O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 43

"You can have something else, then." The main thing was to get her at a table opposite him, where they wouldn't have to hurry away. "Let's go in there."

He pointed toward a small restaurant across the street where red candlelights glimmered warmly through panelled lace.

"But that looks like such a stylish place," she protested, even as she let him guide her toward it.

But it was not so stylish when they got inside, and the appearance of the stout woman, evidently both proprietor and cas.h.i.+er, who presided over the scene at a table on a low platform near the door rea.s.sured them both. And the red candleshades were only crinkled paper; the lace curtains showed many careful darns. A rebellious boy of fourteen, in a white jacket and ap.r.o.n, evidently the proprietor's son, came to take their order. After a good bit of urging Anita said that she would take a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee.

Wesley ordered an oyster stew for himself, and coffee, and then grandly added that they would both have vanilla and chocolate ice cream.

"He looks as if he just hated being a waiter," said Anita, indicating the departing boy servitor.

"Sh'd think he would," said Wesley. He put his arms on the table and leaned toward her. "I was going home this afternoon till I saw you. I stayed over just to see you again. I've got to go back in the morning, for I've not got my spring work done; but--you're going with me."

The vein on his forehead heightened his look of desperate determination. He was not so much a suitor as a commander.

"You haven't got any folks and neither have I, so that makes it easy.

I'll come for you in the morning, about eight o'clock, and we'll go get a license and get married, and then we can get the ten-o'clock bus out to Frederick. Oh, girl, I never saw any one like you! I--I'll be good to you--I'll take care of you. It don't matter if I didn't ever see you till this afternoon, I'd never find anybody else that I want so much in a hundred thousand years. I've not got a lot of money, but the farm's mine, all free and clear, and if my wheat turns out all right I'll have a thousand dollars' cash outright come the end of the year, even after the taxes are paid and everything. Won't you look at me, Anita--won't you tell me something? Don't you like me?"

The girl had listened with her eyes cast down, her hands nervously picking at the edge of the tablecloth. But he was not mistaken in her.

She had wherewith to meet him, and her gaze was honest, without coquetry or evasion.

"Oh, I do like you!" she cried with quick colour. "I do! I do! I always thought somebody like you'd come along some day, just like this, and then--it just seemed foolish to expect it. But look here. I told you a story, right off. My name's not Anita--it's Annie. I took to pretending it's Anita because--it does seem sort of silly, but I got to tell you--because I saw it in the movies, and it seemed sort of cute and different, and Annie's such a plain, common name. But I couldn't let you go on talking like that and calling me by it, now could I?"

The mutinous young waiter brought their food and thumped it truculently down before them.

"Look out!" said Dean with sudden violent harshness, the vein in his forehead darkening ominously. "What do you think you're doing, feeding cattle?"

The boy drew back in confusion, and Annie exclaimed: "Oh, he didn't mean it anything against us--he's just mad because he has to be a waiter."

"Well, he'd better be careful; kids can be too smart Aleck."

The little gust had deflected them away from their own affairs. But Annie brought them back. She leaned toward him.

"You make me kind of afraid of you. If you ever spoke to me like that it'd just about kill me."

He was contrite. "Why, I couldn't ever speak to you like that, honey; it just made me mad the way he banged things down in front of you. I don't want people to treat you like that."

"And you look so fierce, too--scowling so all the time."

He put up a brown finger and touched his savage vein.

"Now, now--you mustn't mind my look. All the Dean men are marked like that; it's in the blood. It don't mean a thing." He smiled winningly.

"I reckon if you're beginning to scold me you're going to marry me, huh?"

Something very sweet and womanly leaped in Annie's blue eyes.

"I--I reckon I am," she said, and then confessed herself a brave adventurer and philosopher in one. "Yes, I'd be a fool to sit round and make excuses and pretend it wouldn't do to be so out of the ordinary when here you are and here I am, and it means--our whole lives. I don't care, either, if I didn't ever set eyes on you till to-day--I know you're all right and that what you say's true. And I feel as if I'd known you for years and years."

"That's the way I felt about you the minute I looked at you. Oh"--he gave a vast and shaking sigh--"I can't hardly believe my luck. Eat up your supper and let's get out of here. Maybe there's some stores open yet and I could buy you a ring."

"And I have to be in my boarding house by half-past ten," offered Annie, "or I'll be locked out. What the girls are going to say when I come in and tell 'em----" She looked at him with intense and piteous question--the question that every woman at the moment of surrender asks sometimes with her lips, but always with her heart: "It is going to be all right, isn't it? And you'll be good to me?"

