The Bondboy.

by George W. (George Washington) Ogden.

CHAPTER I

DELIVERED INTO BONDAGE

Sarah Newbolt enjoyed in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the lilacs, which cl.u.s.tered coppicelike in her dooryard, were ready to unlock and flare forth leaves. On the porch with its southern exposure she sat in her low, splint-bottomed rocker, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees.

The sun tickled her shoulders through her linsey dress, and pictured her, grotesquely foreshortened, upon the nail-drawn, warped, and beaten floor. Her hands, nursing her cheeks, chin pivoted in their palms, were large and toil-distorted, great-jointed like a man's, and all the feminine softness with which nature had endowed her seemed to have been overcome by the masculine cast of frame and face which the hardships of her life had developed.

She did not seem, crouched there like an old cat warming herself in the first keen fires of spring, conscious of anything about her; of the low house, with its battered eaves, the sprawling rail-fence in front of it, out of which the gate was gone, like a tooth; of the wild bramble of roses, or the generations of honeysuckle which had grown, layer upon layer--the under stratum all dead and brown--over the decaying arbor which led up to the cracked front door. She did not seem conscious that time and poverty had wasted the beauties of that place; that shingles were gone from the outreaching eaves, torn away by March winds; that stones had fallen from the chimney, squatting broad-shouldered at the weathered gable; that panes were missing from the windows, their places supplied by boards and tacked-on cloth, or that pillows crowded into them, making it seem a house that stopped its ears against the unfriendly things which pa.s.sengers upon the highway might speak of it.

Time and poverty were pressing upon Sarah Newbolt also, relaxing there that bright hour in the sun, straying away from her troubles and her vexations like an autumn b.u.t.terfly among the golden leaves, unmindful of the frost which soon must cut short its day. For, poor as she was in all that governments put imposts upon, and men list in tax returns and carry to steel vaults to h.o.a.rd away, Sarah Newbolt had her dreams. She had no golden past; there was no golden future ready before her feet. There was no review for her in those visions of happy days and tender memories, over which a woman half closes her eyes and smiles, or over the incense of which a man's heart softens. Behind her stretched a wake of turbulence and strife; ahead of her lay the banked clouds of an unsettled and insecure future.

But she had her dreams, in which even the poorest of us may indulge when our taskmaster in the great brickworks of this hot and heavy world is not hard by and pressing us forward with his lash. She had her dreams of what never was and never could be; of old longings, old heart-hungers, old hopes, and loves which never had come near for one moment's caress of her toil-hardened hand. Dreams which roved the world and soothed the ache in her heart by their very extravagance, which even her frugal conscience could not chide; dreams which drew hot tears upon her cheeks, to trickle down among her knotted fingers and tincture the bitterness of things unrealized.

The crunch of wheels in the road now startled her from her profitless excursions among the mist of visions and dreams. She lifted her head like a cow startled from her peaceful grazing, for the vehicle had stopped at the gap in the fence where the gate should have stood warder between its leaning posts.

"Well, he's come," said she with the resignation of one who finds the long expected and dreaded at hand.

A man got out of the buggy and hitched his horse to one of the old gate-posts, first trying it to satisfy himself that it was trustworthy, for stability in even a post on those premises, where everything was going to decay, seemed unreasonable to expect. He turned up the path, bordered by blue flags, thrusting their swordpoints through the ground, and strode toward the house, with that uncouth giving at the knees which marks a man who long has followed the plow across furrowed fields.

The visitor was tall and bony, brown, dry-faced, and frowning of aspect.

There was severity in every line of his long, loose body; in the hard wrinkles of his forehead, in his ill-nurtured gray beard, which was so harsh that it rasped like wire upon his coat as he turned his head in quick apprais.e.m.e.nt of his surroundings. His feet were bunion-distorted and lumpy in his great coa.r.s.e shoes; coa.r.s.e black hair grew down upon his broad, thick-jointed hands; a thicket of eyebrows presented, like a _chevaux-de-frise_, bristling when he drew them down in his peering squint.

Sarah Newbolt rose to meet him, tall in the vigor of her pioneer stock.

In her face there was a malarial smokiness of color, although it still held a trace of a past brightness, and her meagerness of feature gave her mouth a set of determination which stood like a false index at the beginning of a book or a misleading sign upon a door. Her eyes were black, her brows small and delicate. Back from her narrow forehead she had drawn her plentiful dark hair in rigid unloveliness; over it she wore a knitted shawl.

"Well, Mr. Chase, you've come to put us out, I reckon?" said she, a little tremor in her chin, although her voice was steady and her eyes met his with an appeal which lay too near the soul for words.

Isom Chase drew up to the steps and placed one knotted foot upon them, standing thus in silence a little while, as if thinking it over. The dust of the highroad was on his broad black hat, and gray upon his grizzly beard. In the att.i.tude of his lean frame, in the posture of his foot upon the step, he seemed to be a.s.serting a mastery over the place which he had invaded to the sad dispersion of Sarah Newbolt's dreams.

