The Fighting Shepherdess

by Lockhart, Caroline

  Passing on to the purpose for which he had risen, Mr. Scales averred that it was probable that he would be considered an impractical visionary when he made known his proposition; nevertheless, it had been long in his mind and no harm would come from voicing it. To his notion, the thing most needed to revitalize Prouty was an electric car-line. This line should start at the far end of town, somewhere down by the Double Cross Livery Stable, possibly, and end at an artificial lake and amusement park a few miles out in the country—he waved his arm vaguely. A street car whizzing through Prouty would put new life in it, and so hungry were its inhabitants for entertainment that he had no doubt whatever that the amusement park would make ample returns upon the investment.

  Mr. Butefish made a note of Mr. Scales’s vision, but very much questioned as to whether Prouty was ripe for a street railway, since—he admitted reluctantly—such a project might be a little ahead of the immediate requirements.

  Other suggestions followed—among them, the possibility of opening up an outcropping of marble in a canyon sixteen miles from Prouty. The marble, though badly streaked with yellow, would, it was opined, serve excellently for tombstones. Also, there was a clay peculiar to a certain gulch in the vicinity which was believed by the discoverer to contain the necessary qualities for successful brick-making.

  Then “Gov'nor” Sudds arose in a flattering silence to give the Club the benefit of his cogitations. Something large always could be expected of the “Gov'nor.” Although he lived in three figures, he thought in seven, and not one of the Gov'nor’s many projects had been capitalized at less than a million.

  Conrad has said that listening to a Russian socialist is much like listening to a highly accomplished parrot—one never can rid himself of the suspicion that he knows what he is talking about. The same, at times, applied to the Gov'nor. He said nothing so convincingly that always it was received with the closest attention.

  Now, as Sudds stood up, large, grave and impressive, he looked like a Roman Senator about to address a gathering in the Forum. No one present could dream from his manner that he had that day received a shock, the violence of which could best be likened to a well-planted blow in the pit of the stomach. As a hardy perennial candidate for political office, he had become inured to disappointment, but the present shock had been of such an unexpected nature that for hours Mr. Sudds had been in a state little short of groggy. The maiden aunt of seventy, upon whose liberal remembrance he had built his hopes as the Faithful hug to themselves the promise of heaven, had married a street car conductor and wired for congratulations. He had pulled himself together and staggered to the meeting where, though still with the sinking sensation of a man who has inadvertently stepped through the plastering of the ceiling, he was able to dissemble successfully.

  Clearing his throat, the Gov'nor fixed his eyes upon “Hod” Deefendorf, owner of the Double Cross Livery Stable, and demanded:

  “Among all the voices of Nature is there a more pleasing or varied sound than that of falling water?”

  He paused as though he expected an answer, so “Hod” squirmed and ventured weakly that he “guessed there wasn’t.”

  The Gov'nor continued: “The gentle murmur of the brook, the noisy rumble of rapids, the thundering roar of mighty cataracts—can you beat it?” In a country where the school children giggled at sight of an umbrella, the question seemed irrelevant, so this time no one replied.

  “Consider the rivulet as it glints and glistens in ceaseless change, the fairy mists of shimmering cascades, the majestic sweep of waterfalls—has Nature any force more potent for the use of man than falling water? No! None whatever! And I propose that we yoke these racing tumbling forces back there in yon mountains and make them work for us!”

  The members exchanged glances—the Gov'nor was living up to their expectations of him.

  “That accomplished, I propose,” the Governor declared dramatically, “to take nitrogen from the air and sell it to the government!”

  He looked triumphantly into the intent upturned faces into which had crept a look of blankness. There were those who thought vaguely that nitrogen was the scientific name for mosquito, while others confused it with nitre, an excellent emergency remedy for horses.

  “They’ve done it in Germany,” he continued, “and used it in the manufacture of high explosives. Is there any gentleman present who will tell me that what’s been done in Germany, can’t be done in Wyoming?”

