The Best of Gene Stratton-Porter

by Gene Stratton-Porter

  Mrs. Comstock had followed around the corner and stood watching him. “Do you think some slinking hulk was up there peekin’ in at Elnora?” she demanded indignantly.

  “There is muck on the trunk, and plenty on the limb,” said Sinton. “Hadn’t you better get a saw and let me take this branch off?”

  “No, I hadn’t,” said Mrs. Comstock. “First place, Elnora’s climbed from that window on that limb all her life, and it’s hers. Second place, no one gets ahead of me after I’ve had warning. Any crow that perches on that roost again will get its feathers somewhat scattered. Look along the fence, there, and see if you can find where he came in.”

  The place was easy to find as was a trail leading for some distance west of the cabin.

  “You just go home, and don’t fret yourself,” said Mrs. Comstock. “I’ll take care of this. If you should hear the dinner bell at any time in the night you come down. But I wouldn’t say anything to Elnora. She better keep her mind on her studies, if she’s going to school.”

  When the work was finished that night Elnora took her books and went to her room to prepare some lessons, but every few minutes she looked toward the swamp to see if there were lights near the case. Mrs. Comstock raked together the coals in the cooking stove, got out the lunch box, and sitting down she studied it grimly. At last she arose.

  “Wonder how it would do to show Mag Sinton a frill or two,” she murmured.

  She went to her room, knelt before a big black-walnut chest and hunted through its contents until she found an old-fashioned cook book. She tended the fire as she read and presently was in action. She first sawed an end from a fragrant, juicy, sugar-cured ham and put it to cook. Then she set a couple of eggs boiling, and after long hesitation began creaming butter and sugar in a crock. An hour later the odour of the ham, mingled with some of the richest spices of “happy Araby,” in a combination that could mean nothing save spice cake, crept up to Elnora so strongly that she lifted her head and sniffed amazedly. She would have given all her precious money to have gone down and thrown her arms around her mother’s neck, but she did not dare move.

  Mrs. Comstock was up early, and without a word handed Elnora the case as she left the next morning.

  “Thank you, mother,” said Elnora, and went on her way.

  She walked down the road looking straight ahead until she came to the corner, where she usually entered the swamp. She paused, glanced that way and smiled. Then she turned and looked back. There was no one coming in any direction. She followed the road until well around the corner, then she stopped and sat on a grassy spot, laid her books beside her and opened the lunch box. Last night’s odours had in a measure prepared her for what she would see, but not quite. She scarcely could believe her senses. Half the bread compartment was filled with dainty sandwiches of bread and butter sprinkled with the yolk of egg and the remainder with three large slices of the most fragrant spice cake imaginable. The meat dish contained shaved cold ham, of which she knew the quality, the salad was tomatoes and celery, and the cup held preserved pear, clear as amber. There was milk in the bottle, two tissue-wrapped cucumber pickles in the folding drinking-cup, and a fresh napkin in the ring. No lunch was ever daintier or more palatable; of that Elnora was perfectly sure. And her mother had prepared it for her! “She does love me!” cried the happy girl. “Sure as you’re born she loves me; only she hasn’t found it out yet!”

  She touched the papers daintily, and smiled at the box as if it were a living thing. As she began closing it a breath of air swept by, lifting the covering of the cake. It was like an invitation, and breakfast was several hours away. Elnora picked up a piece and ate it. That cake tasted even better than it looked. Then she tried a sandwich. How did her mother come to think of making them that way. They never had any at home. She slipped out the fork, sampled the salad, and one-quarter of pear. Then she closed the box and started down the road nibbling one of the pickles and trying to decide exactly how happy she was, but she could find no standard high enough for a measure.

