3stalwarts

by Unknown

  “That’s Ethan Allen McCarthy,” Mrs. Gurget said to Dan. “He’s got ideas against God, and him and Ben don’t speak any more.”

  “Hullo, Ethan,” she called. “How be you?”

  “Morning, morning,” he said.

  And then, as he walked over to the gate beams, “George Marble just went through with Jason Brown pushing him close.”

  “They just had it out at the Five Combines. George got a beating.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ll bet old Ben took a frenzy watching them.”

  “No, nothing to notice.”

  “He will, he will. He’ll have to think out the sin of it first. He don’t mean harm, but he’s crazy as a hot bitch with his religion.”

  He locked them through.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asked Dan.

  “Well, I ain’t thought.”

  “Don’t, young man. Don’t do it. You can’t get anywhere doing it. Eat your vittles and thank God you ain’t got religion to raise a gas on a good meal.”

  A wind had begun to pick its way down the pass; by eleven o’clock it was blowing strong from the northwest, and tumbled cold grey clouds showed over the northern hills.

  Still they wound on with the tops of the trees close to their feet; and again and again they sank between the limestone walls. The canal had come to life; behind them now they heard, in eddies of the wind, the horns of other boats, long-drawn and broken by echoes. And they met boats coming up, hauled by sweating teams, the drivers cracking their bull whips as they walked with long slow strides, and the steersmen stiff beside their rudders at the stern. When they passed, Dan learned to trip his rope by holding back the horses while Hector steered the boat to the far side of the canal, so that the slack of the towline sank into the water as the boat came abreast, and the upstream craft, horse and boat, passed over it.

  They locked through number thirty-nine and hauled out onto a stretch a mile and a half long, and for a way the hills were high above them and the roar of the Lansing Kill close at hand. The road stayed up on the hillsides, appearing here and there between the trees.

  In a cove where the canal set back, they saw a shanty boat, a hovel on a platform with a porch facing the stern. Tethered by the towpath, an old mule cropped up grass with short, tobacco-brown teeth. He did not look up at them, but one long white ear followed the sound of their passing. On the porch of the boat, a man with a white beard sat smoking a corncob pipe. Dan could see the smoke pop from his lips and hover under the roof before the wind snatched it away. A line between two posts on the roof held a snapping string of clean clothes to the wind. Inside, a woman was singing softly.

  “Queer place for a shanty boater,” said Mrs. Gurget.

  “They come and go,” said Hector Berry.

  The singing ceased, and the woman came out to stand beside the old man and watch the boats passing. She looked very young and slender and dark. Mrs. Gurget waved to her, but her eyes followed Dan and she did not reply. The old man turned his head to speak to her, and she went in.

  “Queer folk,” Mrs. Gurget said to herself.

  The old man took another puff on his pipe, and the wind carried the smoke away; and a moment after, the boats turned a bend.

  Mrs. Gurget’s glance fell upon Dan. She did not wonder the girl had looked at him. There was a light in his eyes as he walked. He kept his gaze far ahead to the outlet of the gorge. He was handsome, she decided. He had good features, and the wind had brought a color into his lean high cheeks.

  “Seeing things,” said Mrs. Gurget. “Young.”

  She heaved a sigh and caught the tiller in against her side with her right elbow that she might pat smooth her hair and settle her bonnet.

  She smiled at him.

  “Dan!” she called softly. He did not hear her.

  She sighed again, and put her hand to her heart. Presently she felt for the bottle under her chair.

  Dan had seen the young woman on the shanty boat. Over the water she had seemed very pretty. He had flushed… .

  “It must be lonesome living on a shanty boat,” he said to Mrs. Gurget.

  The fat woman smacked her lips against the rim of her tumbler.

  “I guess so— but they’re queer folk.”

  “It must be hard on a girl.”

  “I don’t know,” said Mrs. Gurget, “perhaps it is.”

  “It must get lonesome for her, alone with her father.”

  “Good land!” exclaimed the fat woman. “I guess it would be lonesome.”

