A STIFF CONDITION

BY HERMAN WHITAKER

An Ontario sun shed a pleasant warmth into the clearing where Elder Hector McCakeron sat smoking. His gratified consciousness was pleasantly t.i.tillated by sights and sounds of worldly comfort. From the sty behind the house came fat gruntings; in the barn-yard hens were shrilly announcing that eggs would be served with the bacon; moreover, Janet was vigorously agitating a hoe among the potatoes to his left, while his wife performed similarly in the cabbage-garden. And what better could a man wish than to see his women profitably employed?

It was a pause in Janet's labors that gave the elder first warning of an intruder on his peace. A man was coming across the clearing--a short fellow, thick-set and bow-legged in figure, slow and heavy of face. The elder observed him with stony eyes.

"It's the Englisher," he muttered. "What'll he be wanting wi' me?"

His accent was hostile as his glance. Since, thirty years before, a wave of red-haired Scots inundated western Ontario, no man of Saxon birth had settled in Zorra, the elder's township. That in peculiar had been held sealed as a heritage to the Scot, and when Joshua Timmins bought out Sandy Cruikshanks the township boiled and burned throughout its length and breadth.

Not that it had expected to suffer the contamination. It was simply astounded at the man's impudence. "We'll soon drum him oot!" Elder McCakeron snorted, when he heard of the invasion; to which, on learning that Timmins was also guilty of Methodism, he added, "Wait till the meenister lays claws on the beast."

It was confidently expected that he would be made into a notable example, a warning to all intruders from beyond the pale; and the first Sunday after his arrival a full congregation turned out to see the minister do the trick. Interest was heightened by the presence of the victim, who, lacking a chapel of his own faith, attended kirk. His entrance caused a sensation. Forgetting its Sabbath manners, the congregation turned bodily and stared till recalled to its duty by the minister's cough. Then it shifted its gaze to him. What thunders were brewing behind that confident front? What lightnings lurked in the depths of those steel-gray eyes? Breathlessly Zorra had waited for the anathema which should wither the hardy intruder and drive him as chaff from a burning wind.

But it waited in vain. By the most liberal interpretation no phrase of his could be construed as a reflection on the stranger. Worse! After kirk-letting the minister hailed Timmins in the door, shook hands in the scandalized face of the congregation, and hoped that he might see him regularly at service.

Scandalous? It was irreligious! But if disappointed in its minister, Zorra had no intention of neglecting its own duty in the premises: the Englisher was not to be let off while memories of Bruce and Bannockburn lived in Scottish hearts. Which way he turned that day and in the months that followed he met dour faces. Excepting Cap'en Donald McKay, a retired mariner, whose native granite had been somewhat disintegrated by exposure to other climates, no man gave him a word;--this, of course, without counting Neil McNab, who called on Timmins three times a week to offer half-price for the farm.

With one exception, too, the women looked askance upon him, wondering, doubtless, how he dared to oppose their men-folks' wishes. Calling the cows of evenings, Janet McCakeron sometimes came on Timmins, whose farm cornered on her father's, and thus a nodding acquaintance arose between them. That she should have so demeaned herself is a matter of reproach with many, but the fair-minded who have sufficiently weighed the merits of her case are slower with their blames. For though Zorra can boast maidens who have hung in the wind till fifty and still, as the vernacular has it, "married on a man," a girl was counted well on the way to the shelf at forty-five. Janet, be it remembered, lacked but two years of the fatal age. Already chits of thirty-five or seven were generously alluding to her as the prop of her father's age; so small wonder if she simpered instead of pa.s.sing with a nifty air when Timmins spoke one evening.

His remark was simple in tenor--in effect that her bell-cow was "a wee cat-ham'ed"; but Janet scented its underlying tenderness as a hungry traveller noses a dinner on a wind, and after that drove her cows round by the corner which was conveniently veiled by heavy maple-bush. Indeed, it was to the friendly shadows which shrouded it, day or dark, that Cap'en McKay--a man wise in affairs of the heart by reason of much sailing in and out of foreign ports--afterward attributed the record which Timmins set Zorra in courting.

"He couldna see her bones, nor her his bow-legs," the mariner phrased it. But be this as it may, whether or no each made love to a voice, Cupid ran a swift course with them, steeplechasing over obstacles that would have taken years for a Zorra lad to plod around. In less than six months they pa.s.sed from a bare goodnight to the exchange of soul thoughts on b.u.t.ter-making, the raising of calves, fattening of swine, and methods of feeding swedes that they might not taint cow's milk, and so had progressed by such tender paths through gentle dusks to the point where Timmins was ready to declare himself in the light of this present morning.

a.s.sured by one glance that Timmins's courage still hung at the point to which she had screwed it the preceding evening, Janet drooped again to her work.

To his remark that the potatoes were looking fine, however, the elder made no response--unless a gout of tobacco smoke could be so counted.

With eyes screwed up and mouth drawn down, he gazed off into s.p.a.ce--a Highland sphinx, a Gaelic Rhadamanthus.

His manner, however, made no impression on Timmins's stolidity. The latter's eye followed the elder's in its peregrinations till it came to rest, when, without further preliminaries, he began to unfold his suit, which in matter and essence was such as are usually put forward by those whom love has blinded.

