Joe got up from his chair and left the table; she rose with him and came around the side. He stopped on his way to the door, looking at her with awkward bashfulness as she stood there flushed and brilliant in her tossed state, scarcely a yard between them.

"But there's n.o.body in the world that cares for me," she complained sorrowfully.

Joe was lifting his hat to his head. Midway he stayed his hand, his face blank with surprise.

"Why, you've got your mother, haven't you?" he asked.

"Mother!" she repeated scornfully. "She'd drive me back to him; she was crazy for me to marry him, for she thinks I'll get all his property and money when he dies."

"Well, he may die before long," consoled Joe.

"Die!" said she; and again, "Die! He'll never die!"

She leaned toward him suddenly, bringing her face within a few inches of his. Her hot breath struck him on the cheek; it moved the cl.u.s.tered hair at his temple and played warm in the doorway of his ear.

"He'll never die," she repeated in low, quick voice, which fell to a whisper in the end, "unless somebody he's tramped on and ground down and cursed and driven puts him out of the way!"

Joe stood looking at her with big eyes, dead to that feminine shock which would have tingled a mature man to the marrow, insensible to the strong effort she was making to wake him and draw him to her. He drew back from her, a little frightened, a good deal ashamed, troubled, and mystified.

"Why, you don't suppose anybody would do that?" said he.

Ollie turned from him, the fire sinking down in her face.

"Oh, no; I don't suppose so," she said, a little distant and cold in her manner.

She began gathering up the dishes.

Joe stood there for a little while, looking at her hands as they flew from plate to plate like white b.u.t.terflies, as if something had stirred in him that he did not understand. Presently he went his way to take up his work, no more words pa.s.sing between them.

Ollie, from under her half raised lids, watched him go, tiptoeing swiftly after him to the door as he went down the path toward the well.

Her breath was quick upon her lips; her breast was agitated. If that slow hunk could be warmed with a man's pa.s.sions and desires; if she could wake him; if she could fling fire into his heart! He was only a boy, the man in him just showing its strong face behind that mask of wild, long hair. It lay there waiting to move him in ways yet strange to his experience. If she might send her whisper to that still slumbering force and charge it into life a day before its time!

She stood with hand upon the door, trailing him with her eyes as he pa.s.sed on to the barn. She felt that she had all but reached beyond the insulation of his adolescence in that burning moment when her breath was on his cheek; she knew that the wood, even that hour, was warm under the fire. What might a whisper now, a smile then, a kindness, a word, a hand laid softly upon his hair, work in the days to come?

She turned back to her work, her mind stirred out of its sluggish rut, the swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase would not die; he would live on and on, harder, drier, stingier year by year, unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low.

What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with a strangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as he slept on his bed, s.n.a.t.c.hing from him the life that he had debased of all its beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in the end.

She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hundred ways she had planned and contrived it in her mind, goaded on nearer and nearer to it by his inhuman oppressions day by day. But her heart had recoiled from it as a task for the hand of a man. If a man could be raised up to it, a man who had suffered servitude with her, a man who would strike for the double vengeance, and the love of her in his heart!

She went to the door again, gripping the stove-lid lifter in her little hand, as the jangle of harness came to her when Joe pa.s.sed with the team. He rode by toward the field, the sun on his broad back, slouching forward as his heavy horses plodded onward. The man in him was asleep yet, yes; but there was a pit of fire as deep as a volcano's throat in his slumbering soul.

If she could lift him up to it, if she could pluck the heart out of him and warm it in her own hot breast, then there would stand the man for her need. For Isom Chase would not die. He would live on and on, like a worm in wood, until some strong hand fed him to the flames.

CHAPTER IV

A STRANGER AT THE GATE

Rain overtook Isom as he was driving home from town that evening, and rain was becoming one of the few things in this world from which he would flee. It aggravated the rheumatism in his knotted toes and stabbed his knee-joints with awl-piercing pains.

For upward of forty-five years Isom had been taking the rains as they came wherever they might find him. It made him growl to turn tail to them now, and trot to shelter from every shower like a hen.

So he was in no sweet humor as he drew near his own barn-yard gate with the early autumn downpour already finding its way through his coat. It came to him as he approached that portal of his domain that if he had a son the boy would be there, with the gate flung wide, to help him. It was only one of the thousand useful offices which a proper boy could fill around that place, thought he; but his wives had conspired in barrenness against him; no son ever would come to cheer his declining days.

Even if he had the kind of a wife that a man should have, reflected he, she would be watching; she would come through rain and hail, thunder and wild blast, to open the gate and ease him through without that troublesome stop.