  She was to go to the Bird Woman’s after school for the last load from the case. Saturday she would take the arrow points and specimens to the bank. That would exhaust her present supplies and give her enough money ahead to pay for books, tuition, and clothes for at least two years. She would work early and late gathering nuts. In October she would sell all the ferns she could find. She must collect specimens of all tree leaves before they fell, gather nests and cocoons later, and keep her eyes wide open for anything the grades could use. She would see the superintendent that night about selling specimens to the ward buildings. She must be ahead of any one else if she wanted to furnish these things. So she approached the bridge.

  That it was occupied could be seen from a distance. As she came up she found the small boy of yesterday awaiting her with a confident smile.

  “We brought you something!” he announced without greeting. “This is Jimmy and Belle—and we brought you a present.”

  He offered a parcel wrapped in brown paper.

  “Why, how lovely of you!” said Elnora. “I supposed you had forgotten me when you ran away so fast yesterday.”

  “Naw, I didn’t forget you,” said the boy. “I wouldn’t forget you, not ever! Why, I was ist a-hurrying to take them things to Jimmy and Belle. My they was glad!”

  Elnora glanced at the children. They sat on the edge of the bridge, obviously clad in a garment each, very dirty and unkept, a little boy and a girl of about seven and nine. Elnora’s heart began to ache.

  “Say,” said the boy. “Ain’t you going to look what we have gave you?”

  “I thought it wasn’t polite to look before people,” answered Elnora. “Of course, I will, if you would like to have me.”

  Elnora opened the package. She had been presented with a quarter of a stale loaf of baker’s bread, and a big piece of ancient bologna.

  “But don’t you want this yourselves?” she asked in surprise.

  “Gosh, no! I mean ist no,” said the boy. “We always have it. We got stacks this morning. Pa’s come out of it now, and he’s so sorry he got more ’an ever we can eat. Have you had any before?”

  “No,” said Elnora, “I never did!”

  The boy’s eyes brightened and the girl moved restlessly.

  “We thought maybe you hadn’t,” said the boy. “First you ever have, you like it real well; but when you don’t have anything else for a long time, years an’ years, you git so tired.” He hitched at the string which held his trousers and watched Elnora speculatively.

  “I don’t s’pose you’d trade what you got in that box for ist old bread and bologna now, would you? Mebby you’d like it! And I know, I ist know, what you got would taste like heaven to Jimmy and Belle. They never had nothing like that! Not even Belle, and she’s most ten! No, sir-ee, they never tasted things like you got!”

  It was in Elnora’s heart to be thankful for even a taste in time, as she knelt on the bridge, opened the box and divided her lunch into three equal parts, the smaller boy getting most of the milk. Then she told them it was school time and she must go.

  “Why don’t you put your bread and bologna in the nice box?” asked the boy.

  “Of course,” said Elnora. “I didn’t think.”

  When the box was arranged to the children’s satisfaction all of them accompanied Elnora to the corner where she turned toward the high school.

  “Billy,” said Elnora, “I would like you much better if you were cleaner. Surely, you have water! Can’t you children get some soap and wash yourselves? Gentlemen are never dirty. You want to be a gentleman, don’t you?”

  “Is being clean all you have to do to be a gentleman?”

  “No,” said Elnora. “You must not say bad words, and you must be kind and polite to your sister.”

  “Must Belle be kind and polite to me, else she ain’t a lady?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then Belle’s no lady!” said Billy succinctly.

  Elnora could sa
y nothing more just then, and she bade them good-bye and started them home.

  “The poor little souls!” she mused. “I think the Almighty put them in my way to show me real trouble. I won’t be likely to spend much time pitying myself while I can see them.” She glanced at the lunchbox. “What on earth do I carry this for? I never had anything that was so strictly ornamental! One sure thing! I can’t take this stuff to the high school. You never seem to know exactly what is going to happen to you while you are there.”

  As if to provide a way out of her difficulty a big dog arose from a lawn, and came toward the gate wagging his tail. “If those children ate the stuff, it can’t possibly kill him!” thought Elnora, so she offered the bologna. The dog accepted it graciously, and being a beast of pedigree he trotted around to a side porch and laid the bologna before his mistress. The woman snatched it, screaming: “Come, quick! Some one is trying to poison Pedro!” Her daughter came running from the house. “Go see who is on the street. Hurry!” cried the excited mother.

