Part 12 (2/2)
Little l.u.s.tful thoughts kept coming to Hugh and made him ashamed. He moved restlessly in the buggy seat and a lump came into his throat. Again he looked at Clara. ”I'm a poor white,” he thought. ”It isn't fitten I should marry this woman.”
From the high spot in the road Clara looked down at her father's house and below at the lights of the town, that had already spread so far over the countryside, and up through the hills toward the farm where she had spent her girlhood and where, as Jim Priest had said, ”the sap had begun to run up the tree.” She began to love the man who was to be her husband, but like the dreamers of the town, saw him as something a little inhuman, as a man almost gigantic in his bigness. Many things Kate Chanceller had said as the two developing women walked and talked in the streets of Columbus came back to her mind. When they had started again along the road she continually worried the horse by tapping him with the whip. Like Kate, Clara wanted to be fair and square. ”A woman should be fair and square, even with a man,”
Kate had said. ”The man I'm going to have as a husband is simple and honest,” she thought. ”If there are things down there in town that are not square and fair, he had nothing to do with them.” Realizing a little Hugh's difficulty in expressing what he must feel, she wanted to help him, but when she turned and saw how he did not look at her but continually stared into the darkness, pride kept her silent. ”I'll have to wait until he's ready. Already I've taken things too much into my own hands. I'll put through this marriage, but when it comes to anything else he'll have to begin,” she told herself, and a lump came into her throat and tears to her eyes.
CHAPTER XVI
As he stood alone in the barnyard, excited at the thought of the adventure on which Clara and Hugh had set out, Jim Priest remembered Tom b.u.t.terworth.
For more than thirty years Jim had worked for Tom and they had one strong impulse that bound them together--their common love of fine horses. More than once the two men had spent an afternoon together in the grand stand at the fall trotting meeting at Cleveland. In the late morning of such a day Tom found Jim wandering from stall to stall, looking at the horses being rubbed down and prepared for the afternoon's races. In a generous mood he bought his employee's lunch and took him to a seat in the grand stand.
All afternoon the two men watched the races, smoked and quarreled. Tom contended that Bud Doble, the debonair, the dramatic, the handsome, was the greatest of all race horse drivers, and Jim Priest held Bud Doble in contempt. For him there was but one man of all the drivers he whole-heartedly admired, Pop Geers, the shrewd and silent. ”That Geers of yours doesn't drive at all. He just sits up there like a stick,” Tom grumbled. ”If a horse can win all right, he'll ride behind him all right.
What I like to see is a driver. Now you look at that Doble. You watch him bring a horse through the stretch.”
Jim looked at his employer with something like pity in his eyes. ”Huh,” he exclaimed. ”If you haven't got eyes you can't see.”
The farm hand had two strong loves in his life, his employer's daughter and the race horse driver, Geers. ”Geers,” he declared, ”was a man born old and wise.” Often he had seen Geers at the tracks on a morning before some important race. The driver sat on an upturned box in the sun before one of the horse stalls. All about him there was the bantering talk of hors.e.m.e.n and grooms. Bets were made and challenges given. On the tracks nearby horses, not entered in the races for that day, were being exercised. Their hoofbeats made a kind of music that made Jim's blood tingle. Negroes laughed and horses put their heads out at stall doors. The stallions neighed loudly and the heels of some impatient steed rattled against the sides of a stall.
Every one about the stalls talked of the events of the afternoon and Jim leaned against the front of one of the stalls and listened, filled with happiness. He wished the fates had made him a racing man. Then he looked at Pop Geers, the silent one, who sat for hours dumb and uncommunicative on a feed box, tapping lightly on the ground with his racing whip and chewing straw. Jim's imagination was aroused. He had once seen that other silent American, General Grant, and had been filled with admiration for him.
That was on a great day in Jim's life, the day on which he had seen Grant going to receive Lee's surrender at Appomattox. There had been a battle with the Union men pursuing the fleeing Rebs out of Richmond, and Jim, having secured a bottle of whisky, and having a chronic dislike of battles, had managed to creep away into a wood. In the distance he heard shouts and presently saw several men riding furiously down a road. It was Grant with his aides going to the place where Lee waited. They rode to the place near where Jim sat with his back against a tree and the bottle between his legs; then stopped. Then Grant decided not to take part in the ceremony. His clothes were covered with mud and his beard was ragged. He knew Lee and knew he would be dressed for the occasion. He was that kind of a man; he was one fitted for historic pictures and occasions. Grant wasn't. He told his aides to go on to the spot where Lee waited, told them what arrangements were to be made, then jumped his horse over a ditch and rode along a path under the trees toward the spot where Jim lay.
That was an event Jim never forgot. He was fascinated at the thought of what the day meant to Grant and by his apparent indifference. He sat silently by the tree and when Grant got off his horse and came near, walking now in the path where the sunlight sifted down through the trees, he closed his eyes. Grant came to where he sat and stopped, apparently thinking him dead. His hand reached down and took the bottle of whisky.
For a moment they had something between them, Grant and Jim. They both understood that bottle of whisky. Jim thought Grant was about to drink, and opened his eyes a little. Then he closed them. The cork was out of the bottle and Grant clutched it in his hand tightly. From the distance there came a vast shout that was picked up and carried by voices far away. The wood seemed to rock with it. ”It's done. The war's over,” Jim thought. Then Grant reached over and smashed the bottle against the trunk of the tree above Jim's head. A piece of the flying gla.s.s cut his cheek and blood came.
He opened his eyes and looked directly into Grant's eyes. For a moment the two men stared at each other and the great shout again rolled over the country. Grant went hurriedly along the path to where he had left his horse, and mounting, rode away.
Standing in the race track looking at Geers, Jim thought of Grant. Then his mind came back to this other hero. ”What a man!” he thought. ”Here he goes from town to town and from race track to race track all through the spring, summer and fall, and he never loses his head, never gets excited. To win horse races is the same as winning battles. When I'm at home plowing corn on summer afternoons, this Geers is away somewhere at some track with all the people gathered about and waiting. To me it would be like being drunk all the time, but you see he isn't drunk. Whisky could make him stupid. It couldn't make him drunk. There he sits hunched up like a sleeping dog. He looks as though he cared about nothing on earth, and he'll sit like that through three-quarters of the hardest race, waiting, taking advantage of every little stretch of firm hard ground on the track, saving his horse, watching, watching his horse too, waiting. What a man! He works the horse into fourth place, into third, into second. The crowd in the grand stand, such fellows as Tom b.u.t.terworth, have not seen what he's doing. He sits still. By G.o.d, what a man! He waits. He looks half asleep. If he doesn't have to do it, he makes no effort. If the horse has it in him to win without help he sits still. The people are shouting and jumping up out of their seats in the grand stand, and if that Bud Doble has a horse in the race he's leaning forward in the sulky, shouting at his horse and making a holy show of himself.
”Ha, that Geers! He waits. He doesn't think of the people but of the horse he's driving. When the time comes, just the right time, that Geers, he lets the horse know. They are one at that moment, like Grant and I were over that bottle of whisky. Something happens between them. Something inside the man says, 'now,' and the message runs along the reins to the horse's brain.
It flies down into his legs. There is a rush. The head of the horse has just worked its way out in front by inches--not too soon, nothing wasted.
Ha, that Geers! Bud Doble, huh!”
On the night of Clara's marriage after she and Hugh had disappeared down the county seat road, Jim hurried into the barn and, bringing out a horse, sprang on his back. He was sixty-three but could mount a horse like a young man. As he rode furiously toward Bidwell he thought, not of Clara and her adventure, but of her father. To both men the right kind of marriage meant success in life for a woman. Nothing else really mattered much if that were accomplished. He thought of Tom b.u.t.terworth, who, he told himself, had fussed with Clara just as Bud Doble often fussed with a horse in a race. He had himself been like Pop Geers. All along he had known and understood the mare colt, Clara. Now she had come through; she had won the race of life.
”Ha, that old fool!” Jim whispered to himself as he rode swiftly down the dark road. When the horse ran clattering over a small wooden bridge and came to the first of the houses of the town, he felt like one coming to announce a victory, and half expected a vast shout to come out of the darkness, as it had come in the moment of Grant's victory over Lee.
Jim could not find his employer at the hotel or in Main Street, but remembered a tale he had heard whispered. f.a.n.n.y Twist the milliner lived in a little frame house in Garfield Street, far out at the eastern edge of town, and he went there. He banged boldly on the door and the woman appeared. ”I've got to see Tom b.u.t.terworth,” he said. ”It's important. It's about his daughter. Something has happened to her.”
The door closed and presently Tom came around the corner of the house. He was furious. Jim's horse stood in the road, and he went straight to him and took hold of the bit. ”What do you mean by coming here?” he asked sharply.
”Who told you I was here? What business you got coming here and making a show of yourself? What's the matter of you? Are you drunk or out of your head?”
Jim got off the horse and told Tom the news. For a moment the two stood looking at each other. ”Hugh McVey--Hugh McVey, by crackies, are you right, Jim?” Tom exclaimed. ”No missfire, eh? She's really gone and done it? Hugh McVey, eh? By crackies!”
”They're on the way to the county seat now,” Jim said softly. ”Missfire!
Not on your life.” His voice lost the cool, quiet tone he had so often dreamed of maintaining in great emergencies. ”I figure they'll be back by twelve or one,” he said eagerly. ”We got to blow 'em out, Tom. We got to give that girl and her husband the biggest blowout ever seen in this county, and we got just about three hours to get ready for it.”
”Get off that horse and give me a boost,” Tom commanded. With a grunt of satisfaction he sprang to the horse's back. The belated impulse to philander that an hour before sent him creeping through back streets and alleyways to the door of f.a.n.n.y Twist's house was all gone, and in its place had come the spirit of the man of affairs, the man who, as he himself often boasted, made things move and kept them on the move. ”Now look here, Jim,”
he said sharply, ”there are three livery stables in this town. You engage every horse they've got for the night. Have the horses. .h.i.tched to any kind of rigs you can find, buggies, surreys, spring wagons, anything. Have them get drivers off the streets, anywhere. Then have them all brought around in front of the Bidwell House and held for me. When you've done that, you go to Henry h.e.l.ler's house. I guess you can find it. You found this house where I was fast enough. He lives on Campus Street just beyond the new Baptist Church. If he's gone to bed you get him up. Tell him to get his orchestra together and have him bring all the lively music he's got. Tell him to bring his men to the Bidwell House as fast as he can get them there.”
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