6

When I found that Mr. Mobley was over at the barracks, and had been there playing euchre with the boys since supper, I wondered. I wondered why Mrs. Mobley had come with an excuse to get Mr. Gowdy away from me--or after a couple of weeks' thinking, was it from Rowena? Yet Mr. Gowdy did see Mr. Mobley that evening; for the next morning Mobley put me over a gang of eight breaking-teams, "To handle the way you told Mr. Gowdy last night," he said.

He was a tall, limber-jointed, whipped-looking man with a red nose and a long stringy mustache, and always wore his vest open clear down to the lower button which was fastened, and thus his whole waistcoat was thrown open so as to show a tobacco-stained shirt bosom. The Missourian whom I had noticed at table said that this was done so that the wearer of the vest could reach his dirk handily. But Mobley was the last man I should have suspected of carrying a dirk, or if he did packing the gumption to use it.

I made good with my gang, and did a third more than any other eight teams on the place. Before I went away, Gowdy talked around as if he wanted me for overseer; but I couldn't decide without studying a long time, to take a step so far from what I had been thinking of, and he dropped the subject. I did not like the way things were going there. The men were out of control. They despised Mobley, and said sly things about his using his wife to keep him in a job. One day I told Magnus Thorkelson about Mrs. Mobley's coming and taking Gowdy away from the little cabin of the Fewkes family.

"She do dat," said he, "a dozen times ven Ay bane dar. She alvays bane chasing Buck Gowdy."

"Well," I said, "who be you chasing, coming over here a dozen times when I didn't know it? That's why you bought that mustang pony, eh?"

"I yust go over," said he, squirming, "to help Surajah fix up his machines--his inwentions. Sometimes I take over de wyolin to play for Rowena. Dat bane all, Yake."

When we went home, I with money enough for some new clothes, with what I had by me, we caught a ride with one of Judge Stone's teams to a point two-thirds of the way to Monterey Centre, and came into our own places from the south. We were both glad to see long black streaks of new breaking in the section of which my eighty was a part, and two new shanties belonging to new neighbors. This would bring cultivated land up to my south line, and I afterward found out, take the whole half of the section into the new farms. The Zenas Smith family had moved on to the southwest quarter, and the J.P. Roebuck family on the southeast.

The Smiths and Roebucks still live in the township--as good neighbors as a man need ask for; except that I never could agree with Zenas Smith about line fences, when the time came for them. Once we almost came to the spite-fence stage; but our children were such friends that they kept us from that disgrace. But Mrs. Smith was as good a woman in sickness as I ever saw.

George Story was working for the Smiths, and was almost one of the family. He finally took the northeast quarter of the section, and lives there yet. David Roebuck, J.P.'s son, when he came of age acquired the eighty next to me, and thus completed the settlement of the section. Most of the Roebuck girls and boys became school-teachers, and they had the biggest mail of anybody in the neighborhood. I never saw Dave Roebuck spelled down but once, and that was by his sister Theodosia, called "Dose" for short.

We went to both houses and called as we went home so as to begin neighboring with them. Magnus stopped at his own place, and I went on, wondering if the Frost boy I had engaged to look out for my stock while I was gone had been true to his trust. I saw that there had been a lot of redding up done; and as I came around the corner of the house I heard sounds within as of some one at the housework. The door was open, and as I peeped in, there, of all people, was Grandma Thorndyke, putting the last touches to a general house-cleaning.

The floor was newly scrubbed, the dishes set away in order, and all clean. The churn was always clean inwardly, but she had scoured it on the outside. There was a geranium in bloom in the window, which was as clear as glass could be made. The bed was made up on a different plan from mine, and the place where I hung my clothes had a flowered cotton curtain in front of it, run on cords. It looked very beautiful to me; and my pride in it rose as I gazed upon it. Grandma Thorndyke had not heard me coming, and gave way to her feelings as she looked at her handiwork in her manner of talking to herself.

"That's more like a human habitation!" she ejaculated, standing with her hands on her hips. "I snum! It looked like a hooraw's nest!"

"It looks a lot better," I agreed.

She was startled at seeing me, for she expected to get away, with Henderson L. Burns as he came back from his shooting of golden plover, all unknown to me. But we had quite a visit all by ourselves. She said quite pointedly, that somebody had been keeping her family in milk and butter and vegetables and chickens and eggs all winter, and she was doing a mighty little in repayment. Her eyes were full of tears as she said this.

"He who gives to the poor," said she, "lends to the Lord; and I don't know any place where the Lord's credit has been lower than in Monterey Centre for the past winter. Now le'me show you where things are, Jacob."

I got all the news of the town from her. Several people had moved in; but others had gone back east to live with their own or their wives' folks. Elder Thorndyke, encouraged by the favor of "their two rich men," had laid plans for building a church, and she believed their fellowship would be blessed with greater growth if they had a consecrated building instead of the hall where the secret societies met. On asking who their two richest men were she mentioned Governor Wade, of course, and Mr. Gowdy.

"Mr. Gowdy," she ventured, "is in a very hopeful frame of mind. He is, I fervently hope and believe, under conviction of sin. We pray for him without ceasing. He would be a tower of strength, with his ability and his wealth, if he should, under God, turn to the right and seek salvation. If you and he could both come into the fold, Jacob, it would be a wonderful thing for the elder and me."

"I guess I'd ruther come in alone!" I said.

"You mustn't be uncharitable," said she. "Mr. Gowdy is still hopeful of getting that property for Virginia Royall. He is working on that all the time. He came to get her signature to a paper this week. He is a changed man, Jacob--a changed man."

I can't tell how thunderstruck I was by this bit of news. Somehow, I could not see Buck Gowdy as a member of the congregation of the saints--I had seen too much of him lately: and yet, I could not now remember any of the old hardness he had shown in every action back along the Ridge Road in 1855. But Virginia must have changed toward him, or she would not have allowed him to approach her with any kind of paper, not even a patent of nobility.

But I rallied from my daze and took Grandma Thorndyke to see my live stock--birds and beasts. I discovered that she had been a farmer's daughter in New England, and I began to suspect that it relieved her to drop into New England farm talk, like "I snum!" and "Hooraw's nest." I never saw a hooraw's nest, but she seemed to think it a very disorderly place.

"This ain't the last time, Jacob," said she, as she climbed into Jim Boyd's buggy that Henderson L. had borrowed. "You may expect to find your house red up any time when I can get a ride out."

I was in a daze for some time trying to study out developments. Buck Gowdy and Mrs. Mobley; Rowena and Magnus Thorkelson; Gowdy's calls on Rowena, or at least at her home; Rowena's going to live in his house as a hired girl; her warmth to me; her nervousness, or fright, at Gowdy; Gowdy's religious tendency in the midst of his entanglements with the fair sex; his seeming reconciliation with Virginia; his pulling of the wool over the eyes of Mrs. Thorndyke, and probably the elder's--. Out of this maze I came to a sudden resolution. I would go to Waterloo and get me a new outfit of clothes, even to gloves and a pair of "fine boots."