  Ellen Brownlee ran and looked. Elnora was half a block away, and no one nearer. Ellen called loudly, and Elnora stopped. Ellen came running toward her.

  “Did you see any one give our dog something?” she cried as she approached.

  Elnora saw no escape.

  “I gave it a piece of bologna myself,” she said. “It was fit to eat. It wouldn’t hurt the dog.”

  Ellen stood and looked at her. “Of course, I didn’t know it was your dog,” explained Elnora. “I had something I wanted to throw to some dog, and that one looked big enough to manage it.”

  Ellen had arrived at her conclusions. “Pass over that lunch box,” she demanded.

  “I will not!” said Elnora.

  “Then I will have you arrested for trying to poison our dog,” laughed the girl as she took the box.

  “One chunk of stale bread, one half mile of antique bologna contributed for dog feed; the remains of cake, salad and preserves in an otherwise empty lunch box. One ham sandwich yesterday. I think it’s lovely you have the box. Who ate your lunch to-day?”

  “Same,” confessed Elnora, “but there were three of them this time.”

  “Wait, until I run back and tell mother about the dog, and get my books.”

  Elnora waited. That morning she walked down the hall and into the auditorium beside one of the very nicest girls in Onabasha, and it was the fourth day. But the surprise came at noon when Ellen insisted upon Elnora lunching at the Brownlee home, and convulsed her parents and family, and overwhelmed Elnora with a greatly magnified, but moderately accurate history of her lunch box.

  “Gee! but it’s a box, daddy!” cried the laughing girl. “It’s carved leather and fastens with a strap that has her name on it. Inside are trays for things all complete, and it bears evidence of having enclosed delicious food, but Elnora never gets any. She’s carried it two days now, and both times it has been empty before she reached school. Isn’t that killing?”

  “It is, Ellen, in more ways than one. No girl is going to eat breakfast at six o’clock, walk three miles, and do good work without her lunch. You can’t tell me anything about that box. I sold it last Monday night to Wesley Sinton, one of my good country customers. He told me it was a present for a girl who was worthy of it, and I see he was right.”

  “He’s so good to me,” said Elnora. “Sometimes I look at him and wonder if a neighbour can be so kind to one, what a real father would be like. I envy a girl with a father unspeakably.”

  “You have cause,” said Ellen Brownlee. “A father is the very dearest person in the whole round world, except a mother, who is just a dear.” The girl, starting to pay tribute to her father, saw that she must include her mother, and said the thing before she remembered what Mrs. Sinton had told the girls in the store. She stopped in dismay. Elnora’s face paled a trifle, but she smiled bravely.

  “Then I’m fortunate in having a mother,” she said.

  Mr. Brownlee lingered at the table after the girls had excused themselves and returned to school.

  “There’s a girl Ellen can’t see too much of, in my opinion,” he said. “She is every inch a lady, and not a foolish notion or action about her. I can’t understand just what combination of circumstances produced her in this day.”

  “It has been an unusual case of repression, for one thing. She waits on her elders and thinks before she speaks,” said Mrs. Brownlee.

  “She’s mighty pretty. She looks so sound and wholesome, and she’s neatly dressed.”

  “Ellen says she was a fright the first two days. Long brown calico dress almost touching the floor, and big, lumbering shoes. Those Sinton people bought her clothes. Ellen was in the store, and the woman stopped her crowd and asked them about their dresses. She said the girl was not poor, but her mother was selfish and didn’t care for her. But Elnora showed a bank book the next day, and declared that she paid for the things herself, so the Sinton people must just have selected them. There’s something peculiar about it, but nothing wrong I am sure. I’ll encourage Ellen to ask her again.”

  “I should say so, especially if she is going to keep on giving away her lunch.”

  “She lunched with the Bird Woman one day this week.”

