The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack

by Emily Cheney Neville

  “Find yourself a chair, Mr. Hansen. Yes, I did. But I sent it down to Rene Osgood. I knew she’d want to read it, no matter how many other letters she’d seen. I can remember everything in it, though.

  “It all happened a lot as everybody guessed,” Sayre launched forth a moment later, relieved to find that explaining was going to help a little to lift her out of that heaviness of mood into which part of the letter had been plunging her more and more deeply ever since it had come. “The storm coming up just as the boys had got the car working. Their not being able to see anything. The engine freezing if they stopped a moment. Getting a glimpse of that shack and trying to drive toward it. Losing sight of it altogether soon after. Going into the ditch already nearly full of snow, that’s what saved them there. Trying to beat their way through the storm to where they thought the hut had been. Trying to keep together and to hang on to the blankets. Oh, they had an awful time, struggling for what seemed like hours against that freezing wind and that blinding snow. They had to rest, and then to fight themselves so as not to give up. That’s the last Charley remembers.”

  With a deft thrust of the knife, Sayre slashed off a loaf-sized chunk of dough and began to knead it in rhythm with her narrative.

  “The next thing Charley knew they were in that hut. Somehow Frank had found it. Somehow he’d dragged Charley into it. Neither of ’em will ever really know how it happened. Charley says that when he thinks back it doesn’t seem possible Frank could have done it. But he did. He got Charley into that hut, alive.

  “There wasn’t a thing in it but dirt and the wreck of an old stove and a few handfuls of wormy cornmeal Frank found in a bag on a shelf. The place must have been built by somebody who’d tried to prove upon a desert claim. There was a sort of tumbledown lean-to shed back of the shack. That’s what kept the boys from freezing until the snow packed them in. It was warmer then, though the air got awful. Somehow Frank managed a fire in that old stove—managed to break up for fuel the wood of that lean-to with only his hands and an old rusty hatchet head he found. The stove smoked awfully and snow kept coming down into it. There was hardly any chimney outside, and the roof got piled high with snow. It leaked dreadfully, too, especially around where the stove was, below. The wind had torn off most of the tar-paper roofing before the snow began to pile up. And the one window was broken out and the snow kept coming in.”

  Sayre patted the kneaded loaf of dough into a pan, and sliced another lump off the main supply.

  “But Charley can remember only the first day. He was sick after that; flu, he supposes. Anyway he had a high fever, delirious one day, and in a stupor the next. When he came to, Frank had him in a bed of their blankets in the driest corner and was taking care of him. He’d melted snow in an old tin can for water, and had managed to make mush of the wormy cornmeal. Both of them had their hands and feet frosted. When Charley tried to get up, he fainted dead away, and Frank made him lie on those blankets another day and he lay there with him. He’d done it before, too, while Charley was sick, so as to keep from freezing. By that time all the cornmeal was gone and nearly all the loose pieces of wood. Then Frank got sick, as sick as Charley had been, or sicker.

  “Charley knew he’d have to do something or give up. He made the best shovel he could with his pocket-knife from the widest piece of board he could find (it was part of what had once been the door), and weak as he was he was trying to shovel a way out with it when he heard some of Mr. Hoskins’ men trying to drive a snow-plow somewhere near him. He put all the strength he had into one big yell, and that’s how they found them.” Sayre paused, floury hands braced against the table edge, eyes and voice grown bright with feeling.

  “You see what that story means, don’t you, Mr. Hansen?” There was almost reverence in the earnestness of the girl’s words. “Frank Hoskins saved my brother Charley’s life. Charley told Dad to tell me to tell that to everybody. You’ll tell it, too, won’t you?”

  “Vell. Vell. Vell. Don’t it make you feel funny, Sayre? And de gossips!” Mr. Hansen chuckled with delight. “Sure I vill help put dat good stop-cock on ’em. Ain’t I already?”

  “And Mr. Hoskins, so kind.” Sayre sprinkled flour on the board for the final loaf. “He’s told my father not to worry one minute about the expense—that’s all his, hospital bills, doctors, a specialist if Charley needs one. Mr. Hoskins says he claims the privilege of doing everything he can for Charley to make up for his injustice all last winter about the alfalfa. And he himself’s going to stay right on the spot to see that the boys have every care.

  “Frank’s got pneumonia, you know, though he has passed the crisis. Just as Spens has. We’d all ought to be awfully thankful. As for Charley, he’s got some trouble in his muscles because of the exposure. When the two boys can leave the hospital Mr. Hoskins is going to take them to one of those Metropolis sanitariums where they can take hot sulphur baths till they’re completely well. He himself may take a little business trip then. But he’ll be back to bring the boys home. And he won’t leave them at all if—”

  “And dis, too, you tell?” The interruption came with the usual lifeless intonation, but the twinkle that had leaped into the blue Norwegian eyes of the stolid face was one of quick, sly perception. “Yess, he vill stay. And ven de boys is vell, by dat time folks will be used to dis udder news.”

  “What other news? I’d forgotten there could be any except about Frank and Charley.”

  “On de twenty-eight’ dere vas to be de lawsuit, ain’t? Vell, dere ain’t no lawsuit. Mr. Hoskins, he pays in full vid cash all vat he owes to de United States of America. He pays seven t’ousand dollars on von Pawaukee farm. He pays seex t’ousand dollars on anudder Pawaukee farm. And he pays four t’ousand two hundert dollars on yet anudder Pawaukee farm. Now he owns all dat land.” Mock commiseration edged slyly into the monotonous voice. “De poor man vat can’t sell his hay last vinter to pay his lawyer ven he has a lawsuit yust for experiment-like.”

  Sayre leaned across the table, arms resting heedlessly upon its floury surface. Over her face spread an expression of such astonishment that Mr. Hansen broke into another chuckle. “Don’t you feel so bad, Sayre,” he chided playfully.

  Sayre’s eyes, however, were growing troubled. “Oh, I don’t want to feel that way any longer now, if I can possibly help it, against Frank Hoskins’ father. But,” she hesitated, “you mean there won’t be any debt any more against any of Mr. Hoskins’ land?”

  “Vat he can’t pay on, dat he can’t have—and for a rich man like him dat iss right.”

  But Sayre was not thinking of justice. All the depressing misgivings she had been feeling at the moment of Mr. Hansen’s arrival were descending upon her again with increased force. “That explains it, I suppose. About the dairy farm, I mean—making it a place that’ll really pay. Not having it all hay any more. The one he wants to put Charley on.”

  “Vat?” It was Mr. Hansen’s turn to feel astonishment.

  “Oh, Mr. Hoskins can’t do enough to make up to us.” Sayre’s tone had begun to change. It was taking on an edge not unlike the edge she had so often disliked in Rene Osgoods’. “When Dad and Mr. Kitchell get home tomorrow, Dad’s to go right back to his old job in the store, full time now, and at a really fair salary. I’m truly glad about that. And Charley, as soon as he graduates—They’ll graduate him and Frank and Spens Trowbridge, of course, even though they do have to miss the last of school—

  “What Mr. Hoskins wants to do is to be told, I suppose. Dad’ll be glad to tell; he’s so pleased and grateful. For, of course, Charley’s only a boy.”

  How silly of her to find it so hard to come to the point—to hate so even to mention Mr. Hoskins’ offer. She made a determined plunge. “Mr. Hoskins is going to put Charley, working on shares, on one of his best small holdings to develop it into a dairy farm to show what can be done in that line on this irrigation project.”

  A long moment of silence followed, which the girl made no attempt to fill.

  “
Vell, if dat ain’t dat!” Her visitor pondered aloud at last. “Papa Hoskins! A dairy farm! Mebbe, too, somev’eres else he vill raise pigs. And sheep. And sugar beets. And udder t’angs dis irrigation project needs bad. Sayre”—the slow voice grew slower—“for eberybody ’round here dat iss good. Dat iss very, very good. For Papa Hoskins, you see, iss yet dis neighborhood’s beeg man.”

  “I suppose so,” the girl answered listlessly. Spirit had ebbed out of her. Mr. Hansen’s reception of her news was even worse than her moment of greatest misgiving had feared.

  The man arose to leave. “Sayre, dis is de end of eberyt’ang, I t’ank, all at vonce, yust like in a story-book.” The shapeless cap once again descended low upon the towhead. Over the huge hands light-weight, home-made mittens were being pulled. “De end of Sharley and Frank being all de time in a fight. De end of eberybody being crazy poor ’cause dey can’t sell no hay. De end o’ your pa not having no yob. De end o’ Papa Hoskins kickin’ all de time in de dark at de Ag teacher. De end o’ Papa Hoskins grabbin’ and grabbin’ so slick for eberybody’s good land.”

  Sayre was relieved when the door closed behind her visitor. For a moment she just stood, her mind repeating his words in a spirit of dismay of which there had not been the least trace in the man’s gratified utterance. The end of which Sayre was thinking did not seem to her one bit like that of a story-book.

  With her foot she pulled a stiff chair to the table edge and sank upon it. Once more she leaned her elbows on the flour-strewn board, propping her face upon her dough-stuck hands. “It’s the end,” her thought added with engulfing bitterness, “of everything I’ve lived and worked for for nearly two long years.” She stared unseeing into the corner of the room. “I’m beaten, completely beaten, by the Hoskins, as I might have known I would be,” her crucifying candor went on. “And my defeat’s all the worse because it’s a kind I never once even dreamed of.”

  23

  The Happy Ending

  On a mid-afternoon three weeks later Sayre was working inside the house, while Hitty was engrossed in mudpies in the empty flower garden at one side of the front step. A joyous whoop from the little girl drove Sayre to the window. Mr. Hansen’s truck was stopping in the road. A short, well-knit figure was springing down over the front wheel. Mr. Hansen was handing this figure a suitcase. Just as he received it, the flying Hitty, who had reached the front gate and swung through it precipitated herself upon the figure, suitcase and all.

  “Charley!” Sayre, too, was out the front door and speeding over wide, bare front yard. Halfway, her steps slackened almost to a stop. Her legs were trembling so she could no longer trust them. She was struggling, too, with a contraction in her throat. To greet Charley with tears, how it would disgust him and herself! What ever was the matter with her?

  He was approaching now, holding Hitty pickaback around his shoulders with one hand, the other hand half-tugging, half-dragging the suitcase. Cock-headed because of Hitty’s position, he threw Sayre a grin. It was the old grin, happy, and care-free and infectious. She wanted to cry worse than ever.

  “Hello,” she managed instead, appalled at the indifferent sound of her greeting.

  “Hello, yourself. How’s crops?”

  “Fine.” Of course there weren’t any, really, this early. “Here, give me that.” She reached for the suitcase. Charley jerked a refusal to relinquish it. They walked on, carrying it together.

  “Have a good time at the Tigers’ Club?”

  “Swell.”

  Charley had just come from that business men’s club luncheon, Sayre knew. Mr. Hoskins had planned to arrive in town with Frank and Charley that morning just in time to take in the affair as honor guests because the luncheon’s particular purpose was to celebrate the late triumphs of the Upham High School’s stock-judging team.

  “Dad won’t be home, till late. Mr. Hoskins wanted him to stay in town tonight to talk over store business.”

  “So you got Mr. Hansen to bring you home?”

  “You bet.”

  How commonplace it all was, this home-coming. But, oh, how enormously nice!

  Charley stopped after a moment, set the suitcase on the ground and swung Hitty down from his shoulders. She was getting too big, these days, for rides like that. Although she was chattering hard all the time, the boy paid no attention. His eyes were on the queer, oblong house with its tar-paper covering slatted on to its sides by laths. There was affection, not amusement, now, in that gaze. “Gosh!” he breathed. “It looks good—the old Crate.”

  “The home crate,” came Sayre’s assenting murmur.

  Charley bent to the suitcase again, lowering his face away from his sister. “You bet,” he repeated sotto voce.

  Something back of the casualness in that tone brought Sayre a kind of comfort. “He loves it, anyway,” she thought, “almost as much as I do.”

  It was easier, after that, to bide Charley’s time and not to hurry their discussion of the future. Hadn’t she already been waiting for three weeks? She could hold on a little longer to her resolve not to mention the new plan until he had spoken of it first. Not once had she referred to it in her letters to him, nor he in his to her. She knew why, she had told herself repeatedly. “He suspects how I feel about it all. He won’t tell me his plans because he thinks I’ll try to boss him out of them.”

