In the West Jean Baptiste got ready for the homecoming of his wife. The small grain crop was gone. While the drought was now burning the corn to bits, his large crop of flax, which had been the most hopeful possible a few days before, was showing the effect of the drought now as well.

But with Jean Baptiste, he could almost forego anything and be happy with the prospects. In his mind this became so much so, until he looked forward to the day he had set for her coming as if all the world must become righted when she was once again near him.

Now during these months he had only his grandmother for company, and her he wanted to send home. But she would not leave him, always willing to wait until Orlean came back. During these long lonesome days he found a strange solace in talking to his horses. There, for instance, was John and Humpy, the mules that Orlean had driven her father out to their home with when he had come on his first visit. He told them that she was coming back now, and to him they appeared to answer. They had become round and plump since work had closed, and having fully shed their winter's hair, and not yet become sunburned their dapple gray coating made them very attractive.

He rearranged the house, bought a few pieces of much needed furniture, and made elaborate preparations for the homecoming. At last the day arrived.

It was Saturday morning. The wind had died down, and gave threats of rain for the first time in six long, hot dry weeks. He hitched John and Humpy to the spring wagon, and with a touch of his old enthusiasm, left his grandmother cheerfully--but for reasons of his own, did not tell her that he was going for Orlean. Perhaps he wished to surprise her, at least he did not tell her.

He drove to Winner more filled with hope than he had been for months.

The town was filled that day, and because there was an appearance of rain in the air, which could yet save much of the corn, there was an air of hope and cheer abroad. Jean thought to board a train and ride a few miles, and return on the evening train on which she would be. Then he decided he would wait for her and be ready to drive directly home. As the train was due shortly after nine p.m., he estimated that he could drive the distance in two hours; thereby getting to her claim before midnight and they could spend Sunday together celebrating their happy reunion.

He had longed to talk with her--and grieve with her over their loss in the fine little boy who never knew his parents. He thought of all this and of the happy days they had spent together the summer before. He felt the love and the devotion she had given him then. He wondered sometimes whether he had ever loved her as he had dreamed he would love his wife; but this thought had ever been replaced by his sense of duty. Marriage was sacred; it was the institution of good; he always disliked to see people part. He felt then, as he had ever felt before, that nothing but infidelity could ever make him leave a woman that he had married. He was still an enemy of divorce. He recalled how they had gone to the Catholic church once in Gregory, and had heard a learned priest discourse on divorce and its attendant evils. Never before had anything so impressed him. How plain the priest had made his audience understand why the church did not tolerate divorce. How decidedly he had shown that divorce could and would be avoided if the people could be raised to feel that "until death do us part." And Baptiste and the woman he had married had discussed it afterward. They had found books and stories in the magazines to which they subscribed, and had read deeper into it, and had been united in their opinion on the subject. Divorce was bad; it was evil; it was avoidable in almost every case. Then why should it be?

They had agreed that duty toward each other was the first essential toward combating it; that selfishness was a thing that so often precipitated it. In all its phases he had discussed it with her, and in the end, she had agreed with him. And down in their hearts they had felt that such would never be necessitated in the union they had formed.

So he lived again through the life that had been his, he did not allow his mind to dwell on the evil that had come into and made his life unhappy; made his days and nights and very existence a misery. He did not, as he lingered on the platform of that little western station, think or dwell on the things that were best forgotten. For a time he became Jean Baptiste of old. Return to him then did all that old buoyancy, all that vigor and great hope, all that was his when he had longed for the love that should be every man's.

And she had been away on a visit, to recover from the illness that the delivery had given her. He was sorry for their loss, and he would talk with her this night as they drove along the trail. They would talk of that and all they had lost, and they would talk of that which was to come. Oh, it would be beautiful! Just to have a wife, the wife that gives all her love and thought to making her husband happy. And he would try to give her all that was in him. And his wife would soon be with him--in his arms, and they would be happy as they had once been!

There it was! From down the track the train whistled. It was coming, and his wait was to an end. Near he saw John and Humpy whom she had been delighted to drive. They were groomed for the occasion, and were anxious to go home. Tonight they would haul her and hear her voice. He rose suddenly to his feet when at last the light fell upon the rails and he could see the engine. The roar of the small locomotive was approaching.

Around him were others whose wives had been away. They, too, were come to meet their loved ones. Some were alone while around the others were children--all waiting to meet those dear to their hearts.

The train came to a stop at last, and the people emerged from the coaches. There was the usual caressing as loved ones greeted loved ones.

Little cries of "mama" and "papa" were heard, and for a moment there was quite a hubbub of exclamations. "Oh, John," and "Jim" with the attendant kiss. In the meantime he looked expectantly down the line to where the car doors opened, and not seeing the one for whom he was looking, he presently jumped aboard the first car, and passed through it. It was empty and he estimated that she would be in the rear car. It was the chair car, and the one in which he naturally would expect her to ride. He passed into it bravely, with his lips ready to greet her. The last of the passengers were filing out. The car was empty, and his wife had not come.

