"n.o.body," said Ike, feeling some compunction that he had gone so far. "I just heard it."

"Who'd you hear it from?"

"George Lockwood kind uh let 't out without 'xactly sayin' 't wuz Tom.

But he didn't deny it _wuz_ Tom."

Having thus relieved himself from the uncomfortable pressure of his secret, Ike got up and went out whistling, leaving Rachel to think the matter over. It was not the moral aspect of the question that presented itself to her. If Tom had beaten Sovine she would not have cared. It was Tom's cleverness as well as his buoyant spirit that had touched her, and now her hero had played the fool. She had the wariness of one who had known many lovers; her wit was not profound, and she saw rather than contrived the course most natural to one of her prudent and ease-loving temperament; she would hold Tom in check, and postpone the disagreeable necessity for final decision.

V

THE MITTEN

Next to Tom's foreboding about his uncle was the dread of the effect of his bad conduct on Rachel. On that rainy Sat.u.r.day afternoon he thought much about the possibility of making shipwreck with Rachel; and this led him to remember with a suspicion, foreign to his temper, the part that Lockwood had taken in his disgrace. By degrees he transferred much of his indignation from Sovine to George Lockwood. He resolved to see Rachel on his way back to town, and if possible by a frank confession to her to forestall and break the force of any reports that might get abroad. The bold course was always the easiest to one of so much propulsiveness. He remembered that there was a "singin'," as it was called in the country, held every Sunday afternoon in the Timber Creek school-house, half-way between his mother's house and the Albaugh's.

This weekly singing-school was attended by most of the young people of the neighborhood, and by Rachel Albaugh among the rest. Tom planned to stop, as though by chance, at the gathering and ride home with the ever adorable Rachel.

When Tom reached the school-house, Bryant, the peripatetic teacher of vocal music, was standing in front of his cla.s.s and leading them by beating time with his rawhide riding-whip. Esteeming himself a leader in the musical world, he was not restricted to the methods used by musicians of greater renown. It is easy for ignorance to make innovation,--the America of a half century ago was seriously thinking of revising everything except the moral law. While Noah Webster in Connecticut was proposing single-handed to work over the English tongue so as to render it suitable to the wants of a self-complacent young nation, other reformers as far west as St. Louis were engaged in improving the world's system of musical notation. Of the new method Bryant was an ardent propagator; he made much of the fact that he was a musical new light, and taught the "square notes," a system in which the relative pitch was not only indicated by the position of the notes upon the clef, but also by their characteristic shapes. Any simpleton could here tell "do" from "me" at sight.

In the "Missouri Harmonist" the lines and s.p.a.ces were decorated with quavers and semi-quavers whose heads were circles, squares, and triangles; Old Hundred becoming a solemn procession of one-legged and no-legged geometric figures. But Bryant understood his business too well to confine his Sunday cla.s.ses of young people to Sunday tunes. When Tom, after tying his horse to the inner corner of a rail-fence, pushed back the school-house door, creaking on its wooden hinges, the four divisions of the cla.s.s were chasing one another through a "round," the words of which ran:

"Now, Lawrence, take your bag, And go right straight to mill, And see, m--y b--o--y, That not a bit you spill!"

This kind of music was naturally popular. Such a service relieves the tedium of a Sunday afternoon, and has something of the charm a dog finds in pursuing his own tail.

Some of the members of the cla.s.s turned their heads and their vocal mouths towards the door when Tom came in, but in the midst of this jangle of voices singing different portions of the same air most of them had all they could do to keep their time by waving their heads or thumping their toes on the puncheon floor, while they alternately looked at their books and at Bryant, who thrashed away with his whip, his lips seeming to say, though the words were inaudible in the general din:

"Up, down, right, left, up," as he perpetually made right angles in the air. Rachel was in the act of drawing the word "boy" to the full length of a long note with a hold after it, but she looked up long enough to recognize the new arrival; then she dropped her eyes to the book again and gave the most severe attention to Bryant and the square notes thereafter, not once looking at Tom to the end. From this unwonted absorption in her music, Tom inferred that Rachel had somehow heard of his misconduct and was offended. But her charms enchanted him more than ever now that they were receding from him, and with a characteristic resolution he determined not to give her up without a sharp endeavor to regain his lost ground.

