The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
general chorus. But when she received an invitation to join one of
these bodies, her countenance, as she read the missive, would assume an
expression which was known to her friends as “sticking her nose in the
air.” I do not think that Molly’s reason for refusing to join could have
been a truly good one. I should add that her most precious possession--a
treasure which accompanied her even if she went away for only one
night’s absence--was an heirloom, a little miniature portrait of the old
Molly Stark, painted when that far-off dame must have been scarce more
than twenty. And when each summer the young Molly went to Dunbarton, New
Hampshire, to pay her established family visit to the last survivors of
her connection who bore the name of Stark, no word that she heard in the
Dunbarton houses pleased her so much as when a certain great-aunt would
take her by the hand, and, after looking with fond intentness at her,
pronounce: “My dear, you’re getting more like the General’s wife every
year you live.”
“I suppose you mean my nose,” Molly would then reply.
“Nonsense, child. You have the family length of nose, and I’ve never
heard that it has disgraced us.”
“But I don’t think I’m tall enough for it.”
“There now, run to your room, and dress for tea. The Starks have always
been punctual.”
And after this annual conversation, Molly would run to her room, and
there in its privacy, even at the risk of falling below the punctuality
of the Starks, she would consult two objects for quite a minute before
she began to dress. These objects, as you have already correctly
guessed, were the miniature of the General’s wife and the looking glass.
So much for Miss Molly Stark Wood’s descent.
The second reason why she was not a usual girl was her character. This
character was the result of pride and family pluck battling with family
hardship.
Just one year before she was to be presented to the world--not the great
metropolitan world, but a world that would have made her welcome and
done her homage at its little dances and little dinners in Troy and
Rutland and Burlington--fortune had turned her back upon the Woods.
Their possessions had never been great ones; but they had sufficed. From
generation to generation the family had gone to school like gentlefolk,
dressed like gentlefolk, used the speech and ways of gentlefolk, and as
gentlefolk lived and died. And now the mills failed.
Instead of thinking about her first evening dress, Molly found pupils
to whom she could give music lessons. She found handkerchiefs that she
could embroider with initials. And she found fruit that she could
make into preserves. That machine called the typewriter was then in
existence, but the day of women typewriters had as yet scarcely begun
to dawn, else I think Molly would have preferred this occupation to the
handkerchiefs and the preserves.
There were people in Bennington who “wondered how Miss Wood could go
about from house to house teaching the piano, and she a lady.” There
always have been such people, I suppose, because the world must always
have a rubbish heap. But we need not dwell upon them further than to
mention one other remark of theirs regarding Molly. They all with one
voice declared that Sam Bannett was good enough for anybody who did
fancy embroidery at five cents a letter.
“I dare say he had a great-grandmother quite as good as hers,” remarked
Mrs. Flynt, the wife of the Baptist minister.
“That’s entirely possible,” returned the Episcopal rector of Hoosic,
“only we don’t happen to know who she was.” The rector was a friend of
Molly’s. After this little observation, Mrs. Flynt said no more, but
continued her purchases in the store where she and the rector had
happened to find themselves together. Later she stated to a friend that
she had always thought the Episcopal Church a snobbish one, and now she
knew it.
So public opinion went on being indignant over Molly’s conduct. She
could stoop to work for money, and yet she pretended to hold herself
above the most rising young man in Hoosic Falls, and all just because
there was a difference in their grandmothers!
Was this the reason at the bottom of it? The very bottom? I cannot be
certain, because I have never been a girl myself. Perhaps she thought
that work is not a stooping, and that marriage may be. Perhaps--But all
I really know is that Molly Wood continued cheerfully to embroider
the handkerchiefs, make the preserves, teach the pupils--and firmly to
reject Sam Bannett.
Thus it went on until she was twenty. There certain members of her
family began to tell her how rich Sam was going to be--was, indeed,
already. It was at this time that she wrote Mrs. Balaam her doubts and
her desires as to migrating to Bear Creek. It was at this time also
that her face grew a little paler, and her friends thought that she was
overworked, and Mrs. Flynt feared she was losing her looks. It was at
this time, too, that she grew very intimate with that great-aunt over at
Dunbarton, and from her received much comfort and strengthening.
“Never!” said the old lady, “especially if you can’t love him.”
“I do like him,” said Molly; “and he is very kind.”
“Never!” said the old lady again. “When I die, you’ll have
something--and that will not be long now.”
Molly flung her arms around her aunt, and stopped her words with a kiss.
And then one winter afternoon, two years later, came the last straw.
The front door of the old house had shut. Out of it had stepped the
persistent suitor. Mrs. Flynt watched him drive away in his smart
sleigh.
“That girl is a fool!” she said furiously; and she came away from her
bedroom window where she had posted herself for observation.
Inside the old house a door had also shut. This was the door of Molly’s
own room. And there she sat, in floods of tears. For she could not bear
to hurt a man who loved her with all the power of love that was in him.