  “Jeepers!” said Dan. “He’s too old for her to marry.” He looked at her accusingly; but Mrs. Gurget, with considerable delicacy, was taking another drink.

  At noon they tied up to the bank. After they had grained the teams, Hector and Solomon and Dan sat on the deck of the Nancy, while Mrs. Gurget cooked dinner. They leaned their backs against the low wall of the cabin to be out of the wind, and the iron ventilators, just over their heads, exhaled the smell of coffee and of frying chops. The clouds had swept full across the sky, and there was a keenness in the wind suggesting snow. Far up the valley a small shower was crossing the hills. A hawk circled dizzily back and forth, his wings on an almost vertical plane when he crossed the force of the wind. Now and then his piercing whistle reached their ears.

  All at once Solomon tilted his head.

  “What’s that?”

  They turned their faces to the wind. The road ran along the hillside on their left, and through an opening in the trees almost opposite the Nancy a section of it which had been freshly planked shone white.

  In a gust of the wind, from up the valley, they heard clearly a thunder on the wood, and all at once, in the opening, they had a clear view of a tall man riding a grey horse hard.

  A spatter of rain struck their faces.

  “Jeepers, he was traveling,” said Solomon.

  Dan had recognized the horse. There was no doubt in his mind that he had seen Calash for the second time.

  “Dinner’s ready,” called Mrs. Gurget as they went into the cabin. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Solomon told her about the horse they had just seen.

  She served them with a platter of pork chops and a round pan of fried potatoes. The smell of her coffee was forewarning of heaven.

  “Them chops,” she remarked, “is A-l. I guarantee ‘em. They raise first-rate hogs to Boonville. Now set down and eat.”

  She gave them a good example.

  “I wonder what that man’s hurry was?” said Hector, swishing his coffee round and round in his cup.

  “Grey horse?” asked Mrs. Gurget.

  “Yeanh.”

  “Tall man riding him?”

  “Pretty tall.”

  “Well, my gracious! Didn’t you read a poster this morning, Sol?”

  “By grab! I’ll bet it is!”

  “What?” asked Hector.

  “Gentleman Joe.”

  “Gol,” said Hector.

  Hector’s Sad Case

  There was a pause while Mrs. Gurget brought on an apple pie.

  “We ought to pick up Nell by four o’clock,” said Solomon.

  “Yeanh,” said Hector. He turned to Dan. “That’s Penelope Berry, my wife.”

  “We ought to get going pretty quick,” said Mrs. Gurget. “She don’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “That’s true,” said Hector. “She’s a remarkable woman, Dan. You’ll be pleased to know her. But if you ever get married, make sure she’s got no moral sense— either way.”

  They pulled out shortly afterwards. The wind had died down, but the clouds still hung in the sky.

  The locks they came to were spaced farther apart, and at last they reached the lowest three combines, from the top of which they looked down on the village of Northwestern. Before them the hills sloped away and the canal ran again through level farming country.

  Three boats were tied up to the Northwestern dock in front of Han Yerry’s Saloon, and laughing voices reached out to them from the
windows under the long porch. An old man sat with his back against a cleat and fished for sunfish and bass.

  “Pushing on?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. We aim to reach Delta tonight.”

  “That ain’t far.”

  He pulled a paper bag from his pocket, licked his forefinger, thrust it in, and rubbed the snuff that stuck to it back and forth along his gums.

  The two teams plodded ahead steadily. The sun came out from under the clouds to the west and shone upon the meadows with brown and yellow tints.

  “We ought to pick up Nell Berry pretty soon now. She’s staying at a farm behind those trees over there. Some of her kin.”

  The fat woman pointed out a grove of trees to Dan.

  “Poor Hector,” she sighed. “If he’d up and lace her once or twice, he’d work some of the cat poison out of her liver. She’s a good enough body, too, but he’s let her boss him until she’s got unhealthy notions.

