University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
THE SOD TAVERN.

HERE and there Charlton noticed the little claim-shanties,
built in every sort of fashion, mere excuses
for pre-emption. Some were even constructed
of brush. What was lacking in the house was
amply atoned for by the perjury of the claimant
who, in pre-empting, would swear to any necessary number of
good qualities in his habitation. On a little knoll ahead of the
stage he saw what seemed to be a heap of earth. There must
have been some inspiration in this mound, for, as soon as it
came in sight, Whisky Jim began to chirrup and swear at his
horses, and to crack his long whip threateningly until he had
sent them off up the hill at a splendid pace. Just by this
mound of earth he reined up with an air that said the forenoon
route was finished. For this was nothing less than the
“Sod Tavern,” a house built of cakes of the tenacious prairie-sod.
No other material was used except the popple-poles,
which served for supports to the sod-roof. The tavern was not
over ten feet high at the apex of the roof; it had been built
for two or three years, and the grass was now growing on
top. A red-shirted publican sallied out of this artificial grotto,
and invited the ladies and gentlemen to dinner.

It appeared, from a beautifully-engraved map hanging on
the walls of the Sod Tavern, that this earthly tabernacle stood
in the midst of an ideal town. The map had probably been
constructed by a poet, for it was quite superior to the limitations
of sense and matter-of-fact. According to the map, this solitary
burrow was surrounded by Seminary, Depot, Court-House,
Woolen Factory, and a variety of other potential institutions,
which composed the flourishing city of New Cincinnati. But
the map was meant chiefly for Eastern circulation.

Charlton's dietetic theories were put to the severest test at
the table. He had a good appetite. A ride in the open air
in Minnesota is apt to make one hungry. But the first thing
that disgusted Mr. Charlton was the coffee, already poured
out, and steaming under his nose. He hated coffee because
he liked it; and the look of disgust with which he shoved
it away was the exact measure of his physical craving for
it. The solid food on the table consisted of waterlogged
potatoes, half-baked salt-rising bread, and salt-pork. Now,
young Charlton was a reader of the Water-Cure Journal of
that day, and despised meat of all things, and of all meat
despised swine's flesh, as not even fit for Jews; and of all
forms of hog, hated fat salt-pork as poisonously indigestible.
So with a dyspeptic self-consciousness he rejected the pork,
picked off the periphery of the bread near the crust, cautiously
avoiding the dough-bogs in the middle; but then he revenged
himself by falling furiously upon the aquatic potatoes, out of
which most of the nutriment had been soaked.

Jim, who sat alongside him, doing cordial justice to the
badness of the meal, muttered that it wouldn't do to eat by
idees in Minnesoty. And with the freedom that belongs to

the frontier, the company begun to discuss dietetics, the
fat gentleman roundly abusing the food for the express purpose,
as Charlton thought, of diverting attention from his
voracious eating of it.

“Simply despicable,” grunted the fat man, as he took a
third slice of the greasy pork. “I do despise such food.”

“Eats it like he was mad at it,” said Driver Jim in an
undertone.

But as Charlton's vegetarianism was noticed, all fell to
denouncing it. Couldn't live in a cold climate without
meat. Cadaverous Mr. Minorkey, the broad-shouldered, sad-looking
man with side-whiskers, who complained incessantly of
a complication of disorders, which included dyspepsia, consumption,
liver-disease, organic disease of the heart, rheumatism,
neuralgia, and entire nervous prostration, and who was never
entirely happy except in telling over the oft-repeated catalogue
of his disgusting symptoms—Mr. Minorkey, as he sat by his
daughter, inveighed, in an earnest crab-apple voice, against
Grahamism. He would have been in his grave twenty years
ago if it hadn't been for good meat. And then he recited in
detail the many desperate attacks from which he had been
saved by beefsteak. But this pork he felt sure would make
him sick. It might kill him. And he evidently meant to sell
his life as dearly as possible, for, as Jim muttered to Charlton,
he was “goin' the whole hog anyhow.”