  The applause was tumultuous when he had further elucidated and finished. To get something out of nothing made a strong appeal to Prouty. It was criminal for Sudds to waste his abilities in a small community. They wondered why he did it.

  Hiram Butefish, who succeeded the orator, felt a quite natural diffidence in giving to the Club his modest suggestion, but as he talked he warmed to his subject.

  “I am convinced,” declared Mr. Butefish, “that the future of Prouty lies in fossils.”

  “Human?” a voice inquired ironically.

  “Clams,” replied Mr. Butefish with dignity. “Also fish and periwinkles. Locked in Nature’s boozem over there in the Bad Lands there’s a world of them. I kicked ’em up last year when I was huntin’ horses, and realized their value. They’d go off like hot cakes to high schools and collectors. We could get a professor in here cheap—a lunger, maybe—to classify ’em, and then we’d send out our own salesman. We can advertise and create a market.

  “Gentlemen,” solemnly, “we have not one iota of reason to be discouraged! With thousands of acres available for peppermint; with more air to the square inch than any place else in the world, with an inexhaustible bed of fossils under our very noses, all we need to fulfill the dreams of our city’s founder is unity of effort and capital. In other words—MONEY!”

  “And the longer you stay in Prouty the more you’ll need it!”

  The jeering voice from the rear of the room belonged to Toomey.

  The Club turned its head and looked at the interrupter in astonishment. He was sitting in the high-headed arrogance with which once upon a time they had all been familiar. Though momentarily disconcerted, Mr. Butefish collected himself and retorted:

  “Perhaps you have something better to offer, Toomey.”

  “If I hadn’t I wouldn’t offer it,” he replied insolently.

  The thought that came instantly to every mind was that Toomey must have had a windfall. How else account for this sudden independence? This possibility tempered the asperity of Mr. Butefish’s answer, though it still had plenty of spirit:

  “We are ready to acknowledge your—er—originality, Mr. Toomey, and will be delighted to listen.”

  To Toomey it was a rare moment. He enjoyed it so keenly that he wished he might prolong it. Uncoiling his long legs, he surveyed his auditors with a tolerant air of amusement:

  “I presume there are no objections to my mentioning a few of the flaws that I see in the schemes which have been outlined?”

  “Our time is limited,” hinted Mr. Butefish.

  “It won’t take long to puncture those bubbles,” Toomey answered, contemptuously.

  Certainly he had made a raise somewhere!

  “We will hear your criticisms,” replied Mr. Butefish, with the restraint of offended dignity.

  “In the first place, everybody knows that the soil in this country sours and alkalies when water stands on it.” Toomey spoke as a man who had wide experience. He looked at “Doc” Fussel, who shrivelled with the chagrin that filled him, when Toomey added, “That settles the peppermint bog, doesn’t it?

  “Take the next proposition: What’s the use of car-lines that begin nowhere and end nowhere? A cripple could walk from one end of the town to the other in seven minutes. You couldn’t raise enough outside capital to buy the spikes for it.

  “Take fossils—a school boy would know that the demand for fossils is limited, and who is sure that the bed is inexhaustible until it’s tested. When the government is taking nitrates out of the air in Prouty to make ammunitio
n, you and I will be under the daisies, Governor.”

  If looks could kill, Toomey would have died standing. But he continued emphatically:

  “The salvation of Prouty is water. By water I mean the completion of the irrigation project. Gentlemen—I am here to state unreservedly that I can put that enterprise through, providing the stockholders will give me an option upon fifty-one per cent. of the stock. I must have the controlling interest.”

  Could he have an option? Could he! Only the restraining hand of a neighbor upon his coat tail prevented Walt Scales from hurdling the intervening chairs to reach Toomey to thrust his shares upon him. Hope and skepticism of the genuineness of his assertions commingled in the faces upon which Toomey looked, while he waited for an answer. He saw the doubt and took Prentiss’s letter from his pocket. Shaking it at them, he declared impressively:

  “This communication is from a party I have interested—an old friend of mine of wealth and standing, who will finance the project providing it is as represented, and under the condition I have just mentioned.” Toomey himself so thoroughly believed what he said that he carried conviction, although nowadays his veracity under oath would have been questioned.