  “Now you wouldn’t think it,” she went on, smiling, “but Sol, he won’t take any nonsense. No, sir. But Hector, he was like one of them Bible men and courted her five years before she said she’d take him. And then on the day of the wedding, when the minister came early, she said there’d be no marrying, but he might as well stay to the wedding dinner that had been cooked anyhow. She told Hector the same thing— he’d ought to’ve dragged and kicked her to the marrying state, but she was like an old mare that hadn’t been harness-broke, and she balked. He asked when; and she made it one year. They ate the dinner and married the next year without it, her pa saying that a woman hadn’t ought to have more than one dinner to a wedding. And on the night of the wedding she told him she’d be damned if she’d sleep with him— and I guess she hasn’t yet. But that ain’t so bad-it wouldn’t be no privilege.”

  The fat woman tossed her head.

  “Hector! Hector!”

  The cry was shrilly imperative. A little woman with a grizzled knot of hair pushing her straw-colored bonnet over her eyes, and a big carpetbag in her left hand, ran down to the towpath.

  “That you, Nell?” said Hector mildly.

  “That me? I should guess it was, waiting here for you with this bag in my hand for all of half an hour. What made you so late?”

  “I had ‘em all into the Nancy for dinner,” explained Mrs. Gurget. “I made ‘em come, and we killed a little time.”

  “Who gave you leave to boss my husband?” shrilled the little woman. “If Hector wasn’t so mild-mannered, people wouldn’t impose on him and keep me waiting like this. Now put that boat against the bank, Hector. Think I’m going to jump eight foot of water?”

  Hector swung the Ella in obediently and put out a plank to the towpath. The little woman started up, then stopped and backed off, raising her wizened face to glare at Dan.

  “Who’s that man, Hector? I never seen him. I won’t sleep on board that boat if that strange man is going to be on it.”

  “Well, this is just Dan Harrow who’s driving to Rome for me. That’s all.”

  “I don’t care who he is. A good woman can’t afford to take risks. Either that strange young man will stay ashore, Hector, or I will. Do you hear?”

  “Not you,” Hector answered ingratiatingly, and winking at Dan until the tip of his cigar was almost screwed into his eye.

  “That’s all right,” said the fat woman. “He can come aboard with us. I’ll give him a good piece of pie for supper.”

  “No better than what he’d get here if he wasn’t a strange man, Lucy Gurget!”

  “Bigger, though,” said Mrs. Gurget with a broad grin.

  “Lucy, you shut up!” said Solomon, coming back from his team. “If you two get arguing, we won’t never get to Delta House. Now then, Mrs. Berry,” he soothed the little woman, “better get on.”

  Mrs. Berry put one foot on the plank, and then drew it off as if it had scorched her.

  “Hector, you throw that nasty-smelling cigar overboard, you hear me?”

  Her husband complied with one last wistful and tremendous puff that left the smoke trailing from his nostrils for a good minute.

  This point gained, Mrs. Berry trotted up to the gang-rail, where she stopped stock-still.

  “Hector, them rats? Are there any left? Either there are rats, and I won’t go, or there ain’t— which?”

  But Solomon, with a triumphant chuckle, had seized the shore end of the plank and with a strong heave yanked it from under her. She pitched forward with an angry scream and disappeared from sight. Then he ran to the blacks and switched their rumps with his hat. They jumped ahead, and Hector swung the boat away from the bank.

  “Gid-ap! Gid-ap! Lift a hoof, by Cripus, or I’ll stomp on your innards!” yelled Solomon at his mules.

  Both boats gathered way.

  “Mercy, Sol,” gasped Mrs. Gurget after a volcanic eruption of laughter. “You oughtn’t to have done that. You might have hurt the poor woman. Hector!”

  “Eh?”

  “Nell ain’t hurt, is she?”

  “I guess not. She lit on some potatoes that was kind of soft.”

  Black shadows lowered over the canal. The setting sun had left a twilight of pale green; and the wind had begun to rise again, with a piercing note among the trees. Dan walked on the off side of the team, for there was only an occasional white gleam on the water to mark the edge of the towpath. The outlines of the woodlands blurred, and farm buildings merged with their shadows. Here and there they saw a light across the fields. It was quite dark when they came to the Delta House and tied by for the night.

