George W. Ogden

“ Joe stood at the fence, looking after Morgan, long after the dust of his wheels had settled again to the road. At last he went back to the place where he had dropped his scythe, and cut a swath straight through to the tree where Ollie’s bonnet had hung. And there he mowed the trampled clover, and obliterated her footprints with his own.
The weight of his discovery was like some dead thing on his breast. He felt that Ollie had fallen from the high heaven of his regard, never to mount to her place again. But Isom did not know of this bitter thing, this shameful shadow at his door. ”

“ What if Morgan never should come back? What if she should find herself a double widow, bereft of both the living and the dead?
During her days she watched for him, straining her eyes up and down the dust-white road. At night her cheek burned upon her pillow, and her tears ran down, yearning for the man who had her heart’s love in his keeping and seemed unworthy of the trust.
At such times her anger would flame hot against Joe. If he had not come into her affairs and muddled them, like a calf in a kitchen, all of this uncertainty and longing would have been spared her. ”

“ Greening let his hand fall. He stepped back a pace, Joe’s subdued, calm warning penetrating his senses like the sound of a blow on an anvil. Last week this gangling strip of a youngster was nothing but a boy, fetching and carrying in Isom Chase’s barn-yard. Tonight, big and bony and broad-shouldered, he was a man, with the same outward gentleness over the iron inside of him as old Peter Newbolt before him; the same soft word in his mouth as his Kentucky father, who had, without oath or malediction, shot dead a Kansas Redleg, in the old days of border strife, for spitting on his boot. ”

“ Joe reproached himself for it. He accused himself of having offended beyond forgiveness. In the humiliation which settled upon him, he wasted like water in the sun. The mignonette which she had given him withered, dried; its perfume vanished, its blossoms turned gray. She came no more. What did it matter if they convicted him before the judge, said he, now that Alice had condemned him in her heart. He lamented that he had blundered into such deep offending. His untutored heart had seen only the reflection of his own desire in her eyes that day. She did not care for him. ”

“ The judge would understand him, and would not press a man to tell what he had delicate reasons for concealing, when the concealment could bring harm to nobody, but boundless good to one weak creature who must wither otherwise in the blaze of shame.
He remembered the strong face and the long iron-gray hair of Judge Maxwell; only a little while ago Joe had given him some apples which he had stopped to admire as he drove past Isom’s orchard in his sagging, mud-splashed, old buggy. He was a good man; the uprightness of his life spoke from his face. Judge Maxwell was a man to understand. ”

“ Joe bowed his head, as one overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and shame, yet never doubting that he had acted for the best when he assumed the risk on that sad night to shield his master’s wife. It was a thing that a man must do, that a man would do again.
He did not know that Alice Price, doubting not him, but the woman who had just left the witness-stand and resumed her place among the people, was that moment searching out the shallow soul of Ollie Chase with her accusing eyes. She sat only a little way from Ollie, in the same row of benches, beside the colonel. ”

“ One can see farther back by the soft glow of wood coals, leaning over and looking into them, than under the gleam of the strongest lamp. Judge Maxwell had a long vista behind him to review, and it seemed to him that night that it was a picture with more shadow than gleam. This day’s events had set him upon the train of retrospection, of moody thought.
He had seen that boy, Joe Newbolt, leap out of the obscurity of his life into the place of heroes, as he would have had his own son do, if he could have kept him by his side and fashioned his life. ”

“ Yes, Ollie Chase had her own nobility; the laurel was due her poor, smirched brow, just as much as it was to Joe Newbolt’s lofty forehead. Contrition doubtless played its part in driving her to open confession, and the pain of concealment must have been hard to bear. But there was an underlying nobility in that woman’s heart which had urged her on stronger than all. It is a spark in the breast of even the most debased, thought the judge, which abnegation and sacrifice often kindle into a beautiful flame. ”

“ The scent of them was in his nostrils, stirring memories of his old days of simple poverty, of days in the free fields. Again he turned his face toward the window, the little flowers clutched in his hand. His breast heaved as if he fought in the deep waters of his soul against some ignoble weakness.
She moved a little nearer, and reached timidly through the bars with the breathless quiet of one who offers a caress to a sleeper. Her finger-tips touched his arm.
“Joe,” said she, as if appealing in pity to him for permission to share his agony. ”

“ Joe took the apples, the recollection of the high hopes which he had centered around that little apple-tree when he planted it coming back to him like a scented wind at dawn. He had planned to make that tree the nucleus of an orchard, which was to grow and spread until it covered the old home place, the fields adjoining, and lifted the curse of poverty from the Newbolt name. It had been a boyish plan which his bondage to Isom Chase had set back.
He had not given it up for a day while he labored in Chase’s fields. When he became his own man he always intended to take it up and put it through. ”

