LITMIR.BIZ

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difference of opinion, if you can get their results.”

      Mrs. Wheeler rose and slipped quickly from the room, feeling her way down the dark staircase to the kitchen. It was dusky and quiet there. Mahailey sat in a corner, hemming dish-towels by the light of a smoky old brass lamp which was her own cherished luminary. Mrs. Wheeler walked up and down the long room in soft, silent agitation, both hands pressed tightly to her breast, where there was a physical ache of sympathy for Claude.

      She remembered kind Tom Wested. He had stayed over night with them several times, and had come to them for consolation after his wife died. It seemed to her that his decline in health and loss of courage, Mr. Wheeler’s fortuitous trip to Denver, the old pine-wood farm in Maine were all things that fitted together and made a net to envelop her unfortunate son. She knew that he had been waiting impatiently for the autumn, and that for the first time he looked forward eagerly to going back to school. He was homesick for his friends, the Erlichs, and his mind was all the time upon the history course he meant to take.

      Yet all this would weigh nothing in the family councils probably he would not even speak of it and he had not one substantial objection to offer to his father’s wishes. His disappointment would be bitter. “Why, it will almost break his heart,” she murmured aloud. Mahailey was a little deaf and heard nothing. She sat holding her work up to the light, driving her needle with a big brass thimble, nodding with sleepiness between stitches. Though Mrs. Wheeler was scarcely conscious of it, the old woman’s presence was a comfort to her, as she walked up and down with her drifting, uncertain step.

      She had left the sitting-room because she was afraid Claude might get angry and say something hard to his father, and because she couldn’t bear to see him hectored. Claude had always found life hard to live; he suffered so much over little things, and she suffered with him. For herself, she never felt disappointments. Her husband’s careless decisions did not disconcert her. If he declared that he would not plant a garden at all this year, she made no protest. It was Mahailey who grumbled. If he felt like eating roast beef and went out and killed a steer, she did the best she could to take care of the meat, and if some of it spoiled she tried not to worry. When she was not lost in religious meditation, she was likely to be thinking about some one of the old books she read over and over. Her personal life was so far removed from the scene of her daily activities that rash and violent men could not break in upon it. But where Claude was concerned, she lived on another plane, dropped into the lower air, tainted with human breath and pulsating with poor, blind, passionate human feelings.

      It had always been so. And now, as she grew older, and her flesh had almost ceased to be concerned with pain or pleasure, like the wasted wax images in old churches, it still vibrated with his feelings and became quick again for him. His chagrins shrivelled her. When he was hurt and suffered silently, something ached in her. On the other hand, when he was happy, a wave of physical contentment went through her. If she wakened in the night and happened to think that he had been happy lately, she would lie softly and gratefully in her warm place.

      “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit,” she sometimes whispered to him in her mind, when she wakened thus and thought of him. There was a singular light in his eyes when he smiled at her on one of his good days, as if to tell her that all was well in his inner kingdom. She had seen that same look again and again, and she could always remember it in the dark – a quick blue flash, tender and a little wild, as if he had seen a vision or glimpsed bright uncertainties.

      Chapter XIII

      The next few weeks were busy ones on the farm. Before the wheat harvest was over, Nat Wheeler packed his leather trunk, put on his “store clothes”, and set off to take Tom Welted back to Maine. During his absence Ralph began to outfit for life in Yucca county. Ralph liked being a great man with the Frankfort merchants, and he had never before had such an opportunity as this. He bought a new shot gun, saddles, bridles, boots, long and short storm coats, a set of furniture for his own room, a fireless cooker, another music machine, and had them shipped to Colorado. His mother, who did not like phonograph music, and detested phonograph monologues, begged him to take the machine at home, but he assured her that she would be dull without it on winter evenings. He wanted one of the latest make, put out under the name of a great American inventor.

      Some of the ranches near Wested’s were owned by New York men who brought their families out there in the summer. Ralph had heard about the dances they gave, and he way counting on being one of the guests. He asked Claude to give him his dress suit, since Claude wouldn’t be needing it any more.

      “You can have it if you want it,” said Claude indifferently, “but it won’t fit you.”

      “I’ll take it in to Fritz and have the pants cut off a little and the shoulders taken in,” his brother replied lightly.

      Claude was impassive. “Go ahead. But if that old Dutch man takes a whack at it, it will look like the devil.”

      “I think I’ll let him try. Father won’t say anything about what I’ve ordered for the house, but he isn’t much for glad rags, you know.” Without more ado he threw Claude’s black clothes into the back seat of the Ford and ran into town to enlist the services of the German tailor.

      Mr. Wheeler, when he returned, thought Ralph had been rather free in expenditures, but Ralph told him it wouldn’t do to take over the new place too modestly. “The ranchers out there are all high-fliers. If we go to squeezing nickels, they won’t think we mean business.”

      The country neighbours, who were always amused at the Wheelers’ doings, got almost as much pleasure out of Ralph’s lavishness as he did himself. One said Ralph had shipped a new piano out to Yucca county, another heard he had ordered a billiard table. August Yoeder, their prosperous German neighbour, asked grimly whether he could, maybe, get a place as hired man with Ralph. Leonard Dawson, who was to be married in October, hailed Claude in town one day and shouted, “My God, Claude, there’s nothing left in the furniture store for me and Susie! Ralph’s bought everything but the coffins. He must be going to live like a prince out there.”

      “I don’t know anything about it,” Claude answered coolly. “It’s not my enterprise.”

      “No, you’ve got to stay on the old place and make it pay the debts, I understand.” Leonard jumped into his car, so that Claude wouldn’t have a chance to reply.

      Mrs. Wheeler, too, when she observed the magnitude of these preparations, began to feel that the new arrangement was not fair to Claude, since he was the older boy and much the steadier. Claude had always worked hard when he was at home, and made a good field hand, while Ralph had never done much but tinker with machinery and run errands in his car. She couldn’t understand why he was selected to manage an undertaking in which so much money was invested.

      “Why, Claude,” she said dreamily one day, “if your father were an older man, I would almost think his judgment had begun to fail. Won’t we get dreadfully into debt at this rate?”

      “Don’t say anything, Mother. It’s Father’s money. He shan’t think I want any of it.”

      “I wish I could talk to Bayliss. Has he said anything?”

      “Not to me, he hasn’t.”

      Ralph and Mr. Wheeler took another flying trip to Colorado, and when they came back Ralph began coaxing his mother to give him bedding and table linen. He said he wasn’t going to live like a savage, even in the sand hills. Mahailey was outraged to see the linen she had washed and ironed and taken care of for so many years packed into boxes. She was out of temper most of the time now, and went about muttering to herself.

      The only possessions Mahailey brought with her when she came to live with the Wheelers, were a feather bed and three patchwork quilts, interlined with wool off the backs of Virginia sheep, washed and carded by hand. The quilts had been made by her old mother, and given to her for a marriage portion. The patchwork on each was done in a different design; one was the popular “logcabin” pattern, another the “laurel-leaf”, the third the “blazing star.” This quilt Mahailey thought too good for use, and she had told Mrs. Wheeler that she was saving it “to give Mr. Claude when he got married”.

      She slept on her feather bed in winter,

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