Wheat and Huckleberries Part 1

Wheat and Huckleberries.

by Charlotte Marion (White) Vaile.

CHAPTER I

HARVEST AT THE FARM

Just how Dr. Philip Northmore came to be the owner of a farm had never been quite clear to his fellow-townsmen. That he had bought it-that pretty stretch of upland five miles from Rushmore-in some settlement with a friend, who owed him more money than he could ever pay, was the open fact, but how the doctor had believed it to be a good investment for himself was the question. The opportunity to pay interest on a mortgage and make improvements on those charming acres at the expense of his modest professional income was the main part of what he got out of it. The doctor, as everybody knew, had no genius for making money.

However, he had never lamented his purchase. On the principle perhaps which makes the child who draws most heavily on parental care the object of dearest affection, this particular possession seemed to be the one on which the good doctor prided himself most. Its fine location and natural beauty were points on which he grew eloquent, and he sometimes referred to its peaceful cultivation as the employment in which he hoped to spend his own declining years, an expectation which it is safe to say none of his acquaintances shared with him.

So much for Dr. Northmore's interest in the farm. It had a peculiar interest for the feminine part of his household in the early days of July, when wheat harvest had come and the thres.h.i.+ng machine was abroad in the land. It was too much to expect of Jake Erlock, the tenant at the farm, who, since his wife's death had lived there alone, that he would provide meals for the score of threshers who would bring the harvesting appet.i.te to the work of the great day. Clearly this fell to the Northmores, and the doctor's wife had risen to the part with her own characteristic energy. But for once, on the very eve of the thres.h.i.+ng, she found herself facing a sudden embarra.s.sment. Relatives from a distance had made their unexpected appearance as guests at her house, and to leave them behind, or take them into the crowded doings at the farm, seemed alike impossible. The prompt proposal of her daughters, that they, with the combined wisdom of their seventeen and nineteen years, should manage the harvest dinner, hardly seemed a plan to be adopted, and would have found scant attention but for the unlooked-for support it received from one of the neighbors.

"Now why don't you let 'em do it?" said Mrs. Elwell, who had happened in at the doctor's an hour after the arrival of the guests. "You've got everything planned out, of course, and there'll be lots of the neighbor women in to help. There always is."

She caught the look of entreaty in the eyes of the girls and the doubt in the eyes of their mother, and added, "Now I think of it, I could go out there myself just as well as not. There isn't anything so very much going on at our house to-morrow, and I'd be right glad to take a hand in it. I'll risk it but what the girls and I can manage."

Manage! There was no question on that score. Mrs. Northmore's eyes grew moist and she opened her lips to speak, but her good friend was before her, her pleasant face at that moment the express image of neighborly kindness. "Now, with all you've done for us, you and the doctor, to make a fuss over a little thing like this!" she said. And Mrs. Northmore, with the grace which can receive as well as render a favor, accepted the offer without a protest.

That was how it happened that Esther and Kate Northmore went to the harvesting at the farm, in their mother's stead, the next morning. Kate, at least, carried no anxiety, but Esther, as the older, could not lay aside some uneasiness, not so much lest things should go wrong as lest their generous friend might be too much burdened, and the thought of all there was to do lent an unusual gravity to her sensitive face.

It was a perfect July day, with the sky an unbroken blue except for the clouds which floated like golden chaff high in the zenith. The great machine, flaming in crimson against a background of gold, stood among the ripened sheaves, and a score of sunburned men urged the labor which had begun betimes.

Ah, there is no harvest like this of the wheat. It comes when the year is at its flood, and the sun, rejoicing as a strong man to run a race, holds long on his course against the slow-creeping night. What ingathering of the later months, when the days have grown short and chilly, can match it in joy? The one is like the victory that comes in youth, when the success of to-day seems the promise for to-morrow; the other is the reward that comes to the worn and enfeebled man, who whispers in the midst of his gladness: "How slight at best are the gains of life!"

