University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.
A CRISIS.

WORK, Morton could not. After his noonday dinner
he lifted his flint-lock gun from the forked
sticks upon the wall where it was laid, and set out to
seek for deer,—rather to seek forgetfulness of the anxiety
that preyed upon him. Excitement was almost a
necessity with him, even at ordinary times; now, it
seemed the only remedy for his depression. But instead
of forgetting Patty, he forgot everything but
Patty, and for the first time in his life he found it
impossible to absorb himself in hunting. For when a
frontierman loves, he loves with his whole nature.
The interests of his life are few, and love, having undisputed
sway, becomes a consuming passion. After
two hours' walking through the unbroken forest he
started a deer, but did not see it in time to shoot.
He had tramped through the brush without caution or
vigilance. He now saw that it would be of no avail
to keep up this mockery of hunting. He was seized
with an eager desire to see Patty, and talk with her
once more before the door should be closed against
him. He might strike the trail, and reach the settlement
in an hour, arriving at Lumsden's while yet the
Captain was away from the house. His only chance
was to see her in the absence of her father, who would
surely contrive some interruption if he were present.

So eagerly did Morton travel, that when his return
was about half accomplished he ran headlong into the
very midst of a flock of wild turkeys. They ran
swiftly away in two or three directions, but not until
the two barrels of Morton's gun had brought down
two glossy young gobblers. Tying their legs together
with a strip of paw-paw bark, he slung them across
his gun, and laid his gun over his shoulder, pleased
that he would not have to go home quite empty-handed.

As he steps into Captain Lumsden's yard that Autumn
afternoon, he is such a man as one likes to see:
quite six feet high, well made, broad, but not too
broad, about the shoulders, with legs whose litheness
indicate the reserve force of muscle and nerve coiled
away somewhere for an emergency. His walk is direct,
elastic, unflagging; he is like his horse, a clean
stepper; there is neither slouchiness, timidity, nor craftiness
in his gait. The legs are as much a test of
character as the face, and in both one can read resolute
eagerness. His forehead is high rather than
broad, his blue eye and curly hair, and a certain sweetness
and dignity in his smile, are from his Scotch-Irish
mother. His picturesque coon-skin cap gives him
the look of a hunter. The homespun “hunting shirt”
hangs outside his buckskin breeches, and these terminate
below inside his rawhide boots.

The great yellow dog, Watch, knows him well
enough by this time, but like a policeman on duty,
Watch is quite unwilling to seem to neglect his function;
and so he bristles up a little, meets Morton at

the gate, and snuffs at his cowhide boots with an air
of surly vigilance. The young man hails him with a
friendly “Hello, Watch!” and the old fellow smooths
his back hair a little, and gives his clumsy bobbed
tail three solemn little wags of recognition, comical
enough if Goodwin were only in a mood to observe.

Morton hears the hum of the spinning-wheel in the
old cabin portion of the building, used for a kitchen
and loom-room. The monotonous rise and fall of the
wheel's tune, now buzzing gently, then louder and
louder till its whirr could be heard a furlong, then
slacking, then stopping abruptly, then rising to a new
climax — this cadenced hum, as he hears it, is made
rhythmical by the tread of feet that run back across
the room after each climax of sound. He knows the
quick, elastic step; he turns away from the straight-ahead
entrance to the house, and passes round to the
kitchen door. It is Patty, as he thought, and, as his
shadow falls in at the door, she is in the very act of
urging the wheel to it highest impetus; she whirls it
till it roars, and at the same time nods merrily at
Morton over the top of it; then she trips back across
the room, drawing the yarn with her left hand, which
she holds stretched out; when the impulse is somewhat
spent, and the yarn sufficiently twisted, Patty
catches the wheel, winds the yarn upon the spindle,
and turns to the door. She changes her spinning stick
to the left hand, and extends her right with a genial
“Howdy, Morton? killed some turkeys, I see.”

“Yes, one for you and one for mother.”

“For me? much obliged! come in and take a chair.”

“No, this'll do,” and Morton sat upon the door-sill,
doffing his coon-skin cap, and wiping his forehead
with his red handkerchief. “Go on with your spinning,
Patty, I like to see you spin.”

“Well, I will. I mean to spin two dozen cuts to-day.
I've been at it since five o'clock.”

Morton was glad, indeed, to have her spin. He
was, in his present perplexed state, willing to avoid all
conversation except such broken talk as might be carried
on while Patty wound the spun yarn upon the
spindle, or adjusted a new roll of wool.

Nothing shows off the grace of the female figure
as did the old spinning-wheel. Patty's perfect form
was disfigured by no stays, or pads, or paniers—her
swift tread backwards with her up-raised left hand, her
movement of the wheel with the right, all kept her
agile figure in lithe action. If plastic art were not an
impossibility to us Americans, our stone-cutters might
long since have ceased, like school-boys, to send us
back from Rome imitation Venuses, and counterfeit
Hebes, and lank Lincolns aping Roman senators, and
stagey Washingtons on stage-horses; — they would by
this time have found out that in our primitive life
there are subjects enough, and that in mythology and
heroics we must ever be dead copyists. But I do not
believe Morton was thinking of art at all, as he sat
there in the October evening sun and watched the little
feet, yet full of unexhausted energy after traveling to
and fro all day. He did not know, or care, that Patty,
with her head thrown back and her left arm half outstretched
to guide her thread, was a glorious subject

