The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
"Don't worry, son; you're the third guy to-day that I've caught on
that! Stick around, son, and sit in any time, and I'll learn you some
pool. You got just the right build for a champ player. Have a
cigarette?"
The social amenities whereby Joralemon prepares her youth for the
graces of life having been recognized, Fatty Rusk hitched a chair
beside Carl, and muttered:
"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 God put love in the world for----"
"Say, will you quit explaining to me about what God did things for?"
"Ouch! Quit! Awwww, quit, Carl.... Say, listen; here's what I wanted
to tell you: How if you and me and Adelaide Benner and some of us went
down to the depot to meet Gertie, to-morrow? She comes 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."
* * * * *
Saturday 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 prickles were
transmuted by distance into tawny velvet, seeming only the more
spacious 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, "Hello, 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. Larsen (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.
Miss Muzzy was sarcastic, and proud of it. She was sarcastic to Carl
when he gruffly asked why he couldn't study French instead of "all
this Latin stuff." If there be any virtue in the study of Latin (and
we have all forgotten all our Latin except the fact that "suburb"
means "under the city"--_i. e._, a subway), Carl was blinded to it for
ever. Miss Muzzy wore eye-glasses and had no bosom. Carl's father used
to say approvingly, "Dat Miss Muzzy don't stand for no nonsense," and
Mrs. Dr. Rusk often had her for dinner.... Miss McDonald, fat and
slow-spoken and kind, prone to use the word "dearie," to read
Longfellow, and to have buttons off her shirt-waists, used on Carl a
feminine weapon more unfair than the robust sarcasm of Miss Muzzy. For
after irritating a self-respecting boy into rudeness by pawing his
soul with damp, puffy hands, she would weep. She was a kind, honest,
and reverent bovine. Carl sat under her supervision in the junior
room, with its hardwood and blackboards and plaster, high windows and
portraits of Washington and a President who was either Madison or
Monroe (no one ever remembered which). He hated the eternal school
smell of drinking-water pails and chalk and slates and varnish; he
loathed the blackboard erasers, white with crayon-dust; he found
inspiration only in the laboratory where "Prof" Larsen mistaught
physics and rebuked questions about the useless part of
chemistry--that is, the part that wasn't in their text-books.
As for literature, Ben Rusk persuaded him to try Captain Marryat and
Conan Doyle. Carl met Sherlock Holmes in a paper-bound book, during a
wait for flocks of mallards on the duck-pass, which was a little
temple of silver birches bare with November. He crouched down in his
canvas coat and rubber boots, gun across knees, and read for an hour
without moving. As he tramped home, into a vast Minnesota sunset like
a furnace of fantastic coals, past the garnet-tinged ice of lakes, he
kept his gun cocked and under his elbow, ready for the royal robber
who was dogging the personage of Baker Street.
He hunted much; distinguished himself in geometry and chemistry;
nearly flunked in Cicero and English; learned to play an
extraordinarily steady game of bottle pool at Eddie Klemm's.
And always Gertie Cowles, gently hesitant toward Ben Rusk's affection,
kept asking Carl why he didn't come to see her oftener, and play
tiddledywinks.
On the Friday morning before Christmas vacation, Carl and Ben Rusk
were cleaning up the chemical laboratory, its pine experiment-bench
and iron sink and rough floor. Bennie worried a rag in the sink with
the resigned manner of a man who, having sailed with purple banners
the sunset sea of tragedy, goes bravely on with a life gray and weary.
The town was excited. Gertie Cowles was giving a party, and she had
withdrawn her invitation to Eddie Klemm. Gertie was staying away from
high school, gracefully recovering from a cold. For two weeks the
junior and senior classes had been furtively exhibiting her
holly-decked cards of invitation. Eddie had been included, but after
his quarrel with Howard Griffin, a Plato College freshman who was
spending the vacation with Ray Cowles, it had been explained to Eddie
that perhaps he would be more comfortable not to come to the party.
Gertie's brother, Murray, or "Ray," was the town hero. He had
captained the high-school football team. He was tall and very
black-haired, and he "jollied" the girls. It was said that twenty
girls in Joralemon and Wakamin, and a "grass widow" in St. Hilary,
wrote to him. He was now a freshman in Plato College, Plato,
Minnesota. He had brought home with him his classmate, Howard Griffin,
whose people lived in South Dakota and were said to be wealthy.
Griffin had been very haughty to Eddie Klemm, when introduced to that
brisk young man at the billiard-parlor, and now, the town eagerly
learned, Eddie had been rejected of society.
In the laboratory Carl was growling: "Well, say, Fatty, if it was
right for them to throw Eddie out, where do I come in? His dad 's a
barber, and mine 's a carpenter, and that's just as bad. Or how about
you? I was reading that docs used to be just barbers."
"Aw, thunder!" said Ben Rusk, the doctor's scion, uncomfortably,
"you're just arguing. I don't believe that about doctors being
barbers. Don't it tell about doctors 'way back in the Bible? Why, of
course! Luke was a physician! 'Sides, it ain't a question of Eddie's
being a barber's son. I sh'd think you'd realize that Gertie isn't
well. She wouldn't want to have to entertain both Eddie and Griffin,
and Griffin 's her guest; and besides----"
"You're getting all tangled up. If I was to let you go on you'd trip
over a long word and bust your dome. Come on. We've done enough
cleaning. Le's hike. Come on up to the house and help me on my bobs. I
got a new scheme for pivoting the back sled.... You just wait till
to-night. I'm going to tell Gertie and Mister Howard Griffin just what
I think of them for being such two-bit snobs. And your future
ma-in-law. Gee! I'm glad I don't have to be in love with anybody, and
become a snob! Come on."
Out of this wholesome, democratic, and stuffy village life Carl
suddenly stepped into the great world. A motor-car, the first he had
ever seen, was drawn up before the Hennepin House.
He stopped. His china-blue eyes widened. His shoulders shot forward to
a rigid stoop of astonishment. His mouth opened. He gasped as they ran
to join the gathering crowd.
"A horseless carriage! Do you get that? There's one _here_!" He
touched the bonnet of the two-cylinder 1901 car, and worshiped. "Under
there--the engine! And there's where you steer.... I _will_ own
one!... Gee! you're right, Fatty; I believe I will go to college. And
then I'll study mechanical engineering."
"Thought you said you were going to try and go to Annapolis and be a
sailor."
"No. Rats! I'm going to own a horseless carriage, and I'm going to
tour every state in the Union.... Think of seeing mountains! And the
ocean! And going twenty miles an hour, like a train!"
CHAPTER IV