, and without looking up.

Joe came that night. The moon and the stars were the silent and only witnesses of the convict’s return. It was just as Joe had hoped it might be; yet there was in the man’s soul an awful sense of his loneliness and isolation The eager, wistful light faded out of his large blue eyes, the lines about his firm, tightly-drawn mouth deepened, the whole man took on an air of sullen defiance. Nobody cared for him, why should he care? He wondered if “Uncle Aaron,” as the boys used to call him, still kept the old station and signaled the trains. Alas! it was one of “Louisy’s” bad nights; her husband could not leave her, and so Joe missed forever the cordial hand old Aaron would have offered him, and the kind message he was to give him, for his neighbor.

Sadly, wearily, Joe turned and walked toward the road, lying white and still in the moonlight. His head dropped lower and lower upon his breast; without lifting it he put out his hand, at length, and raised the latch of a dilapidated gate that opened into a deep, weed-entangled yard. His heart was throbbing wildly, a fierce, hot pain shot through his eyes. Could he ever look up? He knew the light of the home he was seeking had gone out in darkness years before. The only love in the world that would have met him without question or reproach was silent forever; but here was her home – his home once – the little white house with its green blinds and shady porch.

He must look up or his heart would burst. With a cry that rang loud and clear on the quiet night, he fell upon his face, his fingers clutching and tearing the long, coarse grass. There was no house – no home – only a mass of blackened timbers, a pile of ashes, the angle of a tumbling wall. Hardly knowing what he did, Joe crept into the shelter of the old stone wall. With his face buried in his hands he lived over again, in one short half-hour, the life he hoped he had put away when the prison doors closed behind him. All through the day there had struggled in his heart a faint, unreasoning faith that life might yet hold something fair for him; one ray of comfort, one word of kindness, and faith would have become a reality. As the man, at last lifted his pale, agonized face to the glittering sky above him he uttered no word of prayer or entreaty, but with the studied self-control that years of repression had taught him, he rose from the ground and walked slowly out of the yard and down the cheerless road again to the station. Life hereafter could mean nothing to him but a silent moving-on. Whenever or wherever he became known, men would shrink and turn away from him. There was no abiding-place, no home, no love for him in all God’s mighty world. He accepted the facts; there was only one relief – somewhere, some time, a narrow bed would open for him and the green sod would shelter the man and his sin till eternity.

He hastily plucked a bit of golden-rod that nodded by the roadside; then taking a small, ragged book from a pocket just over his heart, he opened it and put the yellow spray between the leaves. As he did so a bit of paper fluttered to the ground. Joe stooped and picked it up. It was a letter he had promised to deliver from a fellow-prisoner to his mother in a distant town.

Not very far away an engine whistled at a crossing. A slowly moving freight and accommodation train pulled up at the depot a few moments later. Joe entered the dark, ill-smelling car at the rear and turned his face once more to the world.

It was in the early twilight of the next evening that Joe found himself in the hurry and confusion of a large manufacturing town. As he passed from the great depot into the brilliantly lighted street, he was bewildered for a moment and stood irresolute, with his hand shading his eyes. At one corner of the park that lay between the station and the next street, a man with a Punch-and-Judy theatre had drawn around him a crowd of men, women, and children. Joe mechanically directed his steps that way, and unconsciously became a part of the swaying, laughing audience.

“Hold me up once more, do Mariar, I can’t see nothin’,” begged a piping, childish voice at Joe’s knee.

“I can’t, Cynthy; my arms is most broke now holdin’ of ye; ef you don’t stop teasin’ I’ll never take ye nowheres again,” replied a tall, handsome girl, to whom the child was clinging.

Joe bent without a word, and picking up the small, ill-shaped morsel of human longing and curiosity, swung her upon his broad shoulder, where she sat watching the tiny puppets and listening to their shrill cries, oblivious of all else in the world. Once she looked down into the man’s face with her great, dark, fiery eyes and said softly, “Oh, how good you are!” A shiver ran through Joe’s frame; these were the first words that had been addressed to him since he said good-bye to the warden in that dreary corridor, which for this one moment had been forgotten. The little girl, without turning her eyes from the dancing figures before her, put one arm about Joe’s neck and nestled a little closer to him. Joe could have stood forever. The tall, dark girl, however, had missed Cynthy’s tiresome pulling at her skirts and the whining voice. She looked anxiously about and called “Cynthy! Cynthy! where are you? I’ll be thankful if ever I gets you back to your grandmother.” The fretful words aroused Joe from his happy reverie; he hurriedly placed the child on the pavement, and in an instant was lost in the crowd.

He set out upon his quest the following morning and had no difficulty in finding the old woman he was seeking. At one of a dozen doors marking as many divisions of a long, low tenement building near the river, he had knocked, and the door had opened into a small, clean kitchen, where a bright fire burned in a tiny stove, and a row of scarlet geraniums in pots ornamented the front window. The woman who admitted him he recognized at once as the mother of the man in that far-away prison, whose last hold-upon love and goodness was the remembrance of the aged, wrinkled face so wonderfully like his own. In a corner behind the door there stood an old-fashioned trundle-bed. As Joe stepped into the room a child, perhaps ten years old, started up from it, exclaiming “That’s the man, Granny; the man who put me on his shoulder, when Mariar was cross. Come in! come in, man,” she urged.

“Be still, Cynthy,” retorted the grandmother, not unkindly, as she placed a chair for Joe, who was walking over to the little bed from which the child was evidently not able to rise alone. Two frail hands were outstretched to him, two great black eyes were raised to his full of unspoken gratitude. Joe took the soiled letter from its hiding-place and gave it to the woman without a word. She glanced at the scarcely legible characters, and went into an adjoining room, her impassive face working convulsively.