  “She did!”

  “Yes, she lives out by the Limberlost. You know the Bird Woman works there a great deal, and probably knows her that way. I think the girl gathers specimens for her. Ellen says she knows more than the teachers about any nature question that comes up, and she is going to lead all of them in mathematics, and make them work in any branch.”

  When Elnora entered the coat room after having had luncheon with Ellen Brownlee there was such a difference in the atmosphere that she could feel it.

  “I am almost sorry I have these clothes,” she said to Ellen.

  “In the name of sense, why?” cried the astonished girl.

  “Every one is so nice to me in them, it sets me to wondering if in time I could have made them be equally friendly in the others.”

  Ellen looked at her introspectively. “I believe you could,” she announced at last. “But it would have taken time and heartache, and your mind would have been less free to work on your studies. No one is happy without friends, and I just simply can’t study when I am unhappy.”

  That night the Bird Woman made the last trip to the swamp. Every specimen she possibly could use had been purchased at a fair price, and three additions had been made to the bank book, carrying the total a little past two hundred dollars. There remained the Indian relics to sell on Saturday, and Elnora had secured the order to furnish material for nature work for the grades. Life suddenly grew very full. There was the most excitingly interesting work for every hour, and that work was to pay high school expenses and start the college fund. There was one little rift in her joy. All of it would have been so much better if she could have told her mother, and given the money into her keeping; but the struggle to get a start had been so terrible, Elnora was afraid to take the risk. When she reached home, she only told her mother that the last of the things had been sold that evening.

  “I think,” said Mrs. Comstock, “that we will ask Wesley to move that box over here back of the garden for you. There you are apt to get tolled farther into the swamp than you intend to go, and you might mire or something. There ought to be just the same things in our woods, and along our swampy places, as there are in the Limberlost. Can’t you hunt your stuff here?”

  “I can try,” said Elnora. “I don’t know what I can find until I do. Our woods are undisturbed, and there is a possibility they might be even better hunting than the swamp. But I wouldn’t have Freckles’s case moved for the world. He might come back some day, and not like it. I’ve tried to keep his room the best I could, and taking out the box would make a big hole in one side of it. Store boxes don’t cost much. I will have Uncle Wesley buy me one, and set it up wherever hunting looks the best, early in the spring. I would feel safer at home.”

  “Shall we do the work or
have supper first?”

  “Let’s do the work,” said Elnora. “I can’t say that I’m hungry now. Doesn’t seem as if I ever could be hungry again with such a lunch. I am quite sure no one carried more delicious things to eat than I.”

  Mrs. Comstock was pleased. “I put in a pretty good hunk of cake. Did you divide it with any one?”

  “Why, yes, I did,” admitted Elnora.

  “Who?”

  This was becoming uncomfortable. “I ate the biggest piece myself,” said Elnora, “and gave the rest to a couple of boys named Jimmy and Billy and a girl named Belle. They said it was the very best cake they ever tasted in all their lives.”

  Mrs. Comstock sat straight. “I used to be a master hand at spice cake,” she boasted. “But I’m a little out of practice. I must get to work again. With the very weeds growing higher than our heads, we should raise plenty of good stuff to eat on this land, if we can’t afford anything else but taxes.”

  Elnora laughed and hurried up stairs to change her dress. Margaret Sinton came that night bringing a beautiful blue one in its place, and carried away the other to launder.

  “Do you mean to say those dresses are to be washed every two days?” questioned Mrs. Comstock.

  “They have to be, to look fresh,” replied Margaret. “We want our girl sweet as a rose.”

  “Well, of all things!” cried Mrs. Comstock. “Every two days! Any girl who can’t keep a dress clean longer than that is a dirty girl. You’ll wear the goods out and fade the colours with so much washing.”

  “We’ll have a clean girl, anyway.”

  “Well, if you like the job you can have it,” said Mrs. Comstock. “I don’t mind the washing, but I’m so inconvenient with an iron.”