Matrimony had been a profitless investment for him, said he in bitterness. His first wife had lived long and eaten ravenously, and had worn out shoes and calico slips, and his second, a poor unwilling hand, was not worth her keep.

So, with all this sour summing up of his wasted ventures in his mind, and the cold rain spitting through his years-worn coat, Isom was in no humor to debate the way with another man when it came to entering into his own property through his own wide gate.

But there was another man in the road, blocking it with his top-buggy, one foot out on the step, his head thrust around the side of the hood with inquiring look, as if he also felt that there should be somebody at hand to open the gate and let him pa.s.s without muddying his feet.

"Ho!" called Isom uncivilly, hailing the stranger as he pulled up his team, the end of his wagon-tongue threatening the hood of the buggy; "what do you want here?"

The stranger put his head out a bit farther and twisted his neck to look behind. He did not appear to know Isom, any more than Isom knew him, but there was the surliness of authority, the inhospitality of ownership, in Isom's mien, and it was the business of the man in the buggy to know men at a glance. He saw that Isom was the landlord, and he gave him a nod and smile.

"I'd like to get shelter for my horse and buggy for the night, and lodging for myself," said he.

"Well, if you pay for it I reckon you can git it," returned Isom. "Pile out there and open that gate."

That was the way that Curtis Morgan, advance agent of the divine light of literature, scout of knowledge, torch-bearer of enlightenment into the dark places of ignorance, made his way into the house of Isom Chase, and found himself in due time at supper in the low-ceiled kitchen, with pretty Ollie, like a bright bead in a rusty purse, bringing hot biscuits from the oven and looking him over with a smile.

Curtis Morgan was a slim and limber man, with a small head and a big mouth, a most flexible and plastic organ. Morgan wore a mustache which was cut back to stubs, giving his face a grubby look about the nose. His light hair was short and thick, curling in little love-locks about his ears.

Morgan sold books. He would put you in a set of twenty-seven volumes of the _History of the World_ for fifty-three dollars, or he would open his valise and sell you a ready-reckoner for six bits. He carried _Household Compendiums of Useful Knowledge_ and _Medical Advisers_; he had poultry guides and horse books, and books on bees, and if he couldn't sell you one thing he would sell you another, unless you were a worm, or a greased pig, and able, by some extraordinary natural or artificial attribute, to slip out of his hands.

As has been the case with many a greater man before him, Morgan's most profitable business was done in his smallest article of trade. In the country where men's lives were counted too short for all the work they had to do, they didn't have any time for histories of the world and no interest in them, anyhow. The world was to them no more than they could see of it, and the needs of their lives and their longings--save in some adventurer who developed among them now and then--went no farther than the limit of their vision.

The ready-reckoner was, therefore, the money-maker for Morgan, who seemed to carry an inexhaustible supply. It told a farm-hand what his pay amounted to by days and hours down to the fraction of a cent; it told the farmer what the interest on his note would be; it showed how to find out how many bushels of corn there were in a crib without measuring the contents, and how many tons of hay a stack contained; it told how to draw up a will and write a deed, and make liniment for the mumps.

Isom drew all this information out of his guest at supper, and it did not require much effort to set the sap flowing.

Morgan talked to Isom and looked at Ollie; he asked Joe a question, and c.o.c.ked his eye on Ollie's face as if he expected to find the answer there; he p.r.o.nounced shallow plat.i.tudes of philosophy aiming them at Isom, but looking at Ollie for approval or dissent.

Isom appeared to take rather kindly to him, if his unusual volubility indicated the state of his feelings. He asked Morgan a great deal about his business, and how he liked it, and whether he made any money at it.

Morgan leaned back on the hinder legs of his chair, having finished his supper, and fumbled in his waistcoat pocket for his goose-quill pick. He winked at Isom on the footing of one shrewd man to another as he applied the quill to his big white teeth.

"Well, I pay my way," said he.

There was a great deal back of the simple words; there was an oily self-satisfaction, and there was a vast amount of portentous reserve.

Isom liked it; he nodded, a smile moving his beard. It did him good to meet a man who could get behind the sham skin of the world, and take it by the heels, and turn it a stunning fall.

Next morning, the sun being out again and the roads promising to dry speedily, Morgan hitched up and prepared to set out on his flaming path of enlightenment. Before going he made a proposal to Isom to use that place as headquarters for a week or two, while he covered the country lying about.

Anything that meant profit to Isom looked good and fitting in his eyes.