Carl's recollection of listening to Bone blurs into one of being somewhere in the back of a wagon beside Gertie, wrapped in buffalo robes, and of being awakened by the stopping of the wagon when Bone called to a band of men with lanterns who were searching for the missing Gertie. Apparently the next second he was being lifted out before his home, and his aproned mother was kissing him and sobbing, "Oh, my boy!" He snuggled his head on her shoulder and said:
"I'm cold. But I'm going to San Francisco."
CHAPTER III
Carl Ericson, grown to sixteen and long trousers, trimmed the arc-lights for the Joralemon Power and Lighting Company, after school; then at Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor he won two games of Kelly pool, smoked a cigarette of flake tobacco and wheat-straw paper, and "chipped in" five cents toward a can of beer.
A slender Carl, hesitating in speech, but with plenty to say; rangy as a setter pup, silken-haired; his Scandinavian cheeks like petals at an age when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn and healthy; wearing a celluloid collar and a plain black four-in-hand; a blue-eyed, undistinguished, awkward, busy proletarian of sixteen, to whom evening clothes and poetry did not exist, but who quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin haversack of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly lowering the high-hung mysterious lamps, while his plodding acquaintances "clerked" in stores on Saturdays, or tended furnaces. Sometimes he donned the virile-and noisy-uniform of an electrician: army gauntlets, a coil of wire, pole-climbers strapped to his legs. Crunching his steel spurs into the crisp pine wood of the lighting-poles, he carelessly ascended to the place of humming wires and red cross-bars and green-glass insulators, while crowds of two and three small boys stared in awe from below. At such moments Carl did not envy the aristocratic leisure of his high-school classmate, Fatty Ben Rusk, who, as son of the leading doctor, did not work, but stayed home and read library books.
Carl's own home was not adapted to the enchantments of a boy's reading. Perfectly comfortable it was, and clean with the hard cleanness that keeps oilcloth looking perpetually unused, but it was so airlessly respectable that it doubled Carl's natural restlessness. It had been old Oscar Ericson's labor of love, but the carpenter loved shininess more than space and leisure. His model for a house would have been a pine dry-goods box grained in imitation of oak. Oscar Ericson radiated intolerance and a belief in unimaginative, unresting labor. Every evening, collarless and carpet-slippered, ruffling his broom-colored hair or stroking his large, long chin, while his shirt-tab moved ceaselessly in time to his breathing, he read a Norwegian paper. Carl's mother darned woolen socks and thought about milk-pans and the neighbors and breakfast. The creak of rockers filled the unventilated, oilcloth-floored sitting-room. The sound was as unchanging as the sacred positions of the crayon enlargement of Mrs. Ericson's father, the green-glass top-hat for matches, or the violent ingrain rug with its dog's-head pattern.
Carl's own room contained only plaster walls, a narrow wooden bed, a bureau, a kitchen chair. Fifteen minutes in this irreproachable home sent Carl off to Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor, which was not irreproachable.
He rather disliked the bitterness of beer and the acrid specks of cigarette tobacco that stuck to his lips, but the "bunch at Eddie's" were among the few people in Joralemon who were conscious of life. Eddie's establishment was a long, white-plastered room with a pressed-steel ceiling and an unswept floor. On the walls were billiard-table-makers' calendars and a collection of cigarette-premium chromos portraying bathing girls. The girls were of lithographic complexions, almost too perfect of feature, and their lips were more than ruby. Carl admired them.
* * * * *
A September afternoon. The sixteen-year-old Carl was tipped back in a chair at Eddie Klemm's, one foot on a rung, while he discussed village scandals and told outrageous stories with Eddie Klemm, a brisk money-maker and vulgarian aged twenty-three, who wore a "fancy vest" and celluloid buttons on his lapels. Ben Rusk hesitatingly poked his head through the door.
Eddie Klemm called, with business-like cordiality: "H'lo, Fatty! Come in. How's your good health? Haven't reformed, have you? Going to join us rough-necks? Come on; I'll teach you to play pool. Won't cost you a cent."
"No, I guess I hadn't better. I was just looking for Carl."
"Well, well, Fatty, ain't we ree-fined! Why do we guess we hadn't to probably maybe oughtn't to had better?"
"Oh, I don't know. Some day I'll learn, I guess," sighed Fatty Ben Rusk, who knew perfectly that with a doctor father, a religious mother, and an effeminate taste for reading he could never be a town sport.
"Hey! watch out!" shrieked Eddie.
"Wh-what's the matter?" gasped Fatty.
"The floor 's falling on you!"
"Th-th--Aw, say, you're kidding me," said Fatty, weakly, with a propitiating smile.
"Don't worry, son; you're the third guy to-day that I've caught on that! Stick around, son, and sit in any time, and I'll learn you some pool. You got just the right build for a champ player. Have a cigarette?"
The social amenities whereby Joralemon prepares her youth for the graces of life having been recognized, Fatty Rusk hitched a chair beside Carl, and muttered:
"Say, Carl, here's what I wanted to tell you: I was just up to the Cowleses' to take back a French grammar I borrowed to look at--Maybe that ain't a hard-looking language! What d'you think? Mrs. Cowles told me Gertie is expected back to-morrow."
"Gee whiz! I thought she was going to stay in New York for two years! And she's only been gone six months."
"I guess Mrs. Cowles is kind of lonely without her," Ben mooned.
"So now you'll be all nice and in love with Gertie again, heh? It certainly gets me why you want to fall in love, Fatty, when you could go hunting."
"If you'd read about King Arthur and Galahad and all them instead of reading the Scientific American, and about these fool horseless carriages and stuff--There never will be any practical use for horseless carriages, anyway."
"There will--" growled Carl.
"My mother says she don't believe the Lord ever intended us to ride without horses, or what did He give us horses for? And the things always get stuck in the mud and you have to walk home-mother was reading that in a newspaper, just the other day."
"Son, let me tell you, I'll own a horseless carriage some day, and I bet I go an average of twenty miles an hour with it, maybe forty."
"Oh, rats! But I was saying, if you'd read some library books you'd know about love. Why, what 'd God put love in the world for--"
"Say, will you quit explaining to me about what God did things for?"
"Ouch! Quit! Awwww, quit, Carl.... Say, listen; here's what I wanted to tell you: How if you and me and Adelaide Benner and some of us went down to the depot to meet Gertie, to-morrow? She comes in on the twelve-forty-seven."
"Well, all right. Say, Bennie, you don't want to be worried when I kid you about being in love with Gertie. I don't think I'll ever get married. But it's all right for you."
* * * * *
Saturday morning was so cool, so radiant, that Carl awakened early to a conviction that, no matter how important meeting Gertie might be in the cosmic scheme, he was going hunting. He was down-stairs by five. He fried two eggs, called Dollar Ingersoll, his dog-son of Robert Ingersoll Stillman, gentleman dog-then, in canvas hunting-coat and slouch-hat, tramped out of town southward, where the woods ended in prairie. Gertie's arrival was forgotten.
It was a gipsy day. The sun rolled splendidly through the dry air, over miles of wheat stubble, whose gray-yellow prickles were transmuted by distance into tawny velvet, seeming only the more spacious because of the straight, thin lines of barbed-wire fences lined with goldenrod, and solitary houses in willow groves. The dips and curves of the rolling plain drew him on; the distances satisfied his eyes. A pleasant hum of insects filled the land's wide serenity with hidden life.