"Not if I know myself."

"Yes, but a feller that keeps on foolin' with a woman gits so after a while he don't know himself. What's your object in not wantin' to bring her here?"

"I've got something else to do first. She may not want me after I've told her--the truth."

"Then don't do it, Bill. Talk to a woman all you're a mind to, but don't tell her any more truth than you can help. It gives her the upper hand of you."

"I don't know, Bob, that I'd be warranted in accepting your theories about woman."

"Mebbe not, but I'm the chap that's had the experience."

Milford replied in effect that experience does not always make us wise.

It sometimes tends to weaken rather than to make us strong. It might make freshness stale; it is a thief that steals enthusiasm; it enjoins caution at the wrong time. He took out his letter and read it again, studying the form of each word. The hired man said that he had received many a letter, had read them over and over, but that did not alter the fact that the writer thereof had proved false to him. "I don't want to pile up trash in no man's path," he said, "but I want to give it out strong that it's a mighty hard matter for a woman to be true even to herself. Look how I've been treated."

Milford did not reply. He studied his letter, and the words, "wanted to kneel beside you," gathered a melody, and were sweet music to him.

CHAPTER XXII.

REMEMBERED HIS OBLIGATION.

Now and then there was a bl.u.s.tery day, but good weather remained till late in November. But the ground tightened with the cold, and a snow-whirlwind came from the Northwest. Nowhere had the autumn been fuller of color, but a hiss and a snarl had buried it all beneath the crackly white of winter. Windmills creaked in the fierce blast, sucking smoky water from the ground, to gush, to drip, and then to hang from the spout a frozen beard. Black-capped milkmen, with flaps drawn down over ears, sat upon their wagons, appearing in their garb as if the hangman had rigged them up for a final journey. To look upon the frozen fields and to stand in the groaning woods it did not seem possible that there had ever been a day of lazy heat and nodding bloom. At tightening midnight the flinty lake cracked with a running shriek. The dawn was a gray shudder, the sunrise a shiver of pale red, and then a black cloud blot-out and more snow. A day that promised to be good-tempered often ended in a fury; and sometimes, when it seemed that nature could not be more harsh, the wind would soften, a thaw come with rain, and then another freeze with a snow-storm fiercer than before. Sometimes thunder growled, a lost mood of summer in the upper air; sometimes a lagging autumn bird was whirled through the freezing wind. And with it all the Yankee man was full of spirit, almost happy, happy as the Yankee well can be. His cool nature demanded a fight with the cold. The ears of all his ancestors had been frozen in bleak New England. His religion had been nurtured in a snow-drift, and unlike the breath of a freezing rabbit, did not melt an inch of it. In the howl of a cutting wind he heard a psalm to his vengeful Deity. And to-day the winter reminds him that his army was victorious in the summer South. It was a fight of Winter against Summer.

Milford had no idle time upon his hands. When not at work in the barn he was trading among the farmers. They called him sharp, and this was a compliment. He had beaten Steve Hardy in a trade, and this was praise.

An honest sort of a fellow is an eyesore to the genuine Yankee. He must have other virtues--thrift. There was but one drawback in the Rollins community: The land was too productive. It yielded a good living without the full exercise of the Yankee quality. The Yankee is happiest when strongly opposed. His religion was sweetest when he had to pray with one eye open, sighting at the enemy, the dragoon sent by the king to break up the Conventicle, or the American Indian come to burn the meeting-house.

The winter had brought out Milford's strong points. He doubled his money on a flock of sheep. Fathers spoke of it to their daughters. Mothers asked their sons if they were acquainted with Mr. Milford. Mrs. Stuvic was proud of him.

"Oh, I knowed what I was doin'," she said one night, sitting near the hot stove in Milford's dining-room. "You can't fool me. I know lots, I tell you. Do you know the Bunker girl? Well, she was at my house yesterday, and she talked like she knowed you but wanted to know you better. Now put down that newspaper and talk to me. Do you know her?"

"I think I've met her," said Milford.

"You think you have. Well, a woman has taken mighty little hold of a man when he thinks he's met her. She'd make you a good wife; yes, you bet!"

"I don't want a wife, good or bad."

"Oh, you keep still. What the deuce are you workin' for? You know there's a woman somewhere waitin' for you."

"And if there is, why should I want to marry the Bunker girl?"

"Now listen at him! Why, I didn't know but you'd got tired of foolin'

with the other one. Who is she? That tall critter that was out here?

Well, I don't know about her, with her art. Art the cat's foot! You'd better marry a woman that knows how to do housework. She may be all right for summer, but you'd better marry a woman for winter. Don't you think so, Bob?"