  The prospect of unloading his stock made Hiram Butefish as thirsty as if he had eaten herring, and, overlooking the glass in his excitement, he drank long and deep from the water pitcher before he said tremulously:

  “Undoubtedly that can be arranged, Mr. Toomey.”

  It was obvious that the Boosters Club shared its president’s opinion. Each quivered with an eagerness to get at Toomey which was not unlike that of a race horse fretting to be first over the starting line. They crowded around him when the meeting was ended, offering their congratulations and their stock to him, but taking care to avoid any mention of the various sums that he owed each and all.

  As for Toomey, it was like the old days when his appearance upon the streets of Prouty was an event, when they called him “Mister” and touched their hat-brims to him, when he could get a hearing without blocking the exit.

  He left the Boosters Club with his pulses bounding with pride and importance. He had “come back”—as a man must who has imagination and initiative. They could “watch his smoke,” could Prouty.

  There was not a member present who did not reach his home panting, to shake his wife out of her slumbers to tell her that, at last, Toomey had “got into something.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXV

  THE CHINOOK

  Emblazoned on the front page of the Omaha paper upon which Mr. Pantin relied to keep him abreast of the times was the announcement that both mutton and wool had touched highwater mark in the history of the sheep-raising industry.

  Mr. Pantin moved into the bow window where the light was better and read the article carefully. The Australian embargo, dust-storms in the steppes of Russia, rumors of war, all had contributed to send prices soaring. When he had concluded, he took the stub of a pencil from his waistcoat pocket and made a computation in neat figures upon the margin. As he eyed the total his mouth puckered in a whistle which changed gradually to a grin of satisfaction.

  “You can’t keep a squirrel down in a timbered country,” Mr. Pantin chuckled aloud, ambiguously.

  A pleased smile still rested upon his face when Mrs. Pantin entered.

  “Priscilla, will you do me a favor?”

  “Abram,” reproachfully, “have I ever failed you? What is it?”

  “The next time you have something going on here I want you to invite Kate Prentice.”

  Mrs. Pantin recoiled.

  “What!”

  “Don’t squawk like that!” said Mr. Pantin, irritably. “You do it often, and it’s an annoying mannerism.”

  “Do you quite realize what you are asking?” his wife demanded.

  “Perfectly,” replied Mr. Pantin, calmly. “I’ve passed the stage when I talk to make conversation.”

  “But think how she’s been criticised!”

  Mr. Pantin got up impatiently.

  “Oh, you virtuous dames—”

  Mrs. Pantin’s thin lips went shut like a rat-trap.

  “Abram, are you twitting me?”

  Mr. Pantin ignored the accusation, and observed astutely:

  “I presume you’ve done your share of talking, and that’s why—”

  “She is impossible, and what you ask is impossible,” Mrs. Pantin declared firmly.

  “It’s not often that I ask a favor of you, Prissy.” His tone was conciliatory.

  Mrs. Pantin met him half way and her voice was softer as she answered:

  “I appreciate that, Abram, but there are a few of us who must keep up the bars against such persons. Society—”

  “Rats!” ejaculated Mr. Pantin coarsely.

  The hand which she had laid tenderly upon his shoulder was withdrawn as if it harbored a hornet.

  “I don’t understand this at all—not at all,” she said, icily. “However,” very distinctly, “it is not necessary that I should, for I shall not do it.” She folded her arms as she confronted him.

  Mr. Pantin was silent so long that she thought the battle was over, and purred at him:

  “You can realize how I feel about it, can’t you, darling?”

  “No, by George, I can’t! And I’m not going to either.” He slapped the table with Henry Van Dyke in ooze leather for emphasis. “I want Kate Prentice invited here the next time she’s in town. If you don’t do as I ask, Priscilla, you shan’t go a step—not a step—to Keokuk this winter.”

