Man's Country/Chapter 2
THE sun was shining clear. Some birds were twittering in the plum tree, white with blossoms. Pigeons drummed and cooed in the Flannigan cote, some hundred yards away. The leaves of the maple had enlarged since George was out here two hours before. Everything was astir and a-rustle. The air was warm. The earth was steaming. Seeds were popping in it. Everything—everything seemed imbued with energy save only George Judson.
Lazily he put his hand to the fork, and listlessly he pried its tines to and fro in the soil. He had placed one foot on it to thrust it downward, when his eyes fell upon the folded newspaper and recognized it. He took it up, not so much that he recalled that something in its pages had made his father start and frown, not so much as that unfolding it with delicious deliberation and gazing at each succeeding page long and curiously offered valid excuse for further postponement of entry upon his distasteful task. An illustration, the picture of a cheap-looking wagon, yet with something unmistakably odd about it, had caught his eye, when a sound from the roadside path just over the garden fence drew his attention. He turned and leaned on the fence, transfixed by a vision that was altogether startling.
A rare and glorified equipage, the like of which he had hitherto beheld only in highlycolored picture-books, was coming down the path. A pair of goats, horns polished, fleeces white and immaculate, were drawing a blue wagon, blue as a bluebird's wing, and proudly perched on the little seat, holding silken rope lines in one hand and a tiny whip in the other, sat a young miss of maybe ten years. She wore a red velvet dress, and a red velvet hat shaped like a lampshade. A cascade of golden curls stole out from under the hat and fell away down the little miss's regally upright back.
The goats advanced in leisurely fashion, putting down their feet like sticks, quite after the manner of goats, but daintily as high-bred animals conscious of their estate. The wheels rolled slowly with an aristocratic crunching as they passed over the uneven surfaces of the dirt path. The lady, like a queen in a circus parade—that was the figure that occurred to the boy—gazed proudly around her from side to side. In the course of those regal circlings it was inevitable that her glance should fall upon young George Judson, standing there in the cabbage patch, newspaper fallen from his fingers, leaning on the fence to look at her.
"Hullo, boy!" she smiled, unabashed, serene.
George was petrified. "Hullo!" he said.
And she, having greeted him as a human feature on the landscape, regarded him no further, for when her eyes swept next around the circle of her vision, the cart had moved on so far that he was no longer in range.
Once the spectacle was gone by, George affected to scoff. "Where'd that come from now?" he jested. "Runaway, I'll bet, from some of those big houses down on the avenue. Bet she don't know where she is. Bet she don't know where she's going. Bet they're out looking for her right now's what I bet."
But though his utterances affected scorn, in his heart of hearts George Judson was profoundly touched and softened by the vision of a beauty more tender and appealing than any his gaze had ever rested upon. He felt himself all at once a man and knew that in reality he had looked on really satisfying and enthralling female charm for the first time.
Leaving the paper where it had fallen, George leaned over the fence and marked where the horns of the goats jerked rhythmically up and down, with the red velvet dress stirring gently in the breeze. The queenly poise of the head, with its gradual rotation from side to side, was still the same.
George's mouth was open. Speculative awe held him motionless. His eye never shifted its objective till the last wheel of the blue wagon had disappeared around the corner into that open pasture where the city might be said entirely to cease and the country definitely to begin. Slowly, like one recovering consciousness and memory, the boy turned toward his spade and his newspaper, but before he got to either, a piercing scream had reached his ears—from down the road and round the corner.
George leaped the fence and darted toward the cries. On rounding the corner, a truly piteous spectacle met his alarmed but valorous gaze. Flannigan's brindled goat, the monster! a depraved and bewhiskered old patriarch of no graces and no uses that any one could discover, was attacking the white goats of the little red queen, and with consequences the more disastrous to her majesty because, when a goat attacks, he does not, as the comic supplements portray, double up like a ball of springs and launch himself with lowered head. As a fact of biology, your butting goat elevates himself high upon his hind legs, stiffens himself like a ramrod from horn to heel, then falls like a leaning tower toward the object of his attack, forehead set to smite.