“Miss Minorkey,” said the fat gentleman checking a piece
of pork in the middle of its mad career toward his lips, “Miss
Minorkey, we should like to hear from you on this subject.”
In truth, the fat gentleman was very weary of Mr. Minorkey's
pitiful succession of diagnoses of the awful symptoms and fatal

complications of which he had been cured by very allopathic
doses of animal food. So he appealed to Miss Minorkey for
relief at a moment when her father had checked and choked
his utterance with coffee.

Miss Minorkey was quite a different affair from her father.
She was thoroughly but not obtrusively healthy. She had
a high, white forehead, a fresh complexion, and a mouth
which, if it was deficient in sweetness and warmth of expression,
was also free from all bitterness and aggressiveness.
Miss Minorkey was an eminently well-educated young lady
as education goes. She was more—she was a young lady of
reading and of ideas. She did not exactly defend Charlton's
theory in her reply, but she presented both sides of the controversy,
and quoted some scientific authorities in such a way
as to make it apparent that there were two sides. This unexpected
and rather judicial assistance called forth from Charlton
a warm acknowledgment, his pale face flushed with modest
pleasure, and as he noted the intellectuality of Miss Minorkey's
forehead he inwardly comforted himself that the only
person of ideas in the whole company was not wholly against him.

Albert Charlton was far from being a “ladies' man;” indeed,
nothing was more despicable in his eyes than men who
frittered away life in ladies' company. But this did not at all
prevent him from being very human himself in his regard for
ladies. All the more that he had lived out of society all his
life, did his heart flutter when he took his seat in the stage
after dinner. For Miss Minorkey's father and the fat gentleman
felt that they must have the back seat; there were two
other gentlemen on the middle seat; and Albert Charlton, all
unused to the presence of ladies, must needs sit on the front

seat, alongside the gray traveling-dress of the intellectual Miss
Minorkey, who, for her part, was not in the least bit nervous.
Young Charlton might have liked her better if she had been.

But if she was not shy, neither was she obtrusive. When
Mr. Charlton had grown weary of hearing Mr. Minorkey
pity himself, and of hearing the fat gentleman boast
of the excellence of the Minnesota climate, the dryness of the
air, and the wonderful excess of its oxygen, and the entire
absence of wintry winds, and the rapid development of the
country, and when he had grown weary of discussions of investments
at five per cent a month, he ventured to interrupt
Miss Minorkey's reverie by a remark to which she responded.
And he was soon in a current of delightful talk. The young
gentleman spoke with great enthusiasm; the young woman
without warmth, but with a clear intellectual interest in
literary subjects, that charmed her interlocutor. I say literary
subjects, though the range of the conversation was not very
wide. It was a great surprise to Charlton, however, to find
in a new country a young woman so well informed.

Did he fall in love? Gentle reader, be patient. You want
a love-story, and I don't blame you. For my part, I should
not take the trouble to record this history if there were no
love in it. Love is the universal bond of human sympathy.
But you must give people time. What we call falling in love
is not half so simple an affair as you think, though it often
looks simple enough to the spectator. Albert Charlton was
pleased, he was full of enthusiasm, and I will not deny that he
several times reflected in a general way that so clear a talker
and so fine a thinker would make a charming wife for some
man—some intellectual man—some man like himself, for instance.

He admired Miss Minorkey. He liked her. With an
enthusiastic young man, admiring and liking are, to say the
least, steps that lead easily to something else. But you must
remember how complex a thing love is. Charlton—I have to
confess it—was a little conceited, as every young man is at
twenty. He flattered himself that the most intelligent woman
he could find would be a good match for him. He loved
ideas, and a woman of ideas pleased his fancy. Add to this
that he had come to a time of life when he was very liable to
fall in love with somebody, and that he was in the best of
spirits from the influence of air and scenery and motion and
novelty, and you render it quite probable that he could not be
tossed for half a day on the same seat in a coach with such
a girl as Helen Minorkey was—that, above all, he could not
discuss Hugh Miller and the “Vestiges of Creation” with her,
without imminent peril of experiencing an admiration for her
and an admiration for himself, and a liking and a palpitating
and a castle-building that under favorable conditions might
somehow grow into that complex and inexplicable feeling which
we call love.

In fact, Jim, who drove both routes on this day, and who
peeped into the coach whenever he stopped to water, soliloquized
that two fools with idees would make a quare span of
they had a neck-yoke on.