  “Is that an ultimatum?” Mrs. Pantin demanded.

  Mr. Pantin gave a quick furtive look over either shoulder, then declared with emphatic gusto:

  “I mean every damn word of it!”

  Mrs. Pantin stood speechless, thinking rapidly. There was nothing for it evidently but to play her trump card, which never yet had failed her. She wasted no breath in further argument, but threw herself full-length on the davenport and had hysterics.

  Only a few times in their married life had Mr. Pantin risen on his hind legs, speaking figuratively, and defied her. In the beginning, before he was well housebroken, he was careless in the matter of cleaning his soles on the scraper, and had been obstinate on the question of changing his shirt on Wednesdays, holding that once a week was enough for a person not engaged in manual labor. Mrs. Pantin had won out on each issue, but it had not been an easy victory. Mr. Pantin had been docile so long now that she had expected no further trouble with him, therefore this outbreak was so unlooked for that her fit was almost genuine.

  Having hurled his thunderbolt, Mr. Pantin stood above his wife regarding her imperturbably as she lay with her face buried in a sofa pillow. Unmoved, he even felt a certain interest in the rise and fall of her shoulder blades as she sobbed. Actually, she seemed to breathe with them—“like the gills of a fish,” he thought heartlessly—and wondered how long she could keep it up.

  “It’s no use having this tantrum, Prissy,” he said inexorably.

  Tantrum! The final insult. Mrs. Pantin squealed with rage and gnawed the corner of the leather pillow.

  “You might as well come out of it,” he admonished further. “You’ll only make your eyes red and give yourself a headache.”

  “You’re a brute, Abram Pantin, and I wish I’d never seen you!”

  Mr. Pantin suppressed the reply that the wish was mutual. Instead, he picked up the leather button which flew on the floor when Mrs. Pantin doubled her fist and smote the davenport.

  “I doubt very much if she’d come, even if you ask her,” said Pantin. It was a stroke of genius.

  “Not come!” The eye which Mrs. Pantin exposed regarded Mr. Pantin scornfully. “Not come? Why, she’d be tickled to pieces.”

  But of that Mr. Pantin continued to have his own opinion.

  Mrs. Pantin sat up and winked rapidly in her indignation.

  “She’s made if I take her up, and the woman isn’t so stupid as not to know it, is she?”

  �
��She may not see it from that angle,” dryly. “At any rate, you’ll be pleasing me greatly by asking her.”

  Mrs. Pantin looked at her husband fixedly:

  “Why this deep interest, Abram?”

  Flattered by the implied accusation, Mr. Pantin, however, resisted the temptation to make Mrs. Pantin jealous, and answered truthfully:

  “I admire her greatly. She deserves recognition and will get it. If you are a wise woman you’ll swallow your prejudices and be the first to admit it.”

  Mrs. Pantin raised both eyebrows—her own and the one she put on mornings—incredulously.

  “She’s the kind that would win out anywhere,” he added, with conviction.

  Mrs. Pantin stared at him absently, while the tears on her lashes dried to smudges. She murmured finally:

  “I could have pineapple with mayonnaise dressing.”

  To conceal a smile, Mr. Pantin stooped for his paper.

  “Or would you have lettuce with roquefort cheese dressing, Abram?”

  “You know much more about such things than I do—your luncheons are always perfect, Prissy. Who do you think of inviting to meet her?”

  Mrs. Pantin considered. Then her eyes sparkled with malice, “I’ll begin with Mrs. Toomey.”

  * * *

  In the office of the Grit, Hiram Butefish was reading the proof of his editorial that pointed out the many advantages Prouty enjoyed over its rival in the next county.

  There was no more perfect spot on the footstool for the rearing of children, Mr. Butefish declared editorially. Fresh air, pure water, and a moral atmosphere—wherein it differed, he hinted, from its neighbor. There Vice rampant and innocent Youth met on every corner, while the curse of the Demon Rum was destroying its manhood.