So Flannigan's outlawed billy reared and fell upon the goats of the queen, and so her white steeds reared to meet the attack and fell forward against Flannigan's goat. In consequence the blue wagon of the red queen was going through a series of billowing motions, the front wheels now upon the ground and now in the air, to the necessary disturbance of the peace and dignity of her majesty, who, screaming stridently, but commanding loftily and clinging stoutly, lost her balance just after George rounded the corner, and went rolling backward out upon the dried grass of the pasture.
With true maidenly modesty the little queen thought first of inevitably disarranged skirts and composed them quickly over a pair of legs that appeared to George to be mostly knees, and was sitting up and crying: "Stop him! Stop him! Oh, do please stop him! The horrid, smelly thing!" as her rescuer came dashing up. Gallantry and discretion prompted him to assist the little lady to her feet lest she be trampled upon, but embarrassment and his natural passion for a fight led him to leave majesty to help itself up, and to charge between the battling and embattled animals.
"Ouch!" grunted George. "Dad burn you! Plague take you! Butt me, will you?" and he tried to kick in three directions at once, with only two feet to kick with, one of which must necessarily be upon the ground at least a portion of the time.
"Oo! Oo!" screamed the little queen, wringing her hands.
George's squirming hand now came in contact with the goat whip upon which its owner in her excitement had lost her grip. Using the handle for a weapon of offense, the boy fell upon Flannigan's goat, selecting the nose as the principal point of attack, and speedily put the old rascal in retreat. But he retired stubbornly and turned at a distance of a dozen paces, stamping, flaunting his whiskers, and shaking his horns menacingly.
"Oh! Oh! You have saved me!" cried the little queen. "Thank you! Thank you!" And with admirable resumption of composure, she came right up and took him by the hand, just as a grown-up lady might have done.
George knew this was very queenly and elegant, yet it embarrassed him. He did not know how to respond in kind. He felt all at once that his own social training must have been highly deficient, since it had not equipped him for an emergency like this. "Your britchin' is busted!" he announced concernedly.
"Is it?" gasped the little queen and clawed at herself in dismay. "Why, no,—no, there's nothing broken, I think."
But George was bending over the traces. "Stand still, will you?" he half-ordered and half-entreated—then, holding the still perturbed steeds with one hand, he produced from pocket after pocket, by various physical contortions, an amazing quantity of material—bits of string, bits of wire, a leather shoelace, a one-bladed knife, and some small nails. With these he managed temporary repairs upon the broken breeching, while the little queen gazed with an absorbed expression and tears drying upon her face. She accepted all this service quite as if she were well accustomed to being waited on.
"You're an awfully nice boy," she decided, climbing into the blue wagon and taking the reins, while her radiant eyes looked up so frankly direct into George's that the youngster blushed.
"I'll keep this old skeezicks away from you," he assured, and menaced the brindled creature which waited vindictively in the offing.
"You came from that way," reminded George. "You want to go home, don't you?"
She turned her glorious equipage about, the team being entirely tractable once more till Flannigan's goat began to follow, uttering malicious bleats, when they showed signs of stampede. Thereat the velvet queen manifested alarm, and George, to reassure her, acted as escort clear past the cabbage patch and away down to Kelley's corner, the Flannigan animal obstinately following.
"Now you can go on," said George. "I'll drive old Bill clear back home and put him in the pen."
But when the little girl gazed down the vast length of Jefferson Avenue and considered its huge open spaces that by and by lost themselves in a distance in which horses and wagons and carriages seemed all scrambled up together, a fearsomeness possessed her small soul, and her blue eyes, full of wistful appeal, wavered a moment, then fixed themselves upon the face of the boy.
"I—I'm afraid to go home, I guess," she confessed, as if disappointed in herself. "I've had such a scare, you know. I probably must be nervous."
As if suddenly bereft and alone in the world, she thrust out one of the milk-white hands and took hold of George's wrist—a grasp that was timid and yet confiding—a touch that was altogether different from that sturdy clasp of gratitude with which she had taken his hand before.