Esther was too young to moralize and too busy with the very practical work of helping with the dinner to grow poetical over the harvest scene, but the beauty of it did hold her for a minute with a long admiring gaze as she stood by the well, where she had gone for a pitcher of fresh water.

A man in gray jeans had hurried from the edge of the field at sight of her, to lower the buckets hanging from the old-fas.h.i.+oned windla.s.s. She detained him a moment when he had handed her the dripping pitcher.

"We couldn't have had a better day than this, could we?" she said. "And what a good thing it is that you and father decided to put in the wheat!

He was speaking of that at breakfast this morning, and he says it was all your doing. There was such a poor crop last year that for his part he was almost afraid to try it again."

The man's face shone with gratified pride. "Well, I reckon the doctor ain't fretting over it much now that I had my way," he said. And then he added modestly: "But I might have missed it. You never can tell how a crop'll come out till you see the grain in the measure."

"Well, we're seeing that to-day," said the girl. "How much will there be?"

"We can't rightly tell till it's all threshed out," said the man; "but Tom Balcom 'lows it'll average as well's anything they've threshed, and they've had thirty-five bushels to the acre."

Figures did not mean much to Esther, but her "Oh!" had a note of appreciation. Then, as he was turning away, she said earnestly: "I hope we shall have a good dinner for you, Mr. Erlock. Mother was ever so sorry she couldn't come out to-day herself; I believe she was afraid you wouldn't fare as well as you ought without her. But Mrs. Elwell came, and between us all we won't let you suffer."

"I hain't a bit o' doubt about the victuals being good," said the man, gallantly. "I hope you found things all right in the house. I tried to red up a little for you."

"Oh, everything was in beautiful order, and the women are all praising your good housekeeping," said Esther, smiling.

He looked at once pleased and embarra.s.sed. "I did the best I could," he said, then turned with an awkward nod and hurried again to his work.

She remembered hers too, and hastened with her pitcher back to the house. It was a one-story frame, with gray s.h.i.+ngled sides and a deep drooping roof whose forward projection formed a porch across the entire front. Ordinarily it wore an expression of shy reserve, but to-day, with doors and windows open, and the hum of voices sounding through and round it, it seemed to have taken a new interest in life and looked a willing part of the cheerful scene.

The kitchen which the girl entered was full of country women, so full indeed that it seemed a wonder they could accomplish any work, but every one was busy except a young woman with a baby in her arms, who sat complacently watching the labors of the others.

It is the neighborly fas.h.i.+on in the middle West for the women of adjoining farms to help each other in the labors of this busiest time in the year, and the custom had not been omitted to-day because there was no one to return the service. It was rendered willingly as ever, partly from regard for Dr. Northmore, and partly from sympathy with the lonely householder who managed his farm.

"I had to stop and talk a minute with Jake Erlock," said Esther, apologetic for her slight loitering now that she felt the hurry of the work again. "He came up to draw the water for me, and you ought to have seen him blush when I told him you all thought he was a good housekeeper."

"Well, if he has any doubt what we think on that point, he'd better come in here and we'll tell him," said a woman who was grinding coffee at a mill fixed to the wall. "I don't believe there's another man in this towns.h.i.+p that would manage as well as he does. I wouldn't answer for the way things would look at our house if 'twas _my_ man that had the running of 'em."

Groans and headshakings followed this remark. Apparently none of the women present felt any confidence in the ability of their respective men to run the domestic machinery.

"Well, Mis' Erlock was a mighty good housekeeper herself," observed one of them. "And I reckon Jake thinks it wouldn't be showing proper respect to her memory to let everything go at loose ends now she's gone. I tell you, Jake's an uncommon good man in more ways than one. 'Tain't everybody that would stay single as long as he has, but that's just what I expected from the feelings he showed at the funeral, and it coming so long afterward too."