When the "singing" "let out," Tom availed himself of the first moment of confusion, while Rachel stood apart, to ask permission to go home with her, in the well-worn formula which was the only polite and proper word to use for the purpose; for it is strange how rigidly certain exact forms were adhered to among people where intercourse was for the most part familiar and unconventional.

"May I see you safe home?" he asked, as he had often asked before, but never before with trepidation.

"No," said Rachel, with an evident effort, and without looking at Tom's face.

Such an answer is technically known as "the sack" and "the mitten,"

though it would take a more inventive antiquary than I to tell how it got these epithets. But it was one of the points on which the rural etiquette of that day was rigorous and inflexible, that such a refusal closed the conversation and annihilated the beau without allowing him to demand any explanations or to make any further advances at the time. Tom was not of the sort easily snuffed out. He had to ride past Rachel's house, and it would be an addition to his disappointment that everybody would see his discomfiture. So he answered.

"Well, I'll lead up your horse for you anyhow," and he went out before she could make up her mind to refuse him, and brought the sorrel filly alongside a tree-stump left standing in front of the school-house for a horse-block. The rest had by this time either mounted and gone, or were walking away afoot. Rachel felt a secret admiration for his audacity as she sprang into her saddle, while Tom held her bridle and adjusted the stirrup to her foot.

"What have I done, Rachel?"

"You know, well enough." Her voice was low and tremulous. She had dismissed other favorites, but never before had she found in herself so much reluctance.

"Do you mean my gambling with Dave Sovine?" said Tom, driving, as usual, point-blank at the very center of things.

"Yes."

"Who told you?" He still held on to her bridle-rein with his left hand,--somewhat as a highwayman does in romances.

"Oh! I guess everybody knows. Ike heard it yesterday, from George Lockwood or somebody."

"It was Lockwood got me into it," said Tom, shutting his teeth hard. "If you'd let me go home with you, I could explain things a little."

But those who are enervated by the balmy climate of flattery naturally dread a stiff breeze of ridicule. Rachel Albaugh did not like to bear any share of the odium that must come on Tom when his recklessness, and, above all, his bad luck, should become known. She drew the rein that Tom held, until he felt obliged to let it go, and said "No."

"I have got what I needed," said Tom, making the best of his defeat.

"What?" asked Rachel.

"Oh! one mitten isn't of any use alone; you've given me a pair of them."

Tom felt now the exhilaration of desperation. He gayly mounted his horse, and bade Rachel a cheerful good-bye as he galloped past her; then, when he had overtaken a group of those ahead of Rachel, he reined up and turned in the saddle, leaning his left hand on the croup, while he joked and bantered with one and another. Then he put his horse into a gallop again.

When he was well out of hearing, Henry Miller, who was one of the party, remarked to his companions that he didn't know what was up, but it seemed to him as though Tom Grayson had got something that looked like a mitten without any thumb. "That's one more that Rache's shed," he remarked. "But when she gets a chance to shed me she'll know it."

As Tom rode onward toward the village his spirits sank again, and he let his horse break down into an easy trot and then into a slow walk.

It was no longer Sovine that he cursed inwardly. George Lockwood, he reflected, had called him away from the Law of Common Carriers to play a little game with Dave, and it was Lockwood who had reported his discomfiture to the Albaughs. He put these things together by multiplication rather than by addition, and concluded that Lockwood, from the first, had planned his ruin in order to destroy his chances with Rachel, which was giving that mediocre young man credit for a depth of forethinking malice he was far from possessing.

Monday morning Tom went into Wooden & Snyder's store on the way to his office above. Lockwood had just finished sweeping out; the sprinkling upon the floor was not dry; it yet showed the figure 8s which he had made in swinging the sprinkler to and fro as he walked. The only persons in the store were two or three villagers; the country people rarely came in on Monday, and never at so early an hour. One frisky young man of a chatty temperament had stopped to exchange the gossip of the morning with George; but meaning to make his halt as slight as possible, he had not gone farther than the threshold, on which he now balanced himself, with his hands in his pockets, talking as he rocked nervously to and fro, like a bird on a waving bough in a wind. Another villager had slouched in to buy a pound of nails, with which to repair the damage done to his garden fence by the pigs during Sunday; but as he was never in a hurry, he stood back and gave the first place to a carpenter who wanted a three-cornered file, and who was in haste to get to his day's work. When Lockwood had attended to the carpenter, Tom beckoned him to the back part of the store, and without saying a word counted out to him the money he had borrowed.

Something in Tom's manner gave Lockwood a sneaking feeling that his own share in this affair was not creditable. His was one of those consciences that take their cue from without. Of independent moral judgment he had little; but he had a vague desire to stand well in the judgment of others, and even to stand well in his own eyes when judged by other people's code. It was this half-evolved conscience that made him wish--what shall I say?--to atone for the harm he had but half-intentionally done to Tom? or, to remove the unfavorable impression that Tom evidently had of his conduct? At any rate, when he had taken his money again, he ventured to offer some confidential advice in a low tone. For your cool man who escapes the pitfalls into which better and cleverer men often go headlong is p.r.o.ne to rank his worldly wisdom, and even his sluggish temperament, among the higher virtues. Some trace of this relative complacency made itself heard perhaps in Lockwood's voice, when he said in an undertone:

"You know, Tom, if I were you, I'd take a solemn oath never to touch a card again. You're too rash."

This good counsel grated on the excited feelings of the recipient of it.

"I don't want any advice from you," said Tom in a bitter monotone.

I have heard it mentioned by an expert that a super-heated steam-boiler is likely to explode with the first escape of steam, the slight relief of pressure precipitating the catastrophe. Tom had resolved not to speak a word to Lockwood, but his wounded and indignant pride had brooded over Rachel's rejection the livelong night, and now the air of patronage in Lockwood drew from him this beginning; then his own words aggravated his feelings, and speech became an involuntary explosion.

"You called me down-stairs," he said, "and got me into this sc.r.a.pe. Do you think I don't know what it was for? You took pains to have word about it go where it would do me the most harm."

"I didn't do any such thing," said Lockwood.

"You did," said Tom. "You told Ike Albaugh Sat.u.r.day. You're a cold-blooded villain, and if you cross my path again I'll shoot you."

By this time he was talking loud enough for all in the store to hear.

The villager who wanted nails had sidled a little closer to the center of the explosion, the young man tilting to and fro on the threshold of the front door had come inside the store and was deeply engaged in studying the familiar collection of pearl b.u.t.tons, colored sewing-silks, ribbons, and other knick-knacks in the counter showcase, while the carpenter had forgotten his haste, and turning about stood now with his tool-box under his arm, looking at Tom Grayson and Lockwood with blunt curiosity.

"That's a nice way to treat me, I must say," said Lockwood, in a kind of whine of outraged friendship. "You'd 'a' gone home bareheaded and in your shirt-sleeves and your stocking-feet, if 't hadn't 'a' been fer me."

"I'd 'a' gone home with my money in my pocket, if you and Dave Sovine hadn't fixed it up between you to fleece me. I 'xpect you made as much out of it as Dave did. You've got me out 'v your way now. But you look out! Don't you cross my track again, George Lockwood, or I'll kill you!"

In a new country, where life is full of energy and effervescence, it is much easier for an enraged man to talk about killing than it is in a land of soberer thinking and less lawlessness. The animal which we call a young man was not so tame in Illinois two generations ago as it is now. But Tom's threat, having given vent to his wrath, lowered the pressure: by the time he had made this second speech his violence had partly spent itself, and he became conscious that he was heard by the three persons in the store, as well as by Snyder, the junior proprietor, who stood now in the back door. Tom Grayson turned and strode out of the place, dimly aware that he had again run the risk of bringing down the avalanche by his rashness. For if Tom was quickly brought to a white-heat, radiation was equally rapid. Long before noon he saw clearly that he had probably rendered it impossible to keep the secret of his gambling from his uncle. All the town would hear of his quarrel with Lockwood, and all the town would set itself to know to the utmost the incident that was the starting-point of a wrath so violent.