for a statue. He had never seen marble, and had
never heard of statues except in the talk of the old
schoolmaster. How should he think to call her statuesque?
Or how should he know that the wide old
log-kitchen, with its loom in one corner, its vast fire-place,
wherein sit the two huge, black andirons, and
wherein swings an iron crane on which hang pothooks
with iron pots depending—the old kitchen, with
its bark-covered joists high overhead, from which are
festooned strings of drying pumpkins — how should
Morton Goodwin know that this wide old kitchen,
with its rare centre-piece of a fine-featured, fresh-hearted
young girl straining every nerve to spin two
dozen cuts of yarn in a day, would make a genre
piece, the subject of which would be good enough for
one of the old Dutch masters? He could not know
all this, but he did know, as he watched the feet
treading swiftly and rhythmically back and forth, and
as he saw the fine face, ruddy with the vigorous exercise,
looking at him over the top of a whirling wheel
whose spokes were invisible — he did know that Patty
Lumsden was a little higher than angels, and he shuddered
when he remembered that to-morrow, and indefinitely
afterward, he might be shut out from her father's
house.

It was while he sat thus and listened to Patty's
broken patches of sprightly talk and the monotonous
symphony of her wheel, that Captain Lumsden came
into the yard, snapping his rawhide whip against his
boots, and walking, in his eager, jerky fashion, around
to the kitchen door.

“Hello, Morton! here, eh? Been hunting? This
don't pay. A young man that is going to get on in
the world oughtn't to set here in the sunshine talking
to the girls. Leave that for nights and Sundays. I'm
afeard you won't get on if you don't work early and
late. Eh?” And the captain chuckled his hard little
laugh.

Morton felt all the pleasure of the glorious afternoon
vanish, as he rose to go. He laid the turkey
destined for Patty inside the door, took up the other,
and was about to leave. Meantime the captain had
lifted the white gourd at the well-curb, to satisfy his
thirst.

“I saw Kike just now,” he said, in a fragmentary
way, between his sips of water — and Morton felt his
face color at the first mention of Kike. “I saw Kike
crossing the creek on your mare. You oughtn't to let
him ride her; she'll break his fool neck yet. Here
comes Kike himself. I wonder where he's been to?”

Morton saw, in the fixed look of Kike's eyes, as he
opened the gate, evidence of deep passion; but Captain
Enoch Lumsden was not looking for anything remarkable
about Kike, and he was accustomed to treat
him with peculiar indignity because he was a relative.

“Hello, Kike!” he said, as his nephew approached,
while Watch faithfully sniffed at his heels, “where've
you been cavorting on that filley to-day? I told Mort
he was a fool to let a snipe like you ride that she-devil.
She'll break your blamed neck some day, and
then there'll be one fool less.” And the captain
chuckled triumphantly at the wit in his way of putting

the thing. “Don't kick the dog! What an ill-natured
ground-hog you air! If I had the training of you, I'd
take some of that out.”

“You haven't got the training of me, and you never
will have.”

Kike's face was livid, and his voice almost inaudible.

“Come, come, don't be impudent, young man,”
chuckled Captain Lumsden.

“I don't know what you call impudence,” said
Kike, stretching his slender frame up to its full height,
and shaking as if he had an ague-chill; “but you are
a tyrant and a scoundrel!”

“Tut! tut! Kike, you're crazy, you little brute.
What's up?”

“You know what's up. You want to cheat me out
of that bottom land; you have got it advertised on
the back side of a tree in North's holler, without consulting
mother or me. I have been over to Jonesville
to-day, and picked out Colonel Wheeler to act as my
gardeen.”

“Colonel Wheeler? Why, that's an insult to me!”
And the captain ceased to laugh, and grew red.

“I hope it is. I couldn't get the judge to take
back the order for the sale of the land; he's afeard of
you. But now let me tell you something, Enoch
Lumsden! If you sell my land by that order of the
court, you'll lose more'n you'll make. I ain't afeard
of the devil nor none of his angels; and I recken
you're one of the blackest. It'll cost you more burnt
barns and dead hosses and cows and hogs and sheep

[ILLUSTRATION]

THE ALTERCATION.

[Description: 554EAF. Page 059. In-line engraving of three standing men, one in a top hat and cane, one with a rifle, and one whose arm is extended. A woman looks on in the background.] than what you make will pay for. You cheated pappy,
but you shan't make nothin' out of Little Kike.
I'll turn Ingin, and take Ingin law onto you, you old
thief and—”

Here Captain Lumsden stepped forward and raised
his cowhide. “I'll teach you some manners, you impudent
little brat!”

Kike quivered all over, but did not move hand or
foot. “Hit me if you dare, Enoch Lumsden, and
they'll be blood betwixt us then. You hit me wunst,
and they'll be one less Lumsden alive in a year. You
or me'll have to go to the bone-yard.”

Patty had stopped her wheel, had forgotten all
about her two dozen a day, and stood frightened in
the door, near Morton. Morton advanced and took
hold of Kike.

“Come, Kike! Kike! don't be so wrothy,” said he.

“Keep hands offen me, Mort Goodwin,” said Kike,
shaking loose. “I've got an account to settle, and ef
he tetches a thread of my coat with a cowhide, it'll be
a bad day fer both on us. We'll settle with blood
then.”

“It's no use for you to interfere, Mort,” snarled
the captain. “I know well enough who put Kike up
to this. I'll settle with both of you, some day.”
Then, with an oath, the captain went into the house,
while the two young men moved away down the road,
Morton not daring to look at Patty.

What Morton dreaded most had come upon him.
As for Kike, when once they were out of sight of
Lumsden's, the reaction on his feeble frame was terrible.
He sat down on a log and cried with grief and
anger.

“The worst of it is, I've ruined your chances,
Mort,” said he.

And Morton did not reply.