  Rome

  There was still a star or two way down in the west when they started ahead in the morning. The dark hulk of the Delta House, in which they had heard men laughing and singing the night before, loomed silent be-side the dock. The ghost of the night’s fires rose in a thin line from the centre chimney. The thump of the horses’ hoofs on wood echoed against the walls. But when they had cleared the dock the boats moved into stillness, except for an occasional whimpering of water round the bows.

  The hush of morning was all about them; in it small sounds grew suddenly. As they passed a herd of cows, standing at ease in their night pasture, they became aware of their deep rhythmical breathing; and they heard the thin suck of mud about their feet. They could see united clouds hovering above their horses, and the flat green gleam of their eyes; but the cows stood so quiet there was no voice of bells.

  With a loud rustling a muskrat ran out of the grass on the side of the towpath and slipped into the canal so smoothly that they barely saw the ring he made; but the slop of his belly against the water came to their ears like a report.

  On the stern of the Nancy Mrs. Gurget sat, a mountain of wraps and shawls, with only her face visible. Now and then she would raise a hand to her lips and blow a cloud of steam over it.

  “Early morning travel when it’s warm is the best there is,” she said to Dan; “but this late in the year it’s so cold it gives a body the flesh-creep.”

  It was cold. Both Dan and Solomon stamped their feet as they walked, and, by the rudder of the Ella-Romeyn, Hector Berry was whipping his arms round his middle and puffing and blowing from the exercise. The lights in the cabin windows, where Mrs. Berry was moving about in comfort, shone behind misted glass.

  The low hills to the east began to assume clearer outlines; far behind them a white light was growing; but before the sun rose wraiths of mist began to play upon the water, and gradually merged and thickened, until without warning the boats were traveling in a dense white that glistened like hoarfrost on the decks and turned the worn leather on the teams into handsome harnesses. A rich earth smell of potatoes issued from the pits of the boats and followed them along; and though they could not see, and though sound had dimmed and lost its frosty music, the boaters became aware of the smell of barns when they passed them, and the stinging scent of barnyards.

  For an hour and a half they pushed on through the mist, feeling their way blindly, as if they were approaching birth. Dan
walked behind the black team, his eyes following eagerly the line of the towpath. The grey shapes of Solomon Tinkle and the mules were barely visible a hundred feet ahead. With each stride into the dim whiteness, progress seemed more futile; and distance became an immeasurable quantity. And yet after a time the wetness on Dan’s face felt less chilly, and he became aware of something stirring ahead of him.

  At first it sounded no louder than the breathing of the herd they had passed earlier in the morning; then it turned into a steady drone, thin, like the awakening of bees; and it gained volume as they approached it, and the mist wavered now and then, so that at moments he saw Solomon quite clearly, and there were articulate sounds in it, and a long trahn-ahn- ahn-ahn, repeated over and over like a melody in music. Suddenly Mrs. Gurget sat forward in her chair.

  “Listen. There’s the horns. Hear ‘em, Dan? Them’s horns! They’re blowing on the Erie Canal.”

  All at once they heard a cart rattling along a wooden street, the sound of a bell; and the mist lifted without noticeable motion, and they saw upon their right the outline of a town.

  And then they felt the sun warm upon them, and a burst of color came upon the buildings; rising smokes, shot with gold, were pulling away to the westward; windowpanes gleamed reflected light; carts and wagons and the voices of men moving rose about them with increasing vigor; and the two boats came round a bend into a long line of docks and warehouses, reflected in the water of a long basin. And everywhere Dan looked upon the water there were boats, of all colors and of many shapes, with men and women moving on their decks. Boats coming in and hauling out, both east and west, the drawn-out wailing of their horns a sound behind the stirring sound of the town.

  Solomon stopped the mules upon the dock, and the Nancy swung in close with the Ella-Romeyn at her rudder, and Mrs. Gurget and Hector tossed tie-ropes ashore and came down the gangs.

  The fat woman was laughing.

  “By Nahum, Dan! What do you think of Rome?”

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