Part 5 (1/2)
”Say, Carl, here's what I wanted to tell you: I was just up to the Cowleses' to take back a French grammar I borrowed to look at----Maybe that ain't a hard-looking language! What d'you think? Mrs. Cowles told me Gertie is expected back to-morrow.”
”Gee whiz! I thought she was going to stay in New York for two years!
And she's only been gone six months.”
”I guess Mrs. Cowles is kind of lonely without her,” Ben mooned.
”So now you'll be all nice and in love with Gertie again, heh? It certainly gets me why you want to fall in love, Fatty, when you could go hunting.”
”If you'd read about King Arthur and Galahad and all them instead of reading the _Scientific American_, and about these fool horseless carriages and stuff----There never will be any practical use for horseless carriages, anyway.”
”There will----” growled Carl.
”My mother says she don't believe the Lord ever intended us to ride without horses, or what did He give us horses for? And the things always get stuck in the mud and you have to walk home--mother was reading that in a newspaper, just the other day.”
”Son, let me tell you, I'll own a horseless carriage some day, and I bet I go an average of twenty miles an hour with it, maybe forty.”
”Oh, rats! But I was saying, if you'd read some library books you'd know about love. Why, what 'd G.o.d put love in the world for----”
”Say, will you quit explaining to me about what G.o.d did things for?”
”Ouch! Quit! Aes in on the twelve-forty-seven.”
”Well, all right. Say, Bennie, you don't want to be worried when I kid you about being in love with Gertie. I don't think I'll ever get married. But it's all right for you.”
Sat.u.r.day morning was so cool, so radiant, that Carl awakened early to a conviction that, no matter how important meeting Gertie might be in the cosmic scheme, he was going hunting. He was down-stairs by five.
He fried two eggs, called Dollar Ingersoll, his dog--son of Robert Ingersoll Stillman, gentleman dog--then, in canvas hunting-coat and slouch-hat, tramped out of town southward, where the woods ended in prairie. Gertie's arrival was forgotten.
It was a gipsy day. The sun rolled splendidly through the dry air, over miles of wheat stubble, whose gray-yellow p.r.i.c.kles were trans.m.u.ted by distance into tawny velvet, seeming only the more s.p.a.cious because of the straight, thin lines of barbed-wire fences lined with goldenrod, and solitary houses in willow groves. The dips and curves of the rolling plain drew him on; the distances satisfied his eyes. A pleasant hum of insects filled the land's wide serenity with hidden life.
Carl left a trail of happy, monotonous whistling behind him all day, as his dog followed the winding trail of prairie-chickens, as a covey of chickens rose with booming wings and he swung his shotgun for a bead. He stopped by prairie-sloughs or bright-green bogs to watch for a duck. He hailed as equals the occasional groups of hunters in two-seated buggies, quartering the fields after circling dogs. He lunched contentedly on sandwiches of cold lamb, and lay with his arms under his head, gazing at a steeple fully ten miles away.
By six of the afternoon he had seven prairie-chickens tucked inside the long pocket that lined the tail of his coat, and he headed for home, superior to miles, his quiet eyes missing none of the purple asters and goldenrod.
As he began to think he felt a bit guilty. The flowers suggested Gertie. He gathered a large bunch, poking stalks of aster among the goldenrod, examining the result at arm's-length. Yet when he stopped at the Rusks' in town, to bid Bennie take the rustic bouquet to Gertie, he replied to reproaches:
”What you making all the fuss about my not being there to meet her for? She got here all right, didn't she? What j' expect me to do? Kiss her? You ought to known it was too good a day for hunting to miss....
How's Gert? Have a good time in New York?”
Carl himself took the flowers to her, however, and was so shyly attentive to her account of New York that he scarcely stopped to speak to the Cowleses' ”hired girl,” who was his second cousin.... Mrs.
Cowles overheard him shout, ”h.e.l.lo, Lena! How's it going?” to the hired girl with cousinly ease. Mrs. Cowles seemed chilly. Carl wondered why.
From month to month of his junior year in high school Carl grew more discontented. He let the lines of his Cicero fade into a gray blur that confounded Cicero's blatant virtue and Cataline's treachery, while he pictured himself tramping with snow-shoes and a mackinaw coat into the snowy solemnities of the northern Minnesota tamarack swamps.
Much of his discontent was caused by his learned preceptors. The teachers for this year were almost perfectly calculated to make any lad of the slightest independence hate culture for the rest of his life. With the earnestness and industry usually ascribed to the devil, ”Prof” Sybrant E. La.r.s.en (B. A. Platonis), Miss McDonald, and Miss Muzzy kept up ninety-five per cent. discipline, and seven per cent.
instruction in anything in the least worth while.