“Do you know where Jeff is?” the farmer suddenly asked, without turning his head to where I sat braiding a whiplash, but indicating by the volume of voice that his query was put to me.
“He went off about two o’clock,” I replied, “with his fish-pole. They say they are biting like everything down in the creek.”
“Well, you keep to work and they won’t bite you,” said Abner Beech. This was a very old joke with him, and usually the opportunity of using it once more tended to lighten his mood. Now, though mere force of habit led him to repeat the pleasantry, he had no pleasure in it. He sat with his head bent, and his huge hairy hands spread listlessly on the chair-arms.
Mrs. Beech finished her task, and rose, lifting the bowl from the floor. She paused, and looked wistfully into her husband’s face.
“You ain’t a bit well, Abner!” she said.
“Well as I’m likely ever to be again,” he made answer, gloomily.
“Has any more of’em been sayin’ or doin’ anything?” the wife asked, with diffident hesitation.
The farmer spoke with more animation. “D’ye suppose I care a picayune what they say or do?” he demanded. “Not I! But when a man’s own kith and kin turn agin him, into the bargain—” He left the sentence unfinished, and shook his head to indicate the impossibility of such a situation.
“Has Jeff—then—” Mrs. Beech began to ask.
“Yes—Jeff!” thundered the farmer, striking his fist on the arm of the chair. “Yes—by the Eternal!—Jeff!”
When Abner Beech swore by the Eternal we knew that things were pretty bad. His wife put the bowl down on a chair, and seated herself in another. “What’s Jeff been doin’?” she asked.
“Why, where d’ye suppose he was last night, ’n’ the night before that? Where d’ye suppose he is this minute? They ain’t no mistake about it, Lee Watkins saw ’em with his own eyes, and ta’nted me with it. He’s down by the red bridge—that’s where he is—hangin’ round that Hagadorn gal!”
Mrs. Beech looked properly aghast at the intelligence. Even to me it was apparent that the unhappy Jeff might better have been employed in committing any other crime under the sun. It was only to be expected that his mother would be horrified.
“I never could abide that Lee Watkins,” was what she said.
The farmer did not comment on the relevancy of this. “Yes,” he went on, “the daughter of mine enemy, the child of that whining, backbiting old scoundrel who’s been eating his way into me like a deer-tick for years—the whelp that I owe every mean and miserable thing that’s ever happened to me—yes, of all living human creatures, by the Eternal! it’s his daughter that that blamed fool of a Jeff must take a shine to, and hang around after!”
“He’ll come of age the fourteenth of next month,” remarked the mother, tentatively.
“Yes—and march up and vote the Woollyhead ticket. I suppose that’s what’ll come next!” said the farmer, bitterly. “It only needed that!”
“And it was you who got her the job of teachin’ the school, too,” put in Mrs. Beech.
“That’s nothing to do with it,” Abner continued. “I ain’t blamin’ her—that is, on her own account. She’s a good enough gal so far’s I know. But everything and everybody under that tumble-down Hagadorn roof ought to be pizen to any son of mine! That’s what I say! And I tell you this, mother”—the farmer rose, and spread his broad chest, towering over the seated woman as he spoke—“I tell you this; if he ain’t got pride enough to keep him away from that house—away from that gal—then he can keep away from this house—away from me!”
The wife looked up at him mutely, then bowed her head in tacit consent.
“He brings it on himself!” Abner cried, with clenched fists, beginning to pace up and down the room. “Who’s the one man I’ve reason to curse with my dying breath? Who began the infernal Abolition cackle here? Who drove me out of the church? Who started that outrageous lie about the milk at the factory, and chased me out of that, too? Who’s been a layin’ for years behind every stump and every bush, waitin’ for the chance to stab me in the back, an’ ruin my business, an’ set my neighbors agin me, an’ land me an’ mine in the poorhouse or the lockup? You know as well as I do—‘Jee’ Hagadorn! If I’d wrung his scrawny little neck for him the first time I ever laid eyes on him, it ’d ’a’ been money in my pocket and years added onto my life. And then my son—my son! must go taggin’ around—oh-h!”
He ended with an inarticulate growl of impatience and wrath.
“Mebbe, if you spoke to the boy—” Mrs. Beech began.
“Yes, I’ll speak to him!” the farmer burst forth, with grim emphasis. “I’ll speak to him so’t he’ll hear!” He turned abruptly to me. “Here, boy,” he said, “you go down the creek-road an’ look for Jeff. If he ain’t loafin’ round the school-house he’ll be in the neighborhood of Hagadorn’s. You tell him I say for him to get back here as quick as he can. You needn’t tell him what it’s about. Pick up your feet, now!”
As luck would have it, I had scarcely got out to the road before I heard the loose-spoked wheels of the local butcher’s wagon rattling behind me down the hill. Looking round, I saw through the accompanying puffs of dust that young “Ni” Hagadorn was driving, and that he was alone. I stopped and waited for him to come up, questioning my mind whether it would be fair to beg a lift from him, when the purpose of my journey was so hostile to his family. Even after he had halted, and I had climbed up to the seat beside him, this consciousness of treachery disturbed me.
But no one thought long of being serious with “Ni.” He was along in the teens somewhere, not large for his years but extremely wiry and muscular, and the funniest boy any of us ever knew of. How the son of such a sad-faced, gloomy, old licensed exhorter as “Jee” Hagadorn could be such a running spring of jokes and odd sayings and general deviltry as “Ni,” passed all our understandings. His very face made you laugh, with its wilderness of freckles, its snub nose, and the comical curl to its mouth. He must have been a profitable investment to the butcher who hired him to drive about the country. The farmers’ wives all came out to laugh and chat with him, and under the influence of his good spirits they went on buying the toughest steaks and bull-beef flanks, at more than city prices, year after year. But anybody who thought “Ni” was soft because he was full of fun made a great mistake.
“I see you ain’t doin’ much ditchin’ this year,” “Ni” remarked, glancing over our fields as he started up the horse. “I should think you’d be tickled to death.”
Well, in one sense I was glad. There used to be no other such back-aching work in all the year as that picking up of stones to fill into the trenches which the hired men began digging as soon as the hay and grain were in. But, on the other hand, I knew that the present idleness meant—as everything else now seemed to mean—that the Beech farm was going to the dogs.
“No,” I made rueful answer. “Our land don’t need drainin’ any more. It’s dry as a powder-horn now.”
“Ni” clucked knowingly at the old horse. “Guess it’s Abner that can’t stand much more drainin’,” he said. “They say he’s looking all round for a mortgage, and can’t raise one.”
“No such thing!” I replied. “His health’s poorly this summer, that’s all. And Jeff—he don’t seem to take hold, somehow, like he used to.”