Inwardly, in the boy soul of him, George Judson jumped as if a hot iron had been laid upon him, but in his flesh he did not move nor start. He only felt that warm, soft touch like velvet, and it melted every purpose in his breast to one purpose—the purpose to guard the little queen from harm—to do more, to be henceforth and forever in all things her obedient slave.
"I'll go home with you!" he announced stoutly, disregarding loftily unpleasant memories of an unspaded cabbage patch.
"Oo, that will be lovely—just like a prince in a fairy-tale," cried the little girl, clapping her hands. "You rescue me and then you escort me home."
She looked up at him with the most amazing, sun-like radiance in those jeweled eyes of hers, and somehow all the shyness went out of George. Proud as a knight with his lady, he walked along by her side. Imagination played; possibilities dawned; he was ostentatiously attentive. He must frequently stoop to examine the harness, and he must keep his glance skirting wide horizons for possible massing attacks of enemies—Indians or cannibals or whole herds of goats or lions or elephants or whatever danger it was that might threaten this beauteous young lady who put herself so trustfully under his protection.
From time to time her coquettish glance searched the boy's face from under coy lashes, and at intervals her warmest, most confiding smile was vouchsafed, thrilling him to the depths. But besides being a confiding smile it was a tantalizing, bantering smile. George Judson's was a bold nature. He would not be bantered. And he had made up his mind. Why should he not speak it?
"Some day I'll marry you," he announced frankly.
"You?" The little red queen drew herself up, yet she was flattered at the compliment. She gave him, after the first look of hauteur, an even more confiding smile. "I like you, boy, you're awfully nice," and she reached out and took his hand once more as sympathetically breaking the force of what she had to communicate. "But—the man who marries girls like me must be rich. Vurry—vurry rich—or they must do something wonderful, boy—something that makes everybody talk about them. Then we marry them."
"I'm going to be rich and do something wonderful too," declared George Judson with a set of his sturdy shoulders. He had made up his mind to that at once.
For some time the houses past which the goat cart trundled had been getting bigger, and now there appeared in the near distance one red stone house which had a whole quarter of a block to itself. It was huge and solid looking, with a white portico in front and wide lawns unfenced and noble trees all around.
"That's where I live—there!" she announced impressively.
"Gosh!" breathed George, deeply awed. "It's a grand home, isn't it?"
But, at the moment, this home showed signs of being much less at ease within itself than its heavy and self-satisfied architecture might suggest. The vast front door was open. A baldish man, wearing a solemn coat and a worried expression, and a young woman with a lace cap on her head stood out under the portico, staring up and down the four streets, while before a palatial stable at one side two men hurriedly backed horses into a surrey. For a full minute the little queen appeared to enjoy with a certain approving complacency all these signs of stir and anxiety. And then:
"I guess you better go back now, boy," she suggested, still gazing forward with an abstracted air. "They may be's turbed about me being gone so long. They might blame you."
"Let 'em!" George challenged, and would have stood forth boldly.
The blue eyes gave him a grateful look, but the queenly head was shaken in a decisive negative. "I couldn't let you," she whispered with a smile of delightful intimacy, "but I like you, and I'll come driving out your way again sometime. Thank you ever and ever so much. You're a real nice boy—really."
The goats, still putting their feet down like sticks, rolled the little blue wagon forward into the purview of the maid and the butler on the porch. There were immediate manifestations. The butler shouted something, and both he and the maid rushed forward. The grooms stood gazing, then turned the horses back toward their stalls. At the same time a woman bounded down the front steps, raced across the lawn, and seized upon the driver of the goats, kissing her frantically. But the little queen, after enduring a moment in the maternal embrace, struggled free, and from the first step leading upward to the grand portico turned loyal eyes back to the land of adventure whence she had come and toward him who had adventured with her. Sighting that face peering from behind the tree, she lifted an arm high, then dipped the four fingers of its hand up and down rapidly in comradely farewell.