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Cover design by Anthony Morais
Cover illustration: Thinkstock
ISBN: 978-1-63220-320-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-942-9
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
FOREWORD by Scott Russell Sanders
FRECKLES
A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST
THE HARVESTER
Foreword
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a young woman, recently married, began exploring a vast swamp near her home along the eastern border of Indiana, puzzling and occasionally scandalizing her neighbors. In that age of corsets and voluminous skirts, on her outings she wore breeches like a man, high leather boots to guard against rattlesnakes, and a broad-brimmed hat to shade her bold gray eyes. She carried a box camera, glass photographic plates, a tripod, a butterfly net, and other paraphernalia for capturing images and specimens of the teeming life in that dank place. As a precaution against varmints, including the human sort, and to reassure her husband, she also carried a revolver.
The 13,000-acre wetland was known locally as Limberlost Swamp, a legacy of the glaciers that flattened and watered the northern reaches of the Midwest. The young woman was Gene Stratton-Porter, who would brave the bogs, thickets, mosquitoes, and snakes for two decades, gathering impressions, and would write a series of books that carried the name of the Limberlost to millions of readers worldwide. A few of those books were natural history, chiefly about moths and birds, but most of them were novels, including the three immensely popular tales included in this volume.
Freckles (1904), A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), and The Harvester (1911), along with half a dozen other Stratton-Porter novels, were made into films, which also attracted large audiences. In fact, these movie adaptations became so profitable that in 1920 she moved to Los Angeles and started her own production company. In December 1924, soon after completing work on a film version of A Girl of the Limberlost, she died in Hollywood from injuries sustained when her chauffeur-driven limousine collided with a streetcar. It was an unlikely end to a life that had begun during the Civil War on a farm in the Wabash Valley of Indiana.
Geneva—her given name, later shortened to Gene—was the twelfth and last child of a mother worn out by childbearing and the rigors of pioneer life, and of a father who combined farming with preaching. Gene was two years old when her mother took to bed with typhoid fever, and five when her mother died. That early loss helps account for the frequent appearance of motherless children in Stratton-Porter’s novels, and also for the numerous characters who are afflicted by lingering illnesses. Shortly before her ninth birthday, Gene suffered another grievous loss when her teenage brother Leander, whom she knew as Laddie, her favorite among the siblings, drowned in the Wabash River.
Motherless, largely unsupervised as her brothers and sisters left home, young Gene entertained herself, and perhaps consoled herself, by spending most waking hours outdoors. She was especially attracted by birds and wildflowers, but every growing thing interested her, and this passion remained with her lifelong, informing all of her books. Those early experiences prepared her to see nature not as an opponent to be subdued—the prevailing view among pioneers—but as a healing presence, an antidote to loneliness, illness, and loss.
In Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost, and The Harvester, you will meet virtuous heroines and heroes, dastardly villains, plucky orphans, kindly elders, idealists and scalawags, and young lovers who overcome every obstacle to unite in bliss. Behind all of these characters looms the Limberlost Swamp, a fragment of the wilderness that once spanned the continent. It is a dangerous place—where thieves lurk, a father drowns, a hero is crushed by a falling tree, a scoundrel dies from snakebite. But it is also a comforting place, a tonic for those ailing in body or mind, a refuge of wild beauty in a landscape otherwise tamed.
Acre by acre, the Limberlost was also tamed during the years when Gene Stratton-Porter lived nearby. The old-growth trees were felled for timber, the wetlands were drained for farming, the ground was drilled for oil. Disturbed by this exploitation of the great swamp, which had so entranced her, Stratton-Porter eventually decided to seek out a more natural setting. In 1913, she and her husband moved to a lake in northern Indiana, where they settled into a house that she had designed, on an estate she called Wildflower Woods. She had also designed the home they left behind, a 14-room cedar-log house she called Limberlost Cabin. By the time she moved away, the wilderness for which she had named it was all but gone. The subduing of nature to human purposes, yielding profit but also loss, is the larger story told by these three novels, and it also the dominant story of American civilization.
Recently, however, a hopeful new narrative has begun in the place that Gene Stratton-Porter loved, as local people, inspired by her books, have enlisted farmers, scientists, land trusts, and government agencies in a cooperative effort to restore portions of the vanished swamp. Once more, waters gather and wetland plants thrive, nurturing birds, frogs, salamanders, butterflies, and countless other creatures, allowing visitors to sense what drew that bold young woman, more than a century ago, to the Limberlost.