It was really an able plea, lacking perhaps those subtilities of detail with which a Zorra man would have trimmed it, but good enough for a man who labored under the disadvantages which accrue to birth south of the Tweed and Tyne. But it did not stir the elder's sphinxlike calm. "Ha' ye done?" he inquired, without removing his gaze from the clouds; and when Timmins a.s.sented, he delivered judgment in a cloud of tobacco smoke.

"Weel--ye canna ha' her." After which he resumed his pipe and smoked placidly, wearing the air of one who has settled a difficult question forever.

But if stolid, Timmins had his fair share of a certain slow pugnacity.

"Why?" he demanded.

The elder smoked on.

"Why?"

"Weel,"--the elder spoke slowly to the clouds,--"I'm no obliged to quote chapter an' verse, but for the sake of argyment--forbye should Janet marry on an Englisher when there's good Scotchmen running loose?"

This was a "poser." Born to a full realization of the vast gulf which providence has fixed between the Highlands and the rest of the world, Janet recognized it as such. Pausing, she leaned on her hoe, anxiously waiting, while Timmins chewed a straw and the cud of reflection.

"Yes," he slowly answered, "they've been runnin' from 'er this twenty year." Nodding confirmation to the brilliant rejoinder, Janet fell again to work.

But the elder was in no wise discomposed. Withdrawing one eye from the clouds, he turned it approvingly upon her hoe practice. "She's young yet," he said, "an' a la.s.s o' her pairts wull no go til the shelf."

"Call three-an'-forty young?"

"Christy McDonald," the elder sententiously replied, "marrit on Neil McNab at fifty. Janet's labor's no going to waste. An' if you were the on'y man i' Zorra, it wad behoove me to conseeder the la.s.sie's prospects i' the next world. Ye're a Methodist."

"Meanin'," said Timmins, when his mind had grappled with the charge, "as there's no Methodists there?"

Questions of delicacy and certain theological difficulties involved called for reflection, and the elder smoked a full minute on the question before he replied: "No, I wadna go so far as that. It stan's to reason as there's some of 'em there; on'y--I'm no so sure o' their whereaboots."

Timmins thoughtfully scratched his head ere he came back to the charge.

"Meanin' as there's none in 'eaven?"

Again the elder blew a reflective cloud over the merits of the question.

"Weel," he said, delivering himself with slow caution, "if so--it's no on record."

Again Janet looked up, with defeat perching amid her freckles. "He's got ye this time," her face said, and the elder's expression of placid satisfaction affirmed the same opinion. But Timmins rose to a sudden inspiration.

"In 'eaven," he answered, "there's neither marriage nor givin' in marriage."

"Pish, mon!" the elder snorted. "It's no a question o' marrying; it's a question o' getting theer, an' Janet's no going to do it wi' a Methodist hanging til her skirts."

Silence fell in the clearing--silence that was broken only by the crash and tinkle of Janet's hoe as she buried Timmins under the clod. A Scotch daughter, she would bide by her father's word. Unaware of his funeral, Timmins himself stood scratching his poll.

"So you'll not give her to me?" he futilely repeated.

For the first time the elder looked toward him. "Mon, canna ye see the impossibility o' it? No, ye canna ha' her till--till"--he cast about for the limit of inconceivability--"till ye're an elder i' the Presbyterian Kirk." He almost cracked a laugh at Timmins's sudden brightening. He had evolved the condition to drive home and clinch the ridiculous impossibility of the other's suit, and here he was, the doddered fule, taking hope! It was difficult to comprehend the workings of such a mind, and though the elder smoked upon it for half an hour after Timmins left the clearing, he failed of realization.

"Yon's a gay fule," he said to Janet, when she answered his call to hitch the log farther into the cabin. "He was wanting to marry on you."

"Ay?" she indifferently returned,--adding, without change of feature, "There's no lack o' fules round here."

Meanwhile Timmins was making his way through the woods to his own place.

As he walked along, the brightness gradually faded from his face, and by the time he reached the trysting-corner his mood was more in harmony with his case. His face would have graced a funeral.

Now Cap'en McKay's farm lay cheek by jowl with the elder's, and as the mariner happened to be fixing his fence at the corner, he noted Timmins's signals of distress. "Man!" he greeted, "ye're looking hipped." Then, alluding to a heifer of Timmins's which had _bloated_ on marsh-gra.s.s the day before, he added, "The beastie didna die?" a.s.sured that it was only a wife that Timmins lacked, he sighed relief. "Ah, weel, that's no so bad; they come cheaper. But tell us o't."

"Hecks, lad!" he commented, on Timmins's dole, "I'd advise ye to drive your pigs til anither market."

"Were?" Timmins asked--"w'ere'll I find one?"

"That's so." The mariner thoughtfully shaved his jaw with a red forefinger, while his comprehensive glance took in the other's bow-legs.

"There isna anither la.s.s i' Zorra that wad touch ye with a ten-foot pole."

Reddening, Timmins breathed hard, but the mariner met his stare with the serene gaze of one who deals in undiluted truth; so Timmins gulped and went on: "Say! I 'ear that you're mighty clever in these 'ere affairs.

Can't you 'elp a feller out?"