  “Seems as if I’d been gone ages,” Charley was saying. “Can’t wait to take everything in. Where’re my work clothes, Sayre?”

  “All clean. On the hooks on your bedroom wall. I’ll go the rounds with you.”

  And still, on all those rounds, and through chore-time and supper and dishes, no mention between them of the new opportunity. There was at least the pretext of Hitty’s presence to prevent; the way she tried to cling, however inconveniently, to Charley’s hand; the persistent demand her prattle made upon his attention.

  “And Sayre named one of those lambs Snub, because it had such a cunning little white nose. And she named the other one Button, because it had such a cunning little white nose. They’re twins, just like you and Sayre. And now they’ve grown so much alike that we can’t tell any more which one’s Snub and which one’s Button. Do you think you can? Tell any difference between ’em, I mean?”

  But Hitty was in bed at last. Sayre came out of the front door and seated herself beside her brother on the low step. The late twilight spread out before them over this part of the Pawaukee’s checkerboard landscape of dark alfalfa fields and big white blocks of abandoned semi-desert. But Sayre did not look at it. Instead, she began slyly to study her brother’s face in the half-light.

  Yes, the grim, dogged expression of the winter was gone. The old, bright, friendly cheeriness had come back. Only there was a difference. “I’ve got it,” flashed through her with sudden insight. “Charley’s face has come to have some of that same quiet, firm look I’ve always liked so much on Mr. Kitchell’s.”

  “It just about bowls me over, Sayre, if you want to know,” Charley was breaking the silence meanwhile, “a one hundred percent lamb crop and only one runt lost from the sows’ litters through all that storm. Mr. Hoskins hit it right in his speech today when he said what you’d done was worth more, really, than any stock-judging.”

  “Mr. Hoskins said that? About me?”

  “You bet he did. He read all your project statistics down to date. He’d got ’em from Mr. Kitchell. He’s backing Kit strong now, you know. Everything Mr. Kitchell’s ever done or wants to do.”

  “Queer he didn’t do his talking about a Hoskins.” Sayre did not mean to be spiteful. She was really just trying to cover up her embarrassed gratification.

  “Oh, he did plenty of that, all right. Told all the new plans he’s got for developing this Pawaukee Irrigation Project. Financing a creamery. Getting the Big Western Sugar Company to build a sugar factory in a Pawaukee town now that those German-Russians have shown how this land’ll raise sugar beets. (As if the sugar company hadn’t put ’em here for just that reason, though no
body knew it.) Working out a credit system so that his bank’ll help the farmers get a real start with stock.

  “But he said it was what the high school’s vocational agriculture pupils had done that had changed his views about agriculture on this Pawaukee project more than—”

  “It’s nothing of the sort. It’s the Government’s putting a stop to his trying to steal—” Sayre checked her impulsiveness. There wasn’t any sense, now, in keeping up that old bad feeling.

  Charley ignored the interruption. “And it was what you, the star vocational agriculture pupil, had done more than any—”

  “As if you hadn’t done just as much as I have, really a lot more.” Sayre’s swift intuition shot to the mark. “And he said so, too.”

  Charley laughed in his turn. “Oh, he was pretty puffy, throwing out bouquets all the way ‘round, of course. ’Twas darn decent of him, too, the way he treated me, after what I’d just told him. He didn’t care about that as much as I’d expected, though. He’d already got all he really wanted out of that offer, I guess.”

  Sayre’s attention tightened. “You mean –”

  But Charley didn’t notice. “That’s a mighty nasty speech for me to make after all he’s done for me. I’m making it just once. And only to you, Sayre. Because—because—well, I’ve got to tell you something that you’re not going to like.”

  Sayre trembled. “No, I’m not. You’re right, there,” she thought clearly. But aloud she did not make a sound.

  “I haven’t been in a hurry. I’ve thought and thought about it until I’m dead sure I’ve decided the only way I could. I’m sorriest for your sake. Dad’ll get over it quick enough.”

  Sayre clasped her arms tight around her knees, rocking a little.

  Charley felt her tension, but misinterpreted her silence. “You aren’t going to make it easy for a fellow, are you? You made up your mind to that from the start. As if you didn’t know perfectly well what I’m talking about, Mr. Hoskins’ dairy farm offer. Well, I’ve turned it down—flat.”