“No, Charley isn’t going to have any trouble selling. Only, most of his buyers can’t pay cash. And Charley’s glad, of course, to take hay now it’s so cheap and we haven’t any of our own. Our hay problem’s settled; that’s another comfort. Charley’s glad to take grain, too, when he can get it. Of course his three acres didn’t raise nearly enough for us both. He’s getting in some money, though. And I’ve promised to pay him cash for the grain I use. Then there’s that wagon-box he’s been making lately in farm shop at school. Mr. Cowan’s offered him thirty-nine dollars for that.”
Thus Sayre’s thoughts would travel on and on and on. “I’d hoped so to buy a cow of our own, a really good one, tested at least, if not pedigreed, and maybe a heifer or two besides. I couldn’t make a real school project out of them, of course, because Charley’d have to help me providing part of the feed. But we could do it together, like a project, keeping exact records and everything, and learn so much. It would mean more milk for us, for the young pigs and for my chickens. But that’s not the main thing; it would be the beginning of a herd.
“And there’ll have to be cash on hand in the spring for seed and water rental. And we need a plow and a drag so. I’d even thought we could get a horse next spring; they’re pretty cheap and it’s so hard to rent or borrow at just the right time.”
Plans like these would form and soar, often only to crash to earth again when consciousness of reality insisted upon intruding itself. “There’s no help for it, though. We’ll have to spend money for things we must have. Like coal. Getting it from those near-by surface mines doesn’t cost so much now that we’ve a truck of our own to haul it in. But it takes cash. And there’s school books. And gas. And oil. And we simply can’t get along any longer without a few things to wear. We’ve all got to have shoes, at least, and underwear. But most of those are sort of special buys.
“It’s living expenses I mind most. How can I give up my money just to live on?” she would wail to herself in the darkness, concluding stubbornly, “I can’t do it, and I won’t let Charley, no matter what Dad thinks of us. I just can’t spend my money or trade-in more than a few of my eggs for flour and sugar and coffee and kerosene and all the things Dad used to get from the Hoskins store. I not only can’t do it; I won’t!”
It was not selfishness that prompted this resolve; it was loyalty to her dream. That dream’s fulfillment was to mean so much that the thought of even postponing it was not to be endured.
Such was Sayre’s spirit at times. There were other nights when she was torn by misgiving. “After all,” she would reason then, “I’m a Morgan, too. What if, after my seeming so selfish to my family, this dream that I care so much about that I’m willing, for a while anyway, to sacrifice everybody and everything for it, what if it should turn out to be just another crazy Morgan scheme?”
Her conflict took her in the end to Mr. Kitchell. She sought him out in the very same office where she had first met him just a little more than a year ago. How much older and wiser and more at home she felt now. Yet she and Mr. Kitchell were sitting on the very same stiff chairs. His blond bigness was turning away from his desk toward her with that same interested look on his steady, kind face. She began pouring out her story with the same precipitate impulsiveness, such a stifling sort of beating in her heart that she could scarcely control her voice.
If Mr. Kitchell discouraged her, how could she bear it? Why, that dream of hers had become almost her very life. Her eye studied every shade of expression on the teacher’s listening face. So great was the relief that study brought that it almost unnerved her.
“I had my heart set on it in a kind of way that very first day I came to see you, Mr. Kitchell. And I’ve had it set on it ever since. But it was only after the water users’ meeting that I really knew what we’d have to do to make my dream come true.”
Behind its firm, quiet look Mr. Kitchell’s face was all aglow. It was more than approval he was giving her: it was the very heartiest encouragement! Before it the last of her reserves went down. She even told him how secret she had meant to keep this dream, until she could prove it something more than a dream.
For an hour Sayre and the teacher worked together, making out tentative plans. Those plans had in them a whole lot about Charley.
At last the girl arose to go, her tanned cheeks dark-flushed, her deep blue eyes alight with eager visions.
“I’d love to tell Charley,” she said. “It doesn’t seem exactly fair not to when he counts so much. Now, too, when he’s feeling so awfully down, it might do him a lot of good. But I simply don’t dare, Mr. Kitchell. I’m too afraid he’d think I was trying to manage him again. If he did, that would completely spoil everything.”
It was two days after this consultation that Mr. Cowan sent for Charley, telling him to bring his sister with him out to the Cowan place. The young people complied at once, to find the man they sought in his front yard. He greeted Charley with his usual terse directness. “I understand the situation you’re in. It’s tough, of course. But struggle it through, boy. I’m back of you. I can’t give you your old job back. But I’ve enough odd work about my place to use all your available time. Mrs. Cowan, too, has work for your sister. If you’ll go up to the house,” the speaker had turned toward Sayre, “she’ll tell you about it.”
Mr. Cowan, as usual, proved even better than his brief word. Later, when spring had come on, he even used Dad Morgan, too, often for days at a time.
“Yet everything any one of us does is ‘made work,’” Sayre often thought bitterly during that hard winter, when even school had become a stern affair. “Things about his place he might never have done at all if he didn’t want to give us Morgans a chance to earn. We’re really just objects of charity.”
The experience was a hard one for the girl to endure. But she never wavered in enduring it. How else could she have hung on to her dream?
And hanging on to that dream had become more important than ever. Why, in the end, although in a roundabout way, it might help to right everything, even the wrong to Mr. Kitchell.
14
In the Dark
To Sayre’s surprise, as time went on Charley seemed to have no need of a sustaining power such as she drew from her dream. Nothing could have made him work with a grimmer, more determined intensity than he did all that winter. Sayre even came before long to feel a little awed before the new, silent Charley of these cruel, troubled days.
“He always could hammer like a nailer at anything he really got interested in. And making himself as perfect as he can at stock-judging is the one thing he’s got left now to care much about,” she tried often to explain to herself, knowing full well that her explanation was not completely satisfactory.
By spring both the arid and the fertile acres of Parsons’ eighty would be well dotted with livestock. The Corriedale “bums” would be ewes then and have lambs of their own. The purebred ewes Charley had bought would also lamb in April. The Hampshire sow would have another litter. Each of last year’s three gilts would litter. Charley had traded seed peas for two heifers, one of them old enough to freshen in the spring. It was surprising how fast livestock could increase.
And the Morgan livestock throve. How could it help thriving, cared for as Charley cared for it all through that school year, toiling early and late, with a painstaking, methodical, studious, intelligent fidelity that never wavered? Work seemed to have become the passion of the boy’s life. And yet all the while underneath his new, grim quiet, Sayre knew well, the boy was dreadfully, dreadfully unhappy.
“It isn’t natural for anyone his age to work like that,” Sayre’s groping, inexperienced mind often pondered. “Something special’s making him do it. He’s getting a kind of comfort out of doing it, of course. But it isn’t the right kind of comfort, or it wouldn’t have made him so different—so silent—so sort of set.”
There were times when Sayre bitterly resented that silence. “He knows how lonely I am. Even if the part-time group is bigge
r this year, it’s more foreign than ever. I can’t really chum with them. And a poor kind of sister I’d be, if I went with any of the other high school folks when they’re feeling and believing about my brother the way they are.”
What she wanted to know about most was how things really were these days between Charley and Frank Hoskins. Not for worlds would she question an outsider about the situation. That the unwholesome rivalry between the two boys was more intense than ever, she felt sure. What terrified her was the fear that it was becoming a matter of truly alarming bitterness. Charley’s behavior increased this fear. For no allusion whatever to Frank Hoskins ever fell from Charley’s lips. Only once or twice did Sayre become daring enough to try to force it.
“Frank Hoskins is raising both sheep and Hampshire pigs for projects this year, isn’t he?” she remarked one evening. “And doing awfully well?”
Apparently the question penetrated not at all the absorption with which Charley was bending over the bulletins spread out before him on the kitchen table. Charley was “up to something new” lately. That wasn’t surprising; Charley always had been up to something new. Now it seemed to be entomology stuff he was getting excited about. He’d been poking about, too, in the south ditch shrubbery and in the alfalfa fields.
Sayre, perched opposite her brother, did not at once return her attention to her own studying. Instead she sat trying to summon courage to renew her attack. Before she had succeeded Charley’s voice precipitated itself out of his abstraction.
“Sayre, that south ditch alfalfa field—you remember you said last summer it had bugs in it?”
Remember? She should say she did. Had Charley really no idea how she’d suffered at the recollection of those speeches?
“What were they like—those bugs? Were there any little beetles, about as big as a grain of wheat, brown, with gray and black hairs in sort o’ spots and stripes on their backs, or even pretty black in color, with long, slender snouts?”
“No, I never saw a beetle, big or little, that I can remember.”
“Did you ever see,” Charley persisted, “late last spring or early last summer any little alfalfa-green worms with black heads? About a quarter-inch long. Crawling around up the outside of the alfalfa stems to the leaf buds, or clinging around the leaf buds?”
“No.”
“Or in the summer, tiny white spots of fuzzy, cobweb-like stuff on top of the alfalfa plants?”
“No.”
“But you said you turned your turkeys in there because—”
“I turned them in there to eat the caterpillars and the grasshoppers. But they didn’t last long. The turkeys cleaned ’em out so fast I wished there were more of ’em so my birds could get as fat on bugs as some other people’s did. Frank Hoskins’, for instance.”
The look that leaped into Charley’s face startled Sayre. And lugging in Frank Hoskins’ name hadn’t done a thing toward satisfying her curiosity, either.
How were Charley and Frank managing the situation, together as they were in practically all their school work? At school apparently they were ignoring each other pretty well. Sayre had several times seen them pass one another in the hall and been proud of Charley’s bearing. Not a bit self-conscious, exactly as if he were not aware that such a person as Frank Hoskins was anywhere around.
And Frank’s manner was almost equally successful. At least so Sayre had thought until that day she had caught a look from those dark, brooding eyes. Ever since, that look had haunted her. “How he does hate Charley,” she thought. She would shudder at the recollection. Yet that gleam had not been all hatred. There had been something else in it. Something horrid, to be sure, but something new. Could it have been fear?
What Sayre really wanted to know about, however, was how those two boys managed on the stock-judging trips when the team, both regulars and alternates, were often away together at week-ends for two or three days at a time. Charley simply would not talk. And Sayre believed Frank to be equally silent; he was always such a sullen thing, anyway. But the other boys of the team, apparently, had nothing to say, either. And that certainly was queer. Well, if they didn’t, it was probably because of Mr. Kitchell. Everybody knew how he hated gossip, and how the loyalty and respect he won from his boys made them observe his wishes.
The most surprising bit of evidence which came Sayre’s way was that Rene Osgood seemed to be as ignorant as she. Late one afternoon she saw Rene resolutely pursue a reluctant Spens Trowbridge half the length of a nearly empty school hall. Rene cornered Spens at last, the boy looking so uncomfortable that Sayre wanted to laugh. Sayre had always liked Spens. She would almost have been willing to question him, herself, if only his chumminess with Charley hadn’t fallen off so that winter. Sayre did not believe, though, that this was altogether Spens’ fault.
“What do we do on our stock-judging trips?”
She could tell by Spens’ voice that he was parrying for time. Her own approaching step loitered defiantly within eavesdropping radius.
“We work. Morgan and Hoskins set the pace, trying to nose out each other. And the rest of us run along behind with our tongues hanging out, trying to keep in the race with ’em at all. There’s something a little too nasty about it all for any real fun. But it’s good for us, I guess. For let me tell you one thing, we’re getting to be some team. And when we go to the state high schools’ judging contest at Laramie next spring!”
The overtall boy shrugged his stooped shoulders to indicate that expression was beyond him, “Unless,” he added as if throwing off the strain of a silence which had become too much for him, “the smoking volcano we’re all playing ’round blows up first. If it does, it’ll sure wipe out everything within reach.”
15
The Contest
The volcano did not erupt. Spring vacation was the time set for the agricultural judging contests of Wyoming’s high schools at the agricultural college of the state university. When that time finally arrived, both Frank Hoskins and Charley Morgan were still members of Upham High School’s stock-judging team, narrowed down now to three picked boys.
Mr. Hansen took Charley into town for the young judgers’ early morning departure. A long day of hard driving lay before them; then three days of competitive judging and being entertained by the state university at Laramie.
