was disappointed. Perhaps she, too, suspected a joke. She had
learned that humour might wear almost any guise.
When Claude started for the barn after breakfast, she came
running down the path, calling to him faintly,—hurrying always
made her short of breath. Overtaking him, she looked up with
solicitude, shading her eyes with her delicately formed hand. “If
you want I should do up your linen coat, Claude, I can iron it
while you’re hitching,” she said wistfully.
Claude stood kicking at a bunch of mottled feathers that had once
been a young chicken. His shoulders were drawn high, his mother
saw, and his figure suggested energy and determined self-control.
“You needn’t mind, mother.” He spoke rapidly, muttering his
words. “I’d better wear my old clothes if I have to take the
hides. They’re greasy, and in the sun they’ll smell worse than
fertilizer.”
“The men can handle the hides, I should think. Wouldn’t you feel
better in town to be dressed?” She was still blinking up at him.
“Don’t bother about it. Put me out a clean coloured shirt, if you
want to. That’s all right.”
He turned toward the barn, and his mother went slowly back the
path up to the house. She was so plucky and so stooped, his dear
mother! He guessed if she could stand having these men about,
could cook and wash for them, he could drive them to town!
Half an hour after the wagon left, Nat Wheeler put on an alpaca
coat and went off in the rattling buckboard in which, though he
kept two automobiles, he still drove about the country. He said
nothing to his wife; it was her business to guess whether or not
he would be home for dinner. She and Mahailey could have a good
time scrubbing and sweeping all day, with no men around to bother
them.
There were few days in the year when Wheeler did not drive off
somewhere; to an auction sale, or a political convention, or a
meeting of the Farmers’ Telephone directors;—to see how his
neighbours were getting on with their work, if there was nothing
else to look after. He preferred his buckboard to a car because
it was light, went easily over heavy or rough roads, and was so
rickety that he never felt he must suggest his wife’s
accompanying him. Besides he could see the country better when he
didn’t have to keep his mind on the road. He had come to this
part of Nebraska when the Indians and the buffalo were still
about, remembered the grasshopper year and the big cyclone, had
watched the farms emerge one by one from the great rolling page
where once only the wind wrote its story. He had encouraged new
settlers to take up homesteads, urged on courtships, lent young
fellows the money to marry on, seen families grow and prosper;
until he felt a little as if all this were his own enterprise.
The changes, not only those the years made, but those the seasons
made, were interesting to him.
People recognized Nat Wheeler and his cart a mile away. He sat
massive and comfortable, weighing down one end of the slanting
seat, his driving hand lying on his knee. Even his German
neighbours, the Yoeders, who hated to stop work for a quarter of
an hour on any account, were glad to see him coming. The
merchants in the little towns about the county missed him if he
didn’t drop in once a week or so. He was active in politics;
never ran for an office himself, but often took up the cause of a
friend and conducted his campaign for him.
The French saying, “Joy of the street, sorrow of the home,” was
exemplified in Mr. Wheeler, though not at all in the French way.
His own affairs were of secondary importance to him. In the early
days he had homesteaded and bought and leased enough land to make
him rich. Now he had only to rent it out to good farmers who
liked to work—he didn’t, and of that he made no secret. When he
was at home, he usually sat upstairs in the living room, reading
newspapers. He subscribed for a dozen or more—the list included
a weekly devoted to scandal—and he was well informed about what
was going on in the world. He had magnificent health, and illness
in himself or in other people struck him as humorous. To be sure,
he never suffered from anything more perplexing than toothache or
boils, or an occasional bilious attack.
Wheeler gave liberally to churches and charities, was always
ready to lend money or machinery to a neighbour who was short of
anything. He liked to tease and shock diffident people, and had
an inexhaustible supply of funny stories. Everybody marveled that
he got on so well with his oldest son, Bayliss Wheeler. Not that
Bayliss was exactly diffident, but he was a narrow gauge fellow,
the sort of prudent young man one wouldn’t expect Nat Wheeler to
like.
Bayliss had a farm implement business in Frankfort, and though he
was still under thirty he had made a very considerable financial
success. Perhaps Wheeler was proud of his son’s business acumen.
At any rate, he drove to town to see Bayliss several times a
week, went to sales and stock exhibits with him, and sat about
his store for hours at a stretch, joking with the farmers who
came in. Wheeler had been a heavy drinker in his day, and was
still a heavy feeder. Bayliss was thin and dyspeptic, and a
virulent Prohibitionist; he would have liked to regulate
everybody’s diet by his own feeble constitution. Even Mrs.
Wheeler, who took the men God had apportioned her for granted,
wondered how Bayliss and his father could go off to conventions
together and have a good time, since their ideas of what made a
good time were so different.
Once every few years, Mr. Wheeler bought a new suit and a dozen
stiff shirts and went back to Maine to visit his brothers and
sisters, who were very quiet, conventional people. But he was
always glad to get home to his old clothes, his big farm, his
buckboard, and Bayliss.
Mrs. Wheeler had come out from Vermont to be Principal of the
High School, when Frankfort was a frontier town and Nat Wheeler
was a prosperous bachelor. He must have fancied her for the same
reason he liked his son Bayliss, because she was so different.
There was this to be said for Nat Wheeler, that he liked every
sort of human creature; he liked good people and honest people,
and he liked rascals and hypocrites almost to the point of loving
them. If he heard that a neighbour had played a sharp trick or
done something particularly mean, he was sure to drive over to
see the man at once, as if he hadn’t hitherto appreciated him.
There was a large, loafing dignity about Claude’s father. He
liked to provoke others to uncouth laughter, but he never laughed
immoderately himself. In telling stories about him, people often
tried to imitate his smooth, senatorial voice, robust but never
loud. Even when he was hilariously delighted by anything,—as
when poor Mahailey, undressing in the dark on a summer night, sat
down on the sticky fly-paper,—he was not boisterous. He was a
jolly, easy-going father, indeed, for a boy who was not
thin-skinned.
II
Claude and his mules rattled into Frankfort just as the calliope
went screaming down Main street at the head of the circus parade.
Getting rid of his disagreeable freight and his uncongenial
companions as soon as possible, he elbowed his way along the
crowded sidewalk, looking for some of the neighbour boys. Mr.
Wheeler was standing on the Farmer’s Bank corner, towering a head
above the throng, chaffing with a little hunchback who was