Scott Russell Sanders
Freckles
To all good Irishmen in general and one Charles Darwin Porter in particular
Contents
CHAPTER 1:
Wherein Great Risks Are Taken and the Limberlost Guard Is Hired
CHAPTER 2:
Wherein Freckles Proves His Mettle and Finds Friends
CHAPTER 3:
Wherein a Feather Falls and a Soul Is Born
CHAPTER 4:
Wherein Freckles Faces Trouble Bravely and Opens the Way for New Experiences
CHAPTER 5:
Wherein an Angel Materializes and a Man Worships
CHAPTER 6:
Wherein a Fight Occurs and Women Shoot Straight
CHAPTER 7:
Wherein Freckles Wins Honor and Finds a Footprint on the Trail
CHAPTER 8:
Wherein Freckles Meets a Man of Affairs and Loses Nothing by the Encounter
CHAPTER 9:
Wherein the Limberlost Falls upon Mrs. Duncan and Freckles Comes to the Rescue
CHAPTER 10:
Wherein Freckles Strives Mightily and the Swamp Angel Rewards Him
CHAPTER 11:
Wherein the Butterflies Go on a Spree and Freckles Informs the Bird Woman
CHAPTER 12:
Wherein Black Jack Captures Freckles and the Angel Captures Jack
CHAPTER 13:
Wherein the Angel Releases Freckles, and the Curse of Black Jack Falls upon Her
CHA
PTER 14:
Wherein Freckles Nurses a Heartache and Black Jack Drops Out
CHAPTER 15:
Wherein Freckles and the Angel Try Taking a Picture, and Little Chicken Furnishes the Subject
CHAPTER 16:
Wherein the Angel Locates a Rare Tree and Dines with the Gang
CHAPTER 17:
Wherein Freckles Offers His Life for His Love and Gets a Broken Body
CHAPTER 18:
Wherein Freckles Refuses Love without Knowledge of Honorable Birth, and the Angel Goes in Quest of It
CHAPTER 19:
Wherein Freckles Finds His Birthright and the Angel Loses Her Heart
CHAPTER 20:
Wherein Freckles Returns to the Limberlost, and Lord O’More Sails for Ireland without Him
Chapter 1
Wherein Great Risks Are Taken and the Limberlost Guard Is Hired
Freckles came down the corduroy that crosses the lower end of the Limberlost. At a glance he might have been mistaken for a tramp, but he was truly seeking work. He was intensely eager to belong somewhere and to be attached to almost any enterprise that would furnish him food and clothing.
Long before he came in sight of the camp of the Grand Rapids Lumber Company, he could hear the cheery voices of the men, the neighing of the horses, and could scent the tempting odors of cooking food. A feeling of homeless friendlessness swept over him in a sickening wave. Without stopping to think, he turned into the newly made road and followed it to the camp, where the gang was making ready for supper and bed.
The scene was intensely attractive. The thickness of the swamp made a dark, massive background below, while above towered gigantic trees. The men were calling jovially back and forth as they unharnessed tired horses that fell into attitudes of rest and crunched, in deep content, the grain given them. Duncan, the brawny Scotch head-teamster, lovingly wiped the flanks of his big bays with handfuls of pawpaw leaves, as he softly whistled, “O wha will be my dearie, O!” and a cricket beneath the leaves at his feet accompanied him. The green wood fire hissed and crackled merrily. Wreathing tongues of flame wrapped around the big black kettles, and when the cook lifted the lids to plunge in his testing-fork, gusts of savory odors escaped.
Freckles approached him.
“I want to speak with the Boss,” he said.
The cook glanced at him and answered carelessly: “He can’t use you.”
The color flooded Freckles’s face, but he said simply: “If you will be having the goodness to point him out, we will give him a chance to do his own talking.”
With a shrug of astonishment, the cook led the way to a rough board table where a broad, square-shouldered man was bending over some account-books.
“Mr. McLean, here’s another man wanting to be taken on the gang, I suppose,” he said.
“All right,” came the cheery answer. “I never needed a good man more than I do just now.”
The manager turned a page and carefully began a new line.
“No use of your bothering with this fellow,” volunteered the cook. “He hasn’t but one hand.”
The flush on Freckles’s face burned deeper. His lips thinned to a mere line. He lifted his shoulders, took a step forward, and thrust out his right arm, from which the sleeve dangled empty at the wrist.
“That will do, Sears,” came the voice of the Boss sharply. “I will interview my man when I finish this report.”
He turned to his work, while the cook hurried to the fires. Freckles stood one instant as he had braced himself to meet the eyes of the manager; then his arm dropped and a wave of whiteness swept him. The Boss had not even turned his head. He had used the possessive. When he said “my man,” the hungry heart of Freckles went reaching toward him.
The boy drew a quivering breath. Then he whipped off his old hat and beat the dust from it carefully. With his left hand he caught the right sleeve, wiped his sweaty face, and tried to straighten his hair with his fingers. He broke a spray of ironwort beside him and used the purple bloom to beat the dust from his shoulders and limbs. The Boss, busy over his report, was, nevertheless, vaguely alive to the toilet being made behind him, and scored one for the man.
McLean was a Scotchman. It was his habit to work slowly and methodically. The men of his camps never had known him to be in a hurry or to lose his temper. Discipline was inflexible, but the Boss was always kind. His habits were simple. He shared camp life with his gangs. The only visible signs of wealth consisted of a big, shimmering diamond stone of ice and fire that glittered and burned on one of his fingers, and the dainty, beautiful thoroughbred mare he rode between camps and across the country on business.
No man of McLean’s gangs could honestly say that he ever had been overdriven or underpaid. The Boss never had exacted any deference from his men, yet so intense was his personality that no man of them ever had attempted a familiarity. They all knew him to be a thorough gentleman, and that in the great timber city several millions stood to his credit.
He was the only son of that McLean who had sent out the finest ships ever built in Scotland. That his son should carry on this business after the father’s death had been his ambition. He had sent the boy through the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, and allowed him several years’ travel before he should attempt his first commission for the firm.
Then he was ordered to southern Canada and Michigan to purchase a consignment of tall, straight timber for masts, and south to Indiana for oak beams. The young man entered these mighty forests, parts of which lay untouched since the dawn of the morning of time. The clear, cool, pungent atmosphere was intoxicating. The intense silence, like that of a great empty cathedral, fascinated him. He gradually learned that, to the shy wood creatures that darted across his path or peeped inquiringly from leafy ambush, he was brother. He found himself approaching, with a feeling of reverence, those majestic trees that had stood through ages of sun, wind, and snow. Soon it became difficult to fell them. When he had filled his order and returned home, he was amazed to learn that in the swamps and forests he had lost his heart and it was calling—forever calling him.
When he inherited his father’s property, he promptly disposed of it, and, with his mother, founded a home in a splendid residence in the outskirts of Grand Rapids. With three partners, he organized a lumber company. His work was to purchase, fell, and ship the timber to the mills. Marshall managed the milling process and passed the lumber to the factory. From the lumber, Barthol made beautiful and useful furniture, which Uptegrove scattered all over the world from a big wholesale house. Of the thousands who saw their faces reflected on the polished surfaces of that furniture and found comfort in its use, few there were to whom it suggested mighty forests and trackless swamps, and the man, big of soul and body, who cut his way through them, and with the eye of experience doomed the proud trees that were now entering the homes of civilization for service.
When McLean turned from his finished report, he faced a young man, yet under twenty, tall, spare, heavily framed, closely freckled, and red-haired, with a homely Irish face, but in the steady gray eyes, straightly meeting his searching ones of blue, there was unswerving candor and the appearance of longing not to be ignored. He was dressed in the roughest of farm clothing, and seemed tired to the point of falling.
“You are looking for work?” questioned McLean.
“Yis,” answered Freckles.
“I am very sorry,” said the Boss with genuine sympathy in his every tone, “but there is only one man I want at present—a hardy, big fellow with a stout heart and a strong body. I hoped that you would do, but I am afraid you are too young and scarcely strong enough.”
Freckles stood, hat in hand, watching McLean.
“And what was it you thought I might be doing?” he asked.
The Boss could scarcely repress a start. Somewhere before accident and poverty there had been an ancestor who used cultivated English, even with an accent. The boy spoke in a mellow Irish voice, sweet and pure. It was scarcely de
finite enough to be called brogue, yet there was a trick in the turning of the sentence, the wrong sound of a letter here and there, that was almost irresistible to McLean, and presaged a misuse of infinitives and possessives with which he was very familiar and which touched him nearly. He was of foreign birth, and despite years of alienation, in times of strong feeling he committed inherited sins of accent and construction.
“It’s no child’s job,” answered McLean. “I am the field manager of a big lumber company. We have just leased two thousand acres of the Limberlost. Many of these trees are of great value. We can’t leave our camp, six miles south, for almost a year yet; so we have blazed a trail and strung barbed wires securely around this lease. Before we return to our work, I must put this property in the hands of a reliable, brave, strong man who will guard it every hour of the day, and sleep with one eye open at night. I shall require the entire length of the trail to be walked at least twice each day, to make sure that our lines are up and that no one has been trespassing.”
Freckles was leaning forward, absorbing every word with such intense eagerness that he was beguiling the Boss into explanations he had never intended making.
“But why wouldn’t that be the finest job in the world for me?” he pleaded. “I am never sick. I could walk the trail twice, three times every day, and I’d be watching sharp all the while.”
“It’s because you are scarcely more than a boy, and this will be a trying job for a work-hardened man,” answered McLean. “You see, in the first place, you would be afraid. In stretching our lines, we killed six rattlesnakes almost as long as your body and as thick as your arm. It’s the price of your life to start through the marshgrass surrounding the swamp unless you are covered with heavy leather above your knees.
Wonder, Hope, Love, and Loss Page 1
