Wully

“ From the windows of the parlor the women saw the plot that Wully’s father had insisted on breaking the year before, along one side of which the maple seeds he had planted were presently to appear as slight as spears of sprouting grass. From the kitchen window they saw a row of elms as thick as broomsticks, which Wully had brought the fall before from the creek. ”

“ When she was herself again, Wully found a place for her out of doors. Planks laid on boxes and chairs made seats for supper out there where the smoke defended them, and since there was no back for her to lean against, she having just fainted and all, it was only proper that Wully’s arm do its duty around her. And it was necessary that it give her little strengthening messages, while inside the more zealous [74] young things danced to the fiddle that was not Allen’s. Out in the warm starlight and the smoke, the older guests talked to the bride and groom. ”

“ To give it to Wanton Wully at this stage would be to throw away good-fortune. It was said by Daniel Dyce that the only way to keep a dead secret in the burgh was to send Wully and his handbell round the town with it as public crier. When Wanton Wully cried, it beat you to understand a word he said after “Notice!” but unofficially he was marvellously gleg at circulating news. “What way is she?” he asked again, seeing the postman's hesitation. ”

“ Wully lay playing with the baby, who liked tickling his face with a long spear of grass, and thinking just how he would make that fence, and grinning, at times, to himself. The Sabbath before he had taken Chirstie home for dinner, and when she had seen how the flowers were blooming there, she had explained in vexation about her morning-glories. ”

“ Wully, if Peter’s alive, and just letting his mother think he’s lost, we ought to whip him when he’s found! Every man that’s spent a day hunting him ought to give him a—beating! Wully, he’d never do that! ”

“ It happened one hot August morning on the second day of Wully's incumbency of the position of caddie-in-chief. He lugged his master's clubs across the links, perspiration dropping from his bulbous brow, weariness cramping his thin legs as he strove to keep pace with the huge, tireless old man. The giant was having his own troubles. The unaccustomed heat put him off his game. He foozled, he tore the turf, he lost three balls in the Banlock tarn, and ended by breaking his favorite lofter. "What were caddies for but to be sworn at? Any able-bodied man could carry his own clubs." ”

“ A feverish man wasn’t riding out through a rain like that one without some very good reason. What lassie would it be? He must ask his wife about it.
[43] The path which Wully took required caution, but the cause demanded speed. The way seemed to have stretched out incredibly since he had last gone over it. After riding a hundred miles or so, he got to the little shanty of a barn on the McNair place. Chirstie’s twelve-year-old brother Dod was there, and Wully gave his horse to his care. That horse had to be watched carefully, Wully vowed. ”

“ Wully, who had been swallowing his wrath as best he might all the morning, as man after man came out of pity for Libby Keith, each man’s kindness to her making Wully’s purpose seem the greater sin against the mother—Wully couldn’t understand this story about Peter’s quietness. ”

“ If the boy had had a lesser mother, if he had been well, he would have gone on through the four miles of pouring darkness to Chirstie. But here was shelter and rest for his feebleness, a fire, food, light, a mother, and the children, caresses sprung from the warmest places in human hearts—all things, in short, that a man needs, except one. It seemed that the very kitchen breathed in great, deep sighs of thankfulness and content, this great night of its life, the night Wully got home from the army. ”

“ She gave a little cry and, jumping up, ran into the cabin, and slammed the door behind her. As if he were a robber! Then she came out, even more insultingly, more afraid, and caught up the sleeping baby, and carried her away to safety. She needn’t barricade the house against him, need she? Wully thought, angrily. Then he remembered her face in church. He would sit down and wait a while. He would wait till Dod came home, and see what he could learn from the lad. ”

“ John McLaughlin kept his children hunting, and as for the Squire he vowed he would never stop. His sporting blood was up. For nine days more Wully and his father went again and again from impossible clue to foolish conjecture. Wully’s belief [226] grew constantly stronger that Peter had simply gone back to wherever he had come from. But how he had done it on a road where one passer-by made a day memorable, he couldn’t imagine. It suggested a devilish cunning, a subtility not to be lightly reckoned with, a persistence that made an honest man’s blood boil. ”

“ Old Turkeytrack is where he cannot be consulted to settle it.
Wully is, in a sense, a compound of two dogs; both were mongrels, of some collie blood, and were raised as sheep-dogs. The first part of Wully is given as it happened, after that it was known only that he became a savage, treacherous sheep-killer. The details of the second part belong really to another, a similar yaller dog, who long lived the double life—a faithful sheep-dog by day, and a bloodthirsty, treacherous monster by night. ”

“ Wully might be bewildered, uncomfortable, frustrated, cheated of any assurance of safety for Chirstie. But there was one triumph, and not a small one. “He’s dead. And we never speak ill of the dead, Chirstie!”
She understood his triumph. She would have been glad to have him dead, and not putting Wully into danger. She would be relieved, too, of that sense of terror, if she saw him dead. Then she thought of that great sinful lie, and of Isobel McLaughlin.
“I can’t tell what to wish!” she sighed miserably. [219] “It can’t end well. I wish they’d find him dead. ”

“ There was only one man who escaped, and that was Dorley. This was the more remarkable because he lived in the centre of the region raided, and within one mile of the Devil's Hole. Faithful Wully proved himself worth all the dogs in the neighborhood. Night after night he brought in the sheep, and never one was missing. The Mad Fox might prowl about the Dorley homestead if he wished, but Wully, shrewd, brave, active Wully was more than a match for him, and not only saved his master's flock, but himself escaped with a whole skin. ”

“ There would be no thought of the justification of the man constrained to his murder. There was an intense unfairness about it all, some way. Wully was consoled dumbly by the Squire’s half-heartedness in the search. He grumbled as he went along about having to go. And Wully’s heart warmed to him, not knowing that the Squire’s sensualism, like all men’s, had always to be at war with maternity, which was Libby Keith. Wully had time to question John privately, but he got no further information. Even Chirstie could explain nothing. “Did he look sick?” Wully demanded of her anxiously. ”

“ Wully chuckled. He knew the world. He had seen cities. He had marched across states. He had eaten ice cream.
[19] CHAPTER II WULLY slept the whole afternoon, and that evening the aunts and uncles and cousins began coming to see him. He and Allen, being among the oldest of the clan’s young fry, had been the first to enlist, though since then two of the McNairs, a Stevenson, and a McElhiney had grown old enough to fight. Allen’s death and Wully’s spectacular career had endeared him to the neighbors. They had suffered with him, they thought. ”

“ Alex McNair was the only one that spoke pure anything, he declared. John seemed to like that woman, strange to say. [174] Wully suspected he listened to her because her pronunciation fascinated him, but at Wully’s he was intolerant of any tendency towards Scotticisms. Wully’s and Chirstie’s articulation he supervised continually, their grammar and their diction. They were not allowed to say before John, “She won’t can some,” or “I used to could.” A less happy man than Wully might have resented correction from a younger brother. ”

“ Making the baby his own helped the forgetting. Barbara McNair said to Isobel McLaughlin that she had never seen a man with such a way with a baby as Wully had with that child. And Isobel McLaughlin answered that it was small wonder Wully had a way with babies, since he had carried one in his arms ever since he was three years old. Month by month Wully became in the eyes of that prairie-bound world a more exemplary and unsuspected father to Chirstie’s son. ”

“ The baby grew restless. He complained fretfully of his mother’s lack of attention. Wully gave him, almost mechanically, the ends of the lines to [261] play with. They pleased him, for a while. Then he turned again to his mother, unable to fathom her sternness. Never before had her hands touched him so coldly. Looking right ahead of her, she would pull that little shawl tightly around him again, after he had succeeded in working his bare arms out of it, tucking him in without a kiss or any coaxing. His eyes studied her face, and found there no thought for him. ”

“ For a long time he remained fever-shaken and low-spirited, the last one certainly she would venture to ask about a girl. Day after day he lay contrasting in his mind those two hours with Chirstie, contrasting his dreams with the reality, while the rain continued to sweep across the prairies in gray and windy majesty. One day Andy returned dripping from the post office with the news of Lee’s surrender. Wully celebrated the event with an unusually hard chill. The tidings of Lincoln’s death sickened him desperately. He got to thinking he was never again to be a strong man. ”

“ Isobel couldn’t imagine, of course, that Wully had any real reason for such misgivings. Was it likely a girl would not have her Wully! If he would just listen to her a moment, and wait even till the morrow, they would call the friends in and have a wedding worthy of Chirstie’s mother. It occurred to him that under the circumstances a plan so respectable might have advantages for Chirstie, if only she would consent. And his father began planning how soon he could spare men and horses to begin hauling lumber for the house. ”

“ To have stopped while yet there was sufficient daylight to distinguish another hill of corn would have been shirking; to go to supper while yet one could straighten up without a sharp pain in his back would have been laziness. Yet John was never too tired to choose an idiom as far removed as possible from the one he heard about him. Now that he had been in Chicago he had a growing contempt, which never failed to amuse Wully, for the speech of his own people. What was it they spoke, he demanded scornfully, swinging a violent hoe among the weeds. ”

“ He couldn’t throw her out of the wagon, and the horses were all he could manage, thanks to her excitement. As if in obedience to the thoughts of the humans behind them, they were racing down the path towards the McCreaths’, over which Wully had just come. ”

“ The men never started to the fields with a team without letting the baby ride a few steps on the back of the old mare. No one plowed into a bird’s nest without saving an egg to show the baby. No one ran across a long gaudy pheasant’s [177] feather without saving it for Johnnie’s soft fingers to feel. At noon John carried him out to pat the colt’s nose, or to see the little pigs nosing their way among one another to their mother’s milk. The baby had just naturally become Wully’s child. Wully could never bear the thought of Peter Keith. ”

“ She served the men. They ate in silence, hungrily. Having finished, they went out and lay down in the shade of the house. Most of them slept. Davie McDowell sat next to Wully, smoking vile home-grown tobacco in a stern old pipe. Beyond him Geordie Sproul went on theorizing in a lullabying voice. Wully was half asleep himself when he heard him saying;
“If we knew the girl to ask, we might learn something.” “Girl” when he pronounced it, rhymed with peril. He was a canny man, Geordie, and Wully was instantly awake. ”

“ What they would need first and always would be lumber. The Squire’s John wanted Wully to leave his farm, and start with him selling lumber. Wully would have a little money, and the cousin had some, and for a great wonder, they knew where they could borrow more.
The money they could borrow was a thing which even in those days startled men’s minds. Wully’s cousin John had an aunt who had come with her husband, a miller, from Scotland, and had settled some hundred miles away, where Houghton could get work in a mill. His employer was an old Yankee of some wealth. ”

“ Sometimes she raised her eyes to look into the fire, but never once did she raise them to satisfy Wully’s hunger. His eagerness, her refusal, became apparent at length to even the stupid aunt. She understood that Wully had got home only the night before, and in the morning, rain and all, had ridden over to see the girl who didn’t want to see him. He really was looking very ill. Well, well! Isobel McLaughlin would have been mightily “set up” by such a match. If Chirstie had not been Peter’s own cousin, Libby Keith [45] would have liked nothing better than the girl for her son. ”

“ You come home with me! It’s enough to kill you, staying here with Auntie! Let someone else stay a while. [223] Why can’t Aunt Flora stay with her to-day? You come on home with me!”
“I can stay. She wants me. I can stand anything, if only he’s found. Wully!” she cried, raising a face toward him distorted with tears, “don’t you know where he is?”
If Chirstie had been there to see that face, she would have thought that now, at last, Isobel McLaughlin was betraying her secret, so visibly did forbidden questions tremble on her tongue. Wully only said, soothingly, indulgently ”