"I hate to do it," he declared, speaking hurriedly, as if he held words but frail vehicles in a world where deeds counted with so much greater weight, "but I've been easy on you, ma'am; no man can say that I haven't been easy."

"I know your money's long past due," she sighed, "but if you was to give Joe another chance, Mr. Chase, we could pay you off in time."

"Oh, another chance, another chance!" said he impatiently. "What could you do with all the chances in the world, you and him--what did your husband ever do with his chances? He had as many of 'em as I ever did, and what did he ever do but scheme away his time on fool things that didn't pan out when he ought 'a' been in the field! No, you and Joe couldn't pay back that loan, ma'am, not if I was to give you forty years to do it in."

"Well, maybe not," said she, drawing a sigh from the well of her sad old heart.

"The interest ain't been paid since Peter died, and that's more than two years now," said Chase. "I can't sleep on my rights that way, ma'am; I've got to foreclose to save myself."

"Yes, you've been easy, even if we did give you up our last cow on that there inter-est," she allowed. "You've been as kind and easy over it, I reckon, Mr. Chase, as a body could be. Well, I reckon me and Joe we'll have to leave the old place now."

"Lord knows, I don't see what there is to stay for!" said Chase feelingly, sweeping his eyes around the wired-up, gone-to-the-devil-looking place.

"When a body's bore children in a place," she said earnestly, "and nussed 'em, and seen 'em fade away and die; and when a body's lived in a house for upward of forty years, and thought things in it, and everything----"

"Bosh!" said Isom Chase, kicking the rotting step.

"I know it's all shacklety now," said she apologetically, "but it's home to me and Joe!"

Her voice trembled over the words, and she wiped her eyes with the corner of her head-shawl; but her face remained as immobile as features cast in metal. When one has wept out of the heart for years, as Sarah Newbolt had wept, the face is no longer a barometer over the tempests of the soul.

Isom Chase was silent. He stood as if reflecting his coming words, trying the loose boards of the siding with his blunt thumb.

"Peter and I, we came here from Kentucky," said she, looking at him with a sidelong appeal, as if for permission to speak the profitless sentiments of her heart, "and people was scarce in this part of Missouri then. I rode all the way a-horseback, and I came here, to this very house, a bride."

"I didn't take a mortgage on sentiment--I took it on the land," said Chase, out of humor with this reminiscent history.

"You can't understand how I feel, Mr. Chase," said she, dropping her arms at her sides hopelessly. "Peter--he planted them laylocks and them roses."

"Better 'a' planted corn--and tended to it!" grunted Chase. "Well, you can grub 'em all up and take 'em away with you, if you want 'em. They don't pay interest--I suppose you've found that out."

"Not on money," said she, reaching out her hand toward a giant lilac with a caressing, tender air.

"Sit down," said he in voice of command, planting himself upon the porch, his back against a post, "and let's you and I have a little talk.

Where do you expect to go when you leave here; what plans have you got for the future?"

"Lord, there's not a clap-board in this world that I can poke my head under and lay claim to its shelter!" said she, sitting again in her low rocker, shaking her head sadly.

"Your boy Joe, he'll not be able to command man's wages for three or four years yet," said Chase, studying her averted face as if to take possession of even her thoughts. "He'll not be able to do much toward supportin' you, even if he could light on to a steady, all-the-year job, which he can't, the way times is."

"No, I don't reckon he could," said she.

"And if I was to let you two stay on here I wouldn't be any nearer bein'

paid back that four hundred dollar loan in two or three years than I am now. It's nearly five hundred now, with the interest pilin' up, and it'll be a thousand before you know it. It'd take that boy a lifetime to pay it off."

"Peter failed," she nodded; "it was a burden on him that hackled him to the grave. Yes, I reckon you're right. But there's no tellin' how Joe he'll turn out, Mr. Chase. He may turn out to be a better manager than his pap was."

"How old is he?" asked Chase.

"Most nineteen," said she, some kind of a faraway hope, indefinable and hazy, lifting the cloud of depression which had fallen over her, "and he's uncommon big and stout for his age. Maybe if you'd give Joe work he could pay it off, interest and all, by the time he's twenty-one."

"Not much need for him," said Chase, shaking his head, "but I might--well, I might figure around so I could take him over, on certain conditions, you understand? It all depends on your plans. If you haven't anywhere to go when you leave this house, you're bound to land on the county."

"Don't tell me that, Mr. Chase--don't tell me that!" she begged, pressing her battered hands to her eyes, rocking and moaning in her chair.

"What's the use of puttin' the truth back of you when you're bound to come face up to it in the end?" he asked. "I was talkin' to Judge Little, of the county court, about you this morning. I told him I'd have to foreclose and take possession of this forty to save myself.

"'It'll throw her and that boy on the county,' he says. 'Yes, I reckon it will,' I told him, 'but no man can say I've been hard on 'em.'"

"Oh, you wouldn't throw me on the county at the end of my days, Mr.

Chase!" she appealed. "Joe he'll take care of me, if you'll only give him a chance--if you'll only give him a chance, Mr. Chase!"