CHAPTER III

THE SPARK IN THE CLOD

It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appet.i.te of his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries followed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden that Ollie had planted and tilled under her husband's orders.

Along in early summer the wormy codlings which fell from the apple-trees had to be gathered up and fed to the hogs by Ollie, and it was such a season of blighted fruit that the beasts could not eat them all. So there was apple sauce, sweetened with mola.s.ses from the new barrel that Isom broached.

If it had not been so n.i.g.g.ardly unnecessary, the faculty that Isom had for turning the waste ends of the farm into profit would have been admirable. But the suffering attendant upon this economy fell only upon the human creatures around him. Isom's beasts wallowed in plenty and grew fat in the liberality of his hand. For himself, it looked as if he had the ability to extract his living from the bare surface of a rock.

All of this green truck was filling, as Isom had said, but far from satisfying to a lad in the process of building on such generous plans as Joe. Isom knew that too much skim-milk would make a pot-bellied calf, but he was too stubborn in his rule of life to admit the cause when he saw that Joe began to lag at his work, and grow surly and sour.

Isom came in for quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of a lurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horse cultivators, "laying by" the corn. Joe threw his plow down in the furrow, cast the lines from his shoulders, and declared that he was starving. He vowed that he would not cultivate another row unless a.s.sured, then and there, that Isom would make an immediate enlargement in the bill-of-fare.

Isom stood beside the handles of his own cultivator, there being the s.p.a.ce of ten rows between him and Joe, and took the lines from around his shoulders, with the deliberate, stern movement of a man who is preparing for a fight.

"What do you mean by this kind of capers?" he demanded.

"I mean that you can't go on starving me like you've been doing, and that's all there is to it!" said Joe. "The law don't give you the right to do that."

"Law! Well, I'll law you," said Isom, coming forward, his hard body crouched a little, his lean and guttered neck stretched as if he gathered himself for a run and jump at the fence. "I'll feed you what comes to my hand to feed you, you onery whelp! You're workin' for me, you belong to me!"

"I'm working for mother--I told you that before," said Joe. "I don't owe you anything, Isom, and you've got to feed me better, or I'll walk away and leave you, that's what I'll do!"

"Yes, I see you walkin' away!" said Isom, plucking at his already turned-up sleeve. "I'm goin' to give you a tannin' right now, and one you'll not forget to your dyin' day!"

At that moment Isom doubtless intended to carry out his threat. Here was a piece of his own property, as much his property as his own wedded wife, defying him, facing him with extravagant demands, threatening to stop work unless more bountifully fed! Truly, it was a state of insurrection such as no upright citizen like Isom Chase could allow to go by unreproved and unquieted by castigation of his hand.

"You'd better stop where you are," advised Joe.

He reached down and righted his plow. Isom could see the straining of the leaders in his lean wrist as he stood gripping the handle, and the thought pa.s.sed through him that Joe intended to wrench it off and use it as a weapon against him.

Isom had come but a few steps from his plow. He stopped, looking down at the furrow as if struggling to hold himself within bounds. Still looking at the earth, he went back to his implement.

"I'll put you where the dogs won't bite you if you ever threaten my life ag'in!" said he.

"I didn't threaten your life, Isom, I didn't say a word," said Joe.

"A motion's a threat," said Isom.

"But I'll tell you now," said Joe, quietly, lowering his voice and leaning forward a little, "you'd better think a long time before you ever start to lay hands on me again, Isom. This is twice. The next time----"

Joe set his plow in the furrow with a push that sent the swingle-tree knocking against the horse's heels. The animal started out of the doze into which it had fallen while the quarrel went on. Joe grinned, thinking how even Isom's dumb creatures took every advantage of him that opportunity offered. But he left his warning unfinished as for words.

There was no need to say more, for Isom was cowed. He was quaking down to the tap-root of his salt-hardened soul, but he tried to put a different face on it as he took up his plow.

"I don't want to cripple you, and lay you up," he said. "If I was to begin on you once I don't know where I'd leave off. Git back to your work, and don't give me any more of your sa.s.s!"

"I'll go back to work when you give me your word that I'm to have meat and eggs, b.u.t.ter and milk, and plenty of it," said Joe.

"I orto tie you up to a tree and lash you!" said Isom, jerking angrily at his horse. "I don't know what ever made me pity your mother and keep her out of the poorhouse by takin' in a loafer like you!"

"Well, if you're sick of the bargain go and tell mother. Maybe she is, too," Joe suggested.

"No, you'll not git out of it now, you'll stick right here and put in your time, after all the trouble and expense I've been put to teachin'

you what little you know about farmin'," Isom declared.

He took up his plow and jerked his horse around into the row. Joe stood watching him, with folded arms, plainly with no intention of following.

Isom looked back over his shoulder.

"Git to work!" he yelled.

"You didn't promise me what I asked," said Joe, quietly.

"No, and that ain't all!" returned Isom.

The tall corn swallowed Isom and his horse as the sea swallowed Pharaoh and his host. When he returned to the end of the field where the rebellion had broken out, he found Joe sitting on the beam of his plow and the well-pleased horse asleep in the sun.

Isom said nothing, but plunged away into the tall corn. When he came back next time Joe was unhitching his horse.

"Now, look a-here, Joe," Isom began, in quite a changed tone, "don't you fly up and leave an old man in the lurch that way."

"You know what I said," Joe told him.

"I'll give in to you, Joe; I'll give you everything you ask for, and more," yielded Isom, seeing that Joe intended to leave. "I'll put it in writing if you want me to Joe--I'll do anything to keep you, son. You're the only man I ever had on this place I wouldn't rather see goin' than comin'."

Isom's word was satisfactory to Joe, and he returned to work.

That turned out a day to be remembered in the household of Isom Chase.

If he had come into the kitchen at noon with all the h.o.a.rded savings of his years and thrown them down before her eyes, Ollie could not have been more surprised and mystified than she was when he appeared from the smokehouse carrying a large ham.

After his crafty way in a tight pinch Isom turned necessity into profit by making out that the act was free and voluntary, with the pleasure and comfort of his pretty little wife underlying and prompting it all. He grinned as if he would break his beard when he put the ham down on the table and cut it in two at the middle joint as deftly as a butcher.

"I've been savin' that ham up for you, Ollie. I think it's just about right now," said he.

"That was nice of you, Isom," said she, moved out of her settled taciturnity by his little show of thought for her, "I've been just dying for a piece of ham!"

"Well, fry us a big skilletful of it, and some eggs along with it, and fetch up a crock of sweet milk, and stir it up cream and all," directed Isom.

Poor Ollie, overwhelmed by the suddenness and freedom of this generosity, stood staring at him, her eyes round, her lips open. Isom could not have studied a more astounding surprise. If he had hung diamonds on her neck, rubies on her wrists, and garnets in her hair, she could quicker have found her tongue.

"It's all right, Ollie, it's all right," said Isom pettishly. "We're going to have these things from now on. Might as well eat 'em, and git some of the good of what we produce, as let them city people fatten off 'em."

Isom went out with that, and Ollie attacked the ham with the butcher knife in a most savage and barbarous fashion.

Isom's old wife must have shifted in her grave at sight of the prodigal repast which Ollie soon spread on the kitchen table. Granting, of course, that people in their graves are cognizant of such things, which, according to this old standard of comparison in human amazement, they must be.

But whether the old wife turned over or lay quiescent in the place where they put her when they folded her tired old hands upon her shrunken breast, it is indisputable that the new one eased the pangs of many a hungry day in that bountiful meal. And Joe's face glowed from the fires of it, and his eyes sparkled in the satisfaction of his long-abused stomach.