Slowly he passed out of the car as the brakeman rushed in to change his apparel for the street. Across the street was the team waiting. They seemed to know him before he came in sight and they greeted him as though they thought that she had come, too.

He got slowly into the wagon, and soon they were hurrying homeward.

CHAPTER IX

WHAT THE PEOPLE WERE SAYING

N.J. McCarthy arrived in the city late on Friday afternoon and was met by both his daughters. Ethel had, of course, read the letters Jean Baptiste had written his wife requesting her to return home, and so she took Orlean with her to meet her father, instead of permitting her to go to the station to return to the husband who had asked for her. The Elder was due in about the same time the train that would have taken Orlean West was due out.

"Ah-ha," he cried as he stepped from the car. "And both my babies have come to meet their father! That is the way my children act. Always obedient to their father. Yes, yes. Never have contraried or disobeyed him," a compliment he meant for Orlean, but Ethel could share it this once, although the times she had contraried or sauced him would have been hard to recount.

Upon arriving home, they met Glavis just returning from work, and he was also greeted in the same effusive manner by the Reverend.

"And how is everything about the home, my son?" asked the Elder in a big voice. At the same time he eyed Glavis critically. He had come to the city with and for a purpose, and that purpose was to put down early the intimacy that had been reported as growing up between Glavis and Baptiste. So he had planned to attend to it diplomatically.

"Why everything is alright, father," glabbed Glavis, grinning broadly and showing his teeth. He was ever affected by the other's lordlyism, and he had never tried matching his wits with those of the other's in an extraordinary manner. The Elder was aware of this, and it made him rather grateful. However, he regarded the other closely as Glavis stepped about in quick attention to his possible needs or desires. That was as he had hoped to have both his sons-in-law, wherefore his team would have been complete. It made him sigh now regretfully when he recalled how he had failed in the one case. He gave up momentarily to a siege of self pity. How different it would have been had Jean Baptiste chosen to admire him as Glavis apparently did. But--and he straightened up perceptibly when it occurred to him, instead of being as Glavis was, the other had chosen to be independent, to call him "Judge," "Colonel,"

"Reverend," and "Elder" and any other vulgar title he happened to think of on the moment. Moreover, he had also chosen to ask him a thousand questions about things he did not understand--that was the trouble, though the Elder had not seen it that way--asking him questions about things he did not understand. The Elder saw it as "impudent." He saw and regarded that persistency which had been the making of the man in Jean Baptiste as "hardheadedness." He regarded that tenacity to stick to anything in the other, sufficient to characterize "a bulldog."

"M-m, my boy," he said now to Glavis. "You are certainly a fine young man, just fine, fine, fine!" He paused briefly while Glavis could swallow the flattery, and then went on: "Never in the thirty years I have been a minister of the gospel and been compelled to be away from home in God's work, has it ever been like it has since you married Ethel. I simply do not have to worry at all now; whereas, I used to have to worry all the time." Whereupon he paused again, affected a lordly sigh, and permitted Glavis to become inflated with vanity before going on.

"Now, before you married Ethel, I was a little dubious." He always said this for a purpose. "I am so well informed and understand men so well, and the ways of men, until I was hesitant to risk trusting you with my daughter's love. You will understand how it is when you have raised children with the care I have exercised in the training of my precious darlings. A man cannot be too careful, and for that reason, I was dubious regarding her marrying you. Besides, we, I think you understand, are among the best colored people of the city of Chicago, and the State of Illinois, so it behooved me to exercise discretion."

"Yes, father," Glavis swallowed. He felt then the dignity of his position as a member of such a distinguished family.

"Well," went on the other, "you know how much grief I must be enduring when I see this poor baby," pointing to Orlean, "as she is. The finest girl that ever trod the earth, and my heart always, and then to see her dragged down to this, and all this attendant gossip, grieves my old heart," whereupon big tears rolled down his dark face. All those about sighed in sympathy and were silent.

"Oh, it's a shame, a shame, my father, it is a shame!" he cried between sobs. "Oh, his immortal soul! Come in here like a thief in the night, and with his dirty tongue just deliberately stole her from her good home--her an innocent child to go out into that wilderness and sacrifice her poor soul to make him rich!" He ended with the eloquence that his years of preaching had given him. He shed more tears of mortification, and resumed:

"And my wife, her own mother, was a party to it!" He was killing two birds with one stone now. Nothing was more gratifying to him than to seize every possible opportunity to place all his failures, all his shortcomings, all his blunders, and last, but not least, all the results of his evil nature, on the shoulders of his little helpless wife. For years--aye, since he had taken her as wife, had it been so. Never had she shared even in reflected light the honors that had come to him. She did as he requested, and endeavored to please him in every way. The love he had given her was an affected love. It was not from his heart. He had given her little that was due her as his wife.