“Only seex boys can go. T’ree for stock-judging. Two for crops judging. (Dey von’t do nuttin’.) Von for poultry judge. De alternate can’t go. He’s got de flu like you and your papa yust had, Hitty. Four boys and Meester Keetchell go in de teacher’s car, and Frank Hoskins and von udder boy—not Sharley, you bet—go in Frank Hoskins’ roadster.”
Two of the Morgans were leaning over the gate to listen, and the third was peeking through, lower down, while Mr. Hansen’s big form drooped loquaciously over the steering wheel of his truck, halted directly in front of the Morgan place.
“Dey vas sure von tickled bunch o’ kids. Only Frank Hoskins has been to Laramie. He vas dere yust lately vid his pa, ven Hoskins, he vent dere on business. Vat business?” The monotonous voice broke into the characteristic chuckle with the questioning inflection. “Dose lawsuits, mebbe?”
“Papa Hoskins vas de big man in dat send-off crowd, you bet. He strut ’round like your turkey cock, Sayre. But he’s nice like a pussy, too. And vat do you t’ank? He vill have his arm ’round de Ag teacher’s shoulder. Dat Hoskins, ven he vants, he can forget so good he forgets he’s forgot. Vat to me vas so funny—” the chuckle grew—“de Ag teacher didn’t vant him.”
Mr. Hansen slowly straightened his big body and threw his truck into gear. “Next Friday, late, Sayre, you vill go into town vid me and my Nels?”
The question was characteristic of the man’s thoughtful neighborliness. Trust Mr. Hansen, too-relentless worker though he was, to manage to have business in town at a time of an interesting occurrence.
Sayre accepted eagerly. For in Laramie at six-thirty o’clock on the coming Friday, so the program of activities had stated, in the
big dining-room of the university cafeteria, the high school judgers and their hosts would be gathered at a banquet at which the results of the competitive contests of the previous days would be officially announced.
“Right avay Meester Ketchell vill send vord how de judging comes out, by telephone. And Mr. Hoskins vill put how it all is on his store vindow.”
When Sayre and the two Hansens reached town on the following Friday evening there was nothing as yet written on the plate-glass windows. But already the walk and the street in front of the Hoskins store were packed with a restless milling crowd that had practically stopped traffic. Mr. Hansen managed to manipulate his truck into a narrow parking place directly across the street. Before it reached the curb, young Nels had clambered out from the box over a back wheel and disappeared.
“Vid your good young eyes,” the older Hansen was remarking meanwhile to Sayre, “ve can see better standing up in dis truck dan down low in dat crowd. Dis town must t’ank our stock-judging boys vill vin, else it vould not buzz so much.”
“Oh, look. There comes Mr. Hoskins.” Sayre swirled around on the truck’s front seat as on a pivot, and over the seat’s low back dropped, feet foremost and standing, on to the empty floor of the truck’s wagon box; then hurried to its rear end.
With the deliberate ungainliness of muscles long stiffened by heavy physical labor Mr. Hansen followed her. “He vill speak.”
Sayre nodded, eyes intent on the scene just beyond and below. The crowd was still milling, each individual striving for a better place, but its babel was dying down into an expectant hush. Mr. Hoskins had completely emerged from the store door. He disappeared, raised above the crowd as if he had mounted some chair, barrel or table placed there for him. He was high enough for Sayre to see that he held a paper in his hand.
But it was the bearing of the man on which the girl’s interest was centered. Important, and more than a little pompous? But then he was always that. Very gracious? Very suave? But that, too, he so often was. Eager to persuade, to conciliate? No, no, not this time. Triumphant? That was it, exultingly, overwhelmingly triumphant! Triumph fairly oozed from him. It was in the erectness of his body; in the pose of his head; in the dramatic gesture with which he raised his long right arm, and held out commandingly over the crowd the open palm of his hand; in the expectant, dramatic dignity with which he awaited the silence he was demanding; above all, in the accents of that high, nervous voice which cut so penetratingly into that silence, its words coming clearly distinguishable at first over the bobbing heads of the crowd.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 116