"So help me G.o.d," said young Wesley Dean.

The farm lay high, as Wesley had said. Indeed, all the way from Baltimore they had seemed to be going into the hills, those placidly rounding friendly Maryland hills that rise so softly, so gradually that the traveller is not conscious of ascent. The long straight road dips across them gallantly, a silver band of travel to tie them to the city, with little cities or towns pendent from it at wide intervals.

Trees edge it with a fringe of green; poor trees, maimed by the trimmers' saws and shears into twisted caricatures of what a tree should be, because the telegraph wires and telephone wires must pa.s.s, and oaks and locusts, pines and maples, must be butchered of their spreading branches to give them room.

It was along this highway that the motor bus, filled with pa.s.sengers and baggage and driven with considerably more haste than discretion, carried the newly married pair. Annie's eyes grew wide at the wonder and beauty of it. She was not at all afraid. She snuggled her hand into Wes's and loved it--and loved him, too, with his look of pride and joy in her. She was content to be silent and let him talk. Now and then she looked at the little turquoise ring on her finger above the s.h.i.+ny new wedding ring, and loved that, too, for he had chosen it at once from the trayful offered them, blurting out that she must have it because it matched her eyes.

"All this country out here's rich," he bragged, "but Fred'rick County's far the richest land of all. Richest in the state. Maybe richest in the whole United States, I dunno. And all the farms are big. Great big farms--and great big teams to till 'em. People don't use mules here s'much as they do over on the Eastern Sh.o.r.e. And there's not any sand, like there is over there--in spots, that is."

"What's that man doing?" asked Annie alertly.

"Ploughin'. Say, didn't you ever see a man ploughin' before?" "Only in the movies," said Annie, unabashed. "Do you ever plough?"

He laughed outright.

"Say, you're going to be some little farmer's wife. I can see that.

Yes'm, I plough a little now and then. It's like fancywork--awful fascinating--and once you get started you don't want to stop till you get a whole field done."

"Quit kidding."

"Say, Annie, do you know a chicken when you see it walking round? Or a turkey? Or a guinea keet? We got 'em all. Aunt Dolcey, she takes care of 'em."

"I'd like to take care of 'em. I'll feed 'em, if she'll show me how."

"Aunt Dolcey'll show you. She'll be tickled to death to have somebody feed 'em when she's got the mis'ry."

At Frederick they left the big motor bus and got into Wes's own rackety flivver, the possession of which delighted Annie's heart.

"My land, I never thought I'd get married to a man that owned an automobile," she confessed with flattering frankness in her voice.

"This ain't an automobile," said Wes. "It's a coffeepot, and an awful mean one. Sometimes she won't boil, no matter what I do."

The coffeepot on this particular day chose to boil. They rattled merrily out of Frederick and off into the higher hills beyond. It was a little after noon when they reached the farm.

They had had to turn off the pike and take a winding wood road, rough and muddy from the spring rains. All through the budding green of the trees dogwood had hung out white bridal garlands for them, and there were violets in all the little mossy hollows. At last they came through to the clearing, where lay the farm, right on the ridge, its fields smiling in the sun, a truce of Nature with man's energy and persistence. Yet not a final truce. For all around, the woods crept up to the open and thrust in tentative fingers--tiny pine trees, sprouts and seedlings of hardwood, sc.r.a.ps of underbrush--all trying to gain a foothold and even when cut and overturned by the sharp plough still clinging tenaciously to their feeble rooting.

"It looks somehow," said Annie, vaguely understanding this, "as if the trees and things were just waiting to climb over the walls."

"And that's what they are," said Wesley Dean. "The time I put in grubbing! Well--let's go in and see Aunt Dolcey."

He had told her, coming out, that he was afraid she would find the house sort of plain, but just the s.p.a.ce of it delighted her. The rooms were bare and square, whitewashed exquisitely, the furniture dark old cherry and walnut of a style three generations past.

There were no blinds or curtains, and in the streaming sunlight Annie could see that everything was clean and polished to the last flicker of high light. Here and there were bits of colour--crimson and blue in the rag carpet, golden bra.s.s candlesticks on the mantel, a red-beaded mat on the table under the lamp, the lamp itself clear gla.s.s and filled with red kerosene that happily repeated the tint of the mat. It all pleased Annie, touching some hitherto untw.a.n.ged chord of beauty in her nature. And there was about it the unmistakable atmosphere of home.

"Old-fas.h.i.+oned but sort of swell, too," she decided. "Looks kind of like some of the parlours of those old houses on Charles Street that I used to rubber into in the evenings when the lights were lit and they'd forgot to put the blinds down."