A murmur of a.s.sent showed that the speaker was not the only one who remembered the emotion of the bereaved man on that mournful occasion, which, as had been suggested, occurred some time after his wife's death, the delay of the sermon devoted to her memory being occasioned, as often happens in country districts of the West and South, by the absence of the preacher proper, whose extended circuit gives him but a portion of the year in one place.

"Well, 'twas to his credit, of course," observed an elderly woman who was sh.e.l.ling peas; "but I must say I don't like this way of putting off the funeral so long. I think burying people and preaching about 'em ought to go together, and if you can't have your own preacher, you'd better put up with somebody else, or go without."

"I don't know about that," said the young woman with the baby. "It looks to me as if folks were in a mighty hurry to get the last word said when they can't wait for the right one to say it. I shouldn't want my husband to be so keen to get through with it all, if 'twas me that was taken."

"Maybe you'd want him to do like the man that took his second wife to hear his first wife's funeral," retorted the other.

The defender of local custom admitted, in the midst of a general laugh, that this was carrying it too far, and then the conversation turned on the probability of Jake Erlock's marrying again, the various suitable persons to be found should he feel so inclined, and the importance in general of men having some one to take care of them, and of women having men and their houses to take care of.

The subject which, with its ramifications, seemed fairly inexhaustible was making Kate Northmore yawn and had fairly driven Esther from the room, when a young man with a bright, sunburned face and a pair of straight, broad shoulders looked in at the window.

"My, how good it smells in here!" he exclaimed in a voice that went well with the face. "What all are we going to have for dinner, Aunt Jenny?"

Mrs. Elwell, who was testing the heat of the oven on a plump bare arm, turned a flushed face and motherly smile on the speaker.

"Everything nice," she said. "You never saw a better dinner than the girls have brought out for you. What do you say to fried chicken, and new potatoes, and green peas, with pie and doughnuts to top off, and lots of other good things thrown in extra?"

The young man smacked his lips and sent a devouring glance around the room. "Say!" he repeated. "Why, I say it's enough to make a fellow feel like John Ridd and thank the Lord for the room there is in him. When are you going to give us a chance at all that?"

"When the bell rings, of course," said Kate Northmore, looking up at him with a saucy glance from the meal she was sifting. "You didn't expect to get anything to eat now, I hope."

"Oh, not anything much," said the young man, helping himself to a doughnut from a plate which stood within easy reach. "I just looked in to tell you that while you're getting, you'd better get us a plenty.

We're a fearful hungry crowd, and there won't be much left over; but if there should be, it might come in handy to-morrow."

"_To-morrow!_" repeated Kate, letting the meal which was whirling under her hand fall level in the pan. "You don't mean that there's any danger of your being here to-morrow, do you?"

The young man brushed the chaff from the shoulders of his blue flannel s.h.i.+rt, and set his straw hat a little further on the back of his head before he answered. Kate's "_To-morrow_" had put a complete pause on the talk of the room, and every woman there was looking at him anxiously.

"Well, I wouldn't really say that there's any need of worrying about it _yet_" he said, lowering his voice to a confidential tone; "but you see the men have heard that you and Esther are such stunning good cooks that-well, of course, I don't want to give 'em away, but I don't know as you can blame 'em any for wanting to make the work hold out so as to get in an extra meal or two here, if they can. That's all."

There was a shout at this, and Mrs. Elwell said reproachfully, "Now, Morton, quit your fooling. Aren't you ashamed of yourself to come scaring the girls with your talk about to-morrow? Why, we thought the machine had broken down, or something of that sort."

He did look a little conscience-smitten just then, as Esther, who had caught some hint of excitement in the dining room, where she was setting the table, appeared in the doorway, looking really troubled. Kate was facing him with a different expression.

"Well, since you're so anxious about to-morrow, Mort Elwell, you needn't eat any more of those doughnuts," she said, s.n.a.t.c.hing up the plate toward which his hand was moving a second time, and setting it out of his reach. "We may want them, you know."