“ Ollie’s brightening was only physical. In her heart she was as gloomily hopeless as before. After his first flash of fire she had not found much comfort or hope of comradeship in the boy, Joe Newbolt. He was so respectful in her presence, and so bashful, it seemed, that it almost made her uncomfortable to have him around.
Man that he was in stature, he appeared no more than a timid boy in understanding, and her little advances of friendliness, her little appeals for sympathy, all glanced from the unconscious armor of his youthful innocence and reserve. ”

“ Joe remained standing there a little while. The growing wind, which marked the high tide of night, lifted his hat-brim and let the moonlight fall upon his troubled face. Around him was the peace of the sleeping earth, with its ripe harvest in its hand; the scents of ripe leaves and fruit came out of the orchard; the breath of curing clover from the fields.
Joe brought a horse from the barn and leaped on its bare back. He turned into the highroad, lashing the animal with the halter, and galloped away to summon Constable Bill Frost. ”

“ One may grieve, honestly and deeply, without wearing away the cheeks or burning out the heart, for there is a soft sorrow which lies upon the soul like a deadening mist upon the autumn fields. But there is no worry without waste. One day of it will burn more of the fuel of human life than a decade of placid sorrow.
How much would he tell? Would it be all–the story of the caress in the kitchen door, the orchard’s secret, the attempt to run away from Isom–or would he shield her in some manner? ”

“ She laughed, as if she found humor in his solemn repetition of such a trivial discovery.
“Well, I can’t help being tall,” she said. “How tall would you have a lady grow? How tall do you think one ought to be?”
“‘As high as my heart,’” said Joe, remembering Orlando’s words.
The color deepened in her cheeks; she caught her breath with a little “Oh!”
She wondered what sprout of blue-blooded and true-blooded nobility in Shelbyville there was capable of turning a reply like that without straining for it more than that pale cavalier with his worn clothing hanging loose upon his bony frame. ”

“ He sat there reflectively a little while; then got up, stretching his arms, yawning with a noise like a dog.
“Guess I’ll go to bed,” said he.
He looked for a splinter on a stick of stove-wood, which he lit at the stove and carried to his lamp. At the door he paused, turned, and looked at Ollie, his hand, hovering like a grub curved beside the chimney, shading the light from his eyes.
“So he brought a Bible, did he?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’s welcome to it,” said Isom. “I don’t care what anybody that works for me reads–just so long as he works!” ”

“ He was afraid that the hard fare and harder work would result in stunting his growth, like a young tree that has come to a period of drought green and promising, and stands checked and blighted, never again to regain the hardy qualities which it needs to raise it up into the beauty of maturity.
The work gave him little concern; he knew that he could live and put on strength through that if he had the proper food. So there would have to be a change in the fare, concluded Joe, as he sat there while Isom discussed the merits of dandelion and jowl. ”

“ Ollie, her eyes closed languidly, now languidly opened to follow the track of the lamb-fleece clouds, her young body feeling warm and pleasant, as if lately released from a sorely cramped state; Ollie, with little fleeting dreams in her pretty, shallow head, was believed by the women of the neighborhood to be in the way of realizing on Isom’s expectations of an heir. It was a little fiction that had taken its beginning from Sol Greening’s early talk, and owing to that rumor the coroner had been gentle with her beyond the inclination of his heart. ”

“ As she spoke she put her hand to her throat, and her tears gushed again.
“That’s no way for a man to treat his wife,” said Joe indignantly.
“If you knew everything–if you knew everything!” said she.
Joe, being young, and feeling younger, could not see how she was straining to come to a common footing of understanding with him, to reach a plane where his sympathy would be a balm. He could not realize that her orbit of thought was similar to his own, that she was nearer a mate for him, indeed, than for hairy-limbed, big-jointed Isom Chase, with his grizzled hair and beard. ”

“ In the attitude of his lean frame, in the posture of his foot upon the step, he seemed to be asserting a mastery over the place which he had invaded to the sad dispersion of Sarah Newbolt’s dreams.
“I hate to do it,” he declared, speaking hurriedly, as if he held words but frail vehicles in a world where deeds counted with so much greater weight, “but I’ve been easy on you, ma’am; no man can say that I haven’t been easy.”
“I know your money’s long past due,” she sighed, “but if you was to give Joe another chance, Mr. Chase, we could pay you off in time.” ”

“ Uncle John never came to realize his hopes of freedom, any more than he ever came to realize the uselessness of paint for his angels when he had no eyes for applying it. He whittled on, in melancholy dejection, ring upon ring in his endless chains of rings, forging in bitter irony the emblems of bondage, when his old heart so longed to be free.
It was a bright day in the life of Uncle John Owens, then, when Ollie’s lawyer called at the poorhouse and placed under his hands some slender slips of cardboard bearing raised letters, the A B C of his age. ”