"I went out there," he went on, "to find this child lying there in the bed with only his sister and grandmother to look after her. The doctor was coming twice a day, but that man asked him, when she could but open her eyes, whether such was necessary; and that when it wasn't, then to come but once. I sat there by her bed, I, her poor old father, and nursed her back to life from the brink of death, the death that surely would have come had it not been for me. And when she was well enough, I went to all the expense of bringing her out of that wilderness back to her home and health.

"And for that, for all that I have sacrificed, what am I given? Credit?

Well, I guess not! I am being slandered; I'm being vilified by evil people--and right in my own church! Think of it! For thirty years I have preached the law of the gospel and saved so many souls from hell, and now, now when my poor old head is white and my soul is grieved with the evil that has come into my home, I am vilified!

"No longer than last week, I was approached by a woman, a woman purporting to be a child of God, but who ups to me and said: 'Reverend Mac., what is the matter with your daughter and the man she married? I hear they are parted?' I was so put out that I did not attempt to answer, but just regarded her coldly. But did that stop her mouth? Well, I guess not! She went right on as flip as she could be: 'Well, you know, Reverend, there is all kinds of reports about to various effects. One is that you didn't like him because of his independent ways, and because he was successful, and he didn't take much stock in you because he didn't like the way you had lived. And then there's other reports that he made an enemy of you because he didn't praise and flatter you, and that you did it to "get even." They say that you had your daughter to sign her husband's name to a check for a large sum of money and used it to slip away from him and so on. But the one thing that everybody seems to be agreed upon is, that there was nothing whatever wrong between the couple, and that they had never quarreled and never had thought of parting. That all the trouble is between you and your son-in-law.'

"I had stood her gab about as long as I could, I was so angry. So all I could say was: 'Woman, in the name of heaven, get you away from me before I forget I am a minister of the gospel and you a woman!' But before she had even observed how angry I was, she ups and says: 'Why, now, Elder, as much as you love the ladies, and then you'd abuse a poor woman like me,' and right there, after such a tonguing as she had let out, fell to crying!

"Those are some of the things I must endure, my son, in this work. I must endure slander, vilification, misunderstanding, and all that. It's terrible."

"People are certainly ungrateful," cried Ethel at this point. "And they don't try to learn the truth about anything before they start their rotten gossip. More, they have nerve with it! A certain woman stopped me on the street downtown the other day, a woman who claims to have been my friend and a friend of our family for years. And what do you think she had the nerve to say to me? Well, here's what it was, and I _hope_ she said it: 'Why, Ethel, how is Orlean?' I replied that she was getting better. She says: 'Is she sick physically, or mentally?' I said: 'I don't understand you?' She looked at me kind of funny as she replied, 'Why, don't _you_ know, Ethel Glavis, that it's the talk around Chicago--everybody is saying it, that you and your father went out West there, and made her forge his name to a check for a large sum of money and for spite and spite only, took poor Orlean away from her husband and came back here and spread all this gossip about her being sick and neglected when the doctor had come to see her every day? I know Jean Baptiste and I have not lived in this world for thirty-five years and not able yet to understand people. And Jesus Christ couldn't make me believe that Jean Baptiste would mistreat Orlean. Besides, all this talk comes from you and your father. Orlean has said nothing about it. She is just simple and easy like her mother and will take anything off you and your father. Now, it's none of my business; but I am a friend of humanity, and I want to say this, that anybody that is doing what you and your father are doing will suffer and burn in hell some day for it!'

And she flies away from me and about her business."

"It's outrageous," the Reverend cried. "We hardly dare show our heads on the street; to greet old friends for fear we are going to be ridiculed and abused for what we have done."

"It's certainly an ungrateful world, that's all," agreed Ethel.

CHAPTER X

"UNTIL THEN"

It did not rain the night Jean Baptiste went to Winner to meet the wife who failed to come, but the protracted drought continued on into July.

For three weeks into this month it burned everything in its path. From Canada to Kansas, the crops were almost burned to a crisp, while in the country of our story proper, only the winter wheat, and rye, and some of the oats matured. And this was confined principally to the county where Jean Baptiste had homesteaded. Here a part of a crop of small grain was raised, but everything else was a failure.

His flaxseed crop in Tripp County which had given some promise if rain should come in time, had now fallen along with all else, and when he saw it next, after his trip to Winner, it was a scattered mass of sickly stems, with army worms everywhere cutting the stems off at the ground.

The whole country as a result, was facing a financial panic. Interest would be hard to raise--and this, in view of the fact that the year before had seen less than half a crop produced, was not a cheerful prospect. With Baptiste, and others who had gone in heavily, disaster became a possibility; and, unless a radical change intervened, disaster appeared as an immediate probability.

During these days there was little to do. He had harvested what little crop he had raised, and having no hauling or anything, to engage him he found going fishing his only diversion. And it was at about this time that he received a letter. It bore the postmark of the town where he had met his wife in the beginning, and read:

"_My dear Jean_: