“First let’s have a good cognac, Mr. Cleveland,” remarked the other, a man with long black hair and a black mustache. “The night will be cool, and riding through the high, wet grass without warming the stomach would be bad for your health.”
The peddler, for that’s what Cleveland was, smiled at this splendid suggestion from the black-bearded stranger, since he knew quite well that the fellow didn’t have a damned cent in his pocket.
So he would not insist on being treated.
The other had expected this.
They went to a forlorn little country grocery, such as one finds by the hundreds in Illinois. These are usually not far from riverbanks and always located so that the residents for miles around have no problem getting there.
This is where the gatherings for county and state elections take place. The area around these groceries is suited for the inevitable stump-speakers, who often stay for three or four days, naturally at the expense of their chosen candidates.
The country grocer always does his best business during these periods, often shoveling four hundred dollars out of his drawer and under the counter on a single day.
The grocer watches this mad bustle with pleasure, dropping a word here and there in favor of the speaker, who shouts his throat hoarse and repays the stormy applause of his listeners by hosting them at the bar.
Once whiskey and brandy have electioneered enough and people are supplied for their return, many a farmer buys colorful cottons or bonnets, fans, stockings, and so on for his lady, for these are all available in a country grocery. The grocer is cobbler, tailor, stocking-maker, dressmaker, blacksmith, all in one person. The enthused electors also do not forget their youngsters. For them they take home candy of all varieties and every color. Ginger cakes, molasses candy—in short, all the confections Yankees desire.
“Do good business, Cleveland, and if you do get to New Orleans, don’t forget to bring me my cigars and greet my friends,” the grocer called to the peddler as he rode off with his companion.
After a ride of two hours, they were on Looking-Glass Prairie, which extended as far as the eye could see.
The night was clear as the stars; only a few light clouds moved across the heavens, hiding the full disk of the moon for a moment.
Only someone who has taken a night ride through the endless prairies of the West can conceive of the splendid and silent majesty that reigns in such a place.
One believes himself to be listening to the breath of nature and forgets all those petty concerns and problems arising from people and the restless hustle of working life that so often disturb us and keep our natural sensibilities and desires in morbid tension.
One gives himself over utterly to his feelings, and at such moments the heart celebrates a festival, breaking the bonds with which rational understanding and conventional rules of social life bind it.
The banner of love gleams on the peaceful forehead of the youth thinking of his beloved far away. Whoever bears hatred and resentment in his heart forgives and forgets. Numbers vanish from the head of the speculator. Even the horse lowers his neck and follows his leader.
Listen! A scream sounds out of the darkness of high grasses, followed by a mournful gurgle.
A restless fluttering and flapping of wings rises above the dew drops.
It is a prairie hen and her chicks, roused from sleep by a passing pack of wild dogs.
You can’t see the dogs; only the tops of the grass part for an instant and shake in the moonlight.
Then solemn silence reigns once more.
The breath of the horses rises from their nostrils and loses itself in the night-mist.
“Stay closer to my side,” the peddler said, interrupting a silence of some hours, halting his horse, and looking around at his companion, who was a good fifteen paces back.
“The grass will soon be getting taller,” he continued, “and it would be easy to lose sight of me—another half mile and it will be up to your neck.”
“Yes, you’re right, Mr. Cleveland. It is also much more pleasant to ride alongside you,” the other responded, spurring his horse forward.
So they rode silently for a while next to each other, and soon they reached a place where the moist grass stroked their faces and made them wet.
“It is not always so chilly on the prairie,” the peddler declared to his companion, “particularly at this time of year on such a lovely, clear night. Look over there, that last little cloud is just evaporating … look, look,” he called out, “those large lightning bugs, how they sparkle, how they flash!”
The other man looked in all directions.
“You must have seen a shooting star, Mr. Cleveland, and you took it for a lightning bug.”
“There, now there—now they’re flying right in front of your eyes—there, didn’t you see them? Look, look, they’re still there—grab them!”
The other looked in all directions, high and low.
“Well, if you can’t see them, I’ll catch one for you,” and with these words the peddler shot his hand straight out, but pulled it back in the next instant.
“What the devil! What are you doing? Are you insane? You could have put both my eyes out!” the other shouted.
“May heaven strike me,” the peddler replied, “if your eyes did not look just like lightning bugs.
And so they did.
Since they were covered by the tall grass up to their temples, and the position of the moon joined their shadows together, they could see nothing of each other besides their eyes, which swam through the moist darkness of the prairie like glowworms.
Since the peddler’s companion often faced him, this error was all the more understandable.
“I only wish,” Cleveland mused after an interval, “that I had not left my buffalo shoes behind in St. Louis; they would have done good service here. My shoes are soaked through now.”
“Mine too,” his companion responded, “don’t you have some blankets, an old undershirt or something else? I would like to wrap them around my feet.”
“That’s a good idea I’ll use for myself as well,” the peddler said as he turned to loosen the straps of his mantle.
The other rider broke down some of the high grass.
The peddler’s horse suddenly stood on his rear feet and kicked so high that his hoofs flashed above the high grass in the moonlight.
“Psst, psst! John,” the peddler cooed to his horse, leading her head to the ground with a practiced hand. “Psst, psst, John, what the devil—what’s the matter with you?”
Two shots echoed through the silence of the endless prairie.
The horse sprang once more into the air and fell lifeless on the corpse of his master.
Lajos’s eyes gloated at the booty he sought.
“Thunder and lightning,” the murderer declared to himself, “if the horse had run away with the baggage, it would have been pointless to shoot its master—let me see, John, where did my bullet hit you? Look, look, what a lucky soul I am, another couple inches and the beast would have wanted to beat it.”
While Lajos leaned over the horse, now kneeling, now standing while he ripped the peddler’s baggage to pieces, Lydia came sniffing at the corpse of her former master, finally settling on the ground, her head on his breast.
Lajos was finished. Four thousand dollars, partly in gold, partly in Missouri bonds, was the fruit of his search.
And now?
“I can’t ride to Shellville, since they know Cleveland’s mare there,” he thought to himself. To return without her would raise suspicion.” It did not occur to Lajos that he could neither go to Shellville nor return from where he came, since he could find neither path by himself.
It was already an hour before midnight.
“Will you just get up, mad beast—I almost believe you’re mourning for that old codger there—march!” Lajos cursed at the mare and kicked her in the withers to get her to rise. But the faithful beast would not budge from the spot.
The
peddler’s horse lay next to them.
Lajos suddenly sprang up with a cry of terror that reverberated through the still majesty of the night, his hand spasmodically shooting to his left cheek. This shriek even caused Lydia to raise her head and look around at her master’s murderer.
Lajos roared as if a whole hell of furies and snakes were at work on his innards. His eyes sprang out of their hollows, as if they could thus more easily be witnesses to this dreadful scene. In all directions he saw the blood, which flowed from his cheek down to his lips.
Dreadful moaning and whistling arose from his breast, interrupted only by his fluent curses.
A pack of prairie wolves, led here by a mysterious instinct to descend upon the corpses, fell back over one another at the sight of this human fury who pounded the ground, howling, cursing, and whimpering.
The peddler’s horse, in its last death-agony, had bitten the murderer’s cheek.
The still of the night can pour out redeeming grace on a pure conscience and an innocent heart, causing them to forget sorrows and concerns. The evening glow of a star-strewn heaven can cause the poet to dream and can kiss his pounding fever. Disappointed love can wander along the wide arch of the milky way, to cry out its pain. But the murderer cursed the stars and moon, longing for the blinding sun.
Lajos stood next to Lydia, dispirited and exhausted.
He directed no more curses across the sea of grass—but all the more he continued to curse to himself.
“If only this beast were a person,” he thought to himself, “I would leave behind a monument that would shame it even in death.”
Lydia still seemed to have no desire to get up and bear the murderer’s burden. Lajos did everything he could think of, but in vain. It was time to make a quick decision to get away from the place of his atrocity.
“To go on foot with this money, never having any idea which direction to go … ? Too bad I never bothered with astronomy—the stars would help me avoid the way I should not return. Should I wander for days, perhaps returning to this very place? The devil with it, does Lajos have so little spirit for improvisation?”
He stood for a few moments in indecision.
A thought flashed across the murderer’s dark features.
“I will bring this stubborn beast to its feet,” he said to himself, taking the peddler’s useless baggage and setting fire to it.
He had calculated correctly.
No sooner did Lydia see the flame than she rose from the ground and got ready to run with a whinny. Lajos was prepared for this moment.
The Hungarian, this former officer of hussars, threw himself on the horse’s back and grabbed the raised mane with a quick grasp.
“Thunder and lightning,” he sounded through the silent night, “she’s going like she’s on her way to hell! Prairie fire, prairie fire,” he laughed in the mare’s ear, as the night heavens began to redden and the flames rushed after them with the swiftness of the wind.
“Prairie fire, prairie fire, Lydia! Forward, forward into hell!”
Chapter 4
GRETCHEN IN THE BUSH
The forest greens and the heath reddens,
Winter with its feathery clothing flees,
The snow melts on the heath.
Where the wild birds once flapped enticingly
The farmer’s child walks with quiet complaint!
Blue flowers, red clover,
Bloom not now, my heart hurts too much!
[Otto der Schütz]
Since the regrettable episode that had led to the death of old farmer Carr and Lajos’s flight, Sarah had become an entirely different girl. She no longer snuck up behind her father to give him a pat on the back while he was engaged in his work. She no longer rolled about on the ground, and she spoke only a little or not at all with her neighbors. The guinea hens could now pass their nights in the open unmolested, for she no longer drove them into the hedgerows. The cheery redbird,* used to getting fresh offerings three times a day, had lost its good mood and bumped its black-feathered head against the sides of its cage with irritation and distress when another hand cared for it at noon. The cows showed their dissatisfaction over their lack of bran, which only Sarah could mix in the amount they craved. They trampled around unhappily, and at night, when they were closed in, they often raised as much of a ruckus as if a panther had attacked.
Watson shook his head in concern as he saw his daughter lose so suddenly her old high spirits and rosy freshness of life. He could not imagine that the episode with the old farmer could have made for such a total transformation of her old happiness. He thought he understood that much.
It often occurred to him that his child might have harbored a covert affection for Lajos, and so the episode tormented her heart. But when he weighed all the earlier conditions, he decided he had been incorrect. So passed the fall, making way for winter.
The limbs of the sycamore and cottonwoods groaned under the weight of snow, which covered the entire region far and wide.
The farmhouse was often so snowed in that it was all six hands could do to clear the snow immediately around the house. For several weeks the snow had prevented the farmer from going to the market in St. Louis, which put him a bad mood.
One evening, as it snowed and stormed quite heavily, the farmer sat alone with Sarah at a large table with a round marble top, which a lady friend from St. Louis had given her as a gift.
Both of them were concentrating on sorting flower and vegetable seeds into packets prepared ahead of time.
Watson’s workers had already quit for the day. Outside the wind howled and shook the doors and windows of the farmhouse.
Next to the door lay a large hound that had been allowed into the warm room due to the stormy weather.
Sarah was very efficient at filling the packets with seeds. She had already placed several dozen in a basket that she now passed to her father to be sorted into their proper order.
No one spoke a word.
Watson, who was determined to discover the source of his daughter’s change in mood, had remained silent so far this evening, wondering how he could move Sarah to some sort of confession. Since she had been avoiding his frequent questions, he now intended to get to his goal by an indirect path.
When Sarah passed him a second basket, he said: “If I had known that Lajos had such a touchy and heated temperament, I would never have taken him on. Then we would have been spared all the distress resulting from that act. Old Carr must have given him a lot of trouble for him to have fallen into such a rage.”
“You would certainly not have taken such an insult with indifference yourself, father,” Sarah responded without looking up.
“To be sure, my child. But when one has performed a dishonorable deed, one must tolerate being called to account for it.”
“But father—you still believe that the Hungarian gentleman was capable of such an act?”
“Your own account of that fateful encounter gives me the right to wash my hands of him,” the farmer remarked, observing his child carefully.
“You cannot do that, dear father—I believe for a fact that Mr. Carr mistook him for another, for one Hungarian looks like another. Didn’t you yourself say to me that Lajos looked precisely like a young man who worked for us last year? Couldn’t it just as well have been Marian? Marian was a nasty, evasive person whom I always feared when he approached me. But Lajos—it is not right to hold a person to be bad when you do not have proof,” Sarah interrupted her own chain of thought, since she felt she had already said too much on Lajos’s behalf.
The farmer, who perceived this interruption, continued: “Where on earth could poor Lajos have gone? Heaven grant that they don’t catch him, since then you would have to appear in court as a witness—but that would be the least of it, since such a murderer, even if he did not do the deed as accused, must have a lamentable fate. In a case such as that, I would rather put an end to my life myself. Yes, yes, wherever he is wandering right now, his lot is certainly
not enviable.”
Sarah could no longer hold back her feelings. Hot tears coursed over her cheeks and dropped on the packet she had just filled with seeds of blue knightspur.
Joy beamed on the face of the farmer, joy that he had finally succeeded in discovering his dear child’s situation. What more proof did he want? What could prove more than these tears that his child had loved Lajos, loved him even now? When he looked across at lovesick Sarah, who had dropped her little head and was trying to hold back the tears, it was no longer possible for him to torture his child or even to continue his interrogation.
He drew her to his lap and sought to soothe her to the best of his powers.
“Sarah, my dear child, why did you trust your father so little that you kept your concerns to yourself? Tell me, my child, has your love for Lajos buried itself so deeply in your heart that it has robbed you of all your personal peace, has robbed you of all your youthful cheer? Girl, girl, what changes you have undergone! If your dear mother were still living, she would hardly recognize her child.”
“O Father,” Sarah said in pained tones, “you are so good to your child—but Father, tell me, am I committing so great a crime when I love Lajos? You liked him, too, Father. You still remember the evening when all your other workers did not want to work any further since they had done their hours, and Lajos helped us dig the potatoes late into the night so you could take them to market the next day. What did you say then, father? Didn’t you say how much you liked this Hungarian gentleman? He was so calm, so hard-working and solid?
The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures) Page 18