"For winter and summer, I should think," said the hired man. "But I married one for winter, and she went away along in July. But I guess I could get her again."

"And he's just about fool enough to take her," Milford spoke up. "Why, she'd run away again."

"I don't think that, Bill. I guess she's got more sense now."

"At any rate, she's got more sense than you," said the old woman. "She had sense enough to run away and you didn't. But I hear that somebody else run away, Bill. I heard that you left a wife out West."

"You heard a lie, madam," Milford replied. "But that's not hard to hear.

A man may be ever so deaf, and sometimes might hear a lie."

"That's gospel, Mrs. Stuvic," said the hired man. "I was out at the deaf and dumb asylum one time, and they had a boy shut up for lyin' with his fingers."

"Well, what do you come tellin' me about it for? Do you s'pose I care? I wasn't talkin' about lyin'. I was talkin' about some folks not havin'

much sense, and you was right at the top of the pot, I'll tell you that.

You haven't got sense enough to catch a good woman."

"I might not have from your standpoint, but I have from mine. I don't believe I'd want the woman you'd call good. She'd think it was her duty to keep a man stirred up all the time; she'd make him work himself to death."

"Well," she snapped, "a woman's better off every time she makes a man work himself to death, I'll tell you that."

"Yes, from your standpoint," drawled the hired man, opening the stove door to get a light for his pipe. "But I wouldn't kill myself for no woman, would you, Bill?"

"I don't know that I'm called on to do it," Milford replied. "Give me that," he added, reaching for the bit of blazing paper which the hired man was about to put out. He lighted his pipe, threw the burning paper on the stove, and idly looked at the cinder waving in the draft. "As unsteadfast as Mitch.e.l.l's love," he said.

"What is?" the hired man inquired. "That thing, there? No, that's a woman's love. See, it's blowed away."

"Such nonsense!" said the old woman. "How can you keep it up so long?

I'd get sick to death of it. Woman's love, woman's love--I never was as tired of hearing of a thing. I hear it all summer, and now you're talkin' it. Conscience alive, how the wind blows! It makes me think of old Lewson, the cold made him shiver so. I've knowed him to sit up at night with his fire out and his teeth chatterin', waitin' for the spirits to come. One night I asked him who he expected, and he said his wife, and I told him she was a fool to come out such a night, and he flung his spirit book at me, and the Dutch girl kindled the fire with it the next mornin'. Poor old feller! I pa.s.sed his grave the other day, all heaped up with snow; and it made me shake so to think I'd be lyin' there sometime, with the snow fallin' an' the cows mooin' down the road. But I'm not gone yet, Bill. Do you understand that? I say I'm not gone yet, and many a one of 'em 'll be hauled off before I do go. Yes, you bet!

I'll outlive all of you; the last one of you."

"I hope so, Mrs. Stuvic," said Milford.

"You do? Thank you for the compliment."

"But you've got to go sometime," Mitch.e.l.l spoke up; and she frowned upon him.

"You shut your mouth, now," she snapped. "I wan't talkin' to you. I'll go when I get ready, and it's none of your business. But ain't it awful," she added, speaking to Milford, "that we've got to go? And we don't know where and don't know what'll happen to us afterwards. Lord, Lord, such a world! If we could only be dead for a while to see what it's like; but to think forever and ever, all the summers and all the winters to come! Dead, all the time dead. I wake up in the night, and think about it and wish I'd never been born. Sometimes I look at my hand and say, 'Yes, the flesh has got to drop off.' Not long ago a doctor stopped at my house one night with a skeleton. He was a young fool, and had bought it somewhere. He jerked the thing around like it was a jumpin'-jack; and I said to myself, 'You'd do me the same way, you scoundrel.' And I told him to drive away from there as fast as he could.

And old Lewson's failin' to come back has made it worse. I wonder if he did lie to me. I wonder if he could come back. And if he could, why didn't he? I'd always been kind to him; took him when his own flesh and blood turned him out. Then what made him lie to me? I don't care so much about his not comin' back; all I want is to know that he could have come. That would satisfy me. And why couldn't he let me know that much?

Bill, you lump of mud, don't you think about dyin'?"

"You're coming pretty close to my name, old lady. Yes, I think about it, but death will have to take care of itself. I haven't the time to worry with it just at present."

"Yes, and the first thing you know you can't worry about it."

"Then I'll be all right; won't need to worry."

She reached over and gripped his wrist. "Ah, that's it; that's just it.

How do you know that you won't need to worry? What proof have you got?

Tell me, if you've got any." She jerked him. "Tell me. Don't you see how I'm sufferin'? If you know anythin', tell me. I want the truth. That's all I want, the truth."