It was about twilight when her door opened, and an elderly lady came
softly in.
“My dear,” she ventured, “and you were not able--”
“Oh, mother!” cried the girl, “have you come to say that too?”
The next day Miss Wood had become very hard. In three weeks she
had accepted the position on Bear Creek. In two months she started,
heart-heavy, but with a spirit craving the unknown.
IX. THE SPINSTER MEETS THE UNKNOWN
On a Monday noon a small company of horsemen strung out along the trail
from Sunk Creek to gather cattle over their allotted sweep of range.
Spring was backward, and they, as they rode galloping and gathering
upon the cold week’s work, cursed cheerily and occasionally sang. The
Virginian was grave in bearing and of infrequent speech; but he kept
a song going--a matter of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were
quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cow-punchers monstrously.
They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and
awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after
a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his gentle voice
and begin:
“If you go to monkey with my Looloo girl,
I’ll tell you what I’ll do:
I’ll cyarve your heart with my razor, AND
I’ll shoot you with my pistol, too--”
then they would stridently take up each last line, and keep it going
three, four, ten times, and kick holes in the ground to the swing of it.
By the levels of Bear Creek that reach like inlets among the
promontories of the lonely hills, they came upon the schoolhouse, roofed
and ready for the first native Wyoming crop. It symbolized the dawn of a
neighborhood, and it brought a change into the wilderness air. The feel
of it struck cold upon the free spirits of the cow-punchers, and they
told each other that, what with women and children and wire fences, this
country would not long be a country for men. They stopped for a meal at
an old comrade’s. They looked over his gate, and there he was pattering
among garden furrows.
“Pickin’ nosegays?” inquired the Virginian and the old comrade asked
if they could not recognize potatoes except in the dish. But he grinned
sheepishly at them, too, because they knew that he had not always lived
in a garden. Then he took them into his house, where they saw an object
crawling on the floor with a handful of sulphur matches. He began to
remove the matches, but stopped in alarm at the vociferous result; and
his wife looked in from the kitchen to caution him about humoring little
Christopher.
When she beheld the matches she was aghast but when she saw her baby
grow quiet in the arms of the Virginian, she smiled at that cow-puncher
and returned to her kitchen.
Then the Virginian slowly spoke again: “How many little strangers have
yu’ got, James?”
“Only two.”
“My! Ain’t it most three years since yu’ maried? Yu’ mustn’t let time
creep ahaid o’ yu’, James.”
The father once more grinned at his guests, who themselves turned
sheepish and polite; for Mrs. Westfall came in, brisk and hearty, and
set the meat upon the table. After that, it was she who talked. The
guests ate scrupulously, muttering, “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” in
their plates, while their hostess told them of increasing families upon
Bear Creek, and the expected school-teacher, and little Alfred’s early
teething, and how it was time for all of them to become husbands like
James. The bachelors of the saddle listened, always diffident,
but eating heartily to the end; and soon after they rode away in a
thoughtful clump. The wives of Bear Creek were few as yet, and the homes
scattered; the schoolhouse was only a sprig on the vast face of a world
of elk and bear and uncertain Indians; but that night, when the earth
near the fire was littered with the cow-punchers’ beds, the Virginian
was heard drawling to himself: “Alfred and Christopher. Oh, sugar!”
They found pleasure in the delicately chosen shade of this oath. He also
recited to them a new verse about how he took his Looloo girl to the
schoolhouse for to learn her A B C; and as it was quite original and
unprintable, the camp laughed and swore joyfully, and rolled in its
blankets to sleep under the stars.
Upon a Monday noon likewise (for things will happen so) some tearful
people in petticoats waved handkerchiefs at a train that was just
leaving Bennington, Vermont. A girl’s face smiled back at them once, and
withdrew quickly, for they must not see the smile die away.
She had with her a little money, a few clothes, and in her mind a rigid
determination neither to be a burden to her mother nor to give in to
that mother’s desires. Absence alone would enable her to carry out
this determination. Beyond these things, she possessed not much except
spelling-books, a colonial miniature, and that craving for the unknown
which has been mentioned. If the ancestors that we carry shut up inside
us take turns in dictating to us our actions and our state of mind,
undoubtedly Grandmother Stark was empress of Molly’s spirit upon this
Monday.
At Hoosic Junction, which came soon, she passed the up-train bound back
to her home, and seeing the engineer and the conductor,--faces that she
knew well,--her courage nearly failed her, and she shut her eyes against
this glimpse of the familiar things that she was leaving. To keep
herself steady she gripped tightly a little bunch of flowers in her
hand.
But something caused her eyes to open; and there before her stood Sam
Bannett, asking if he might accompany her so far as Rotterdam Junction.
“No!” she told him with a severity born from the struggle she was making
with her grief. “Not a mile with me. Not to Eagle Bridge. Good-by.”
And Sam--what did he do? He obeyed her, I should like to be sorry for
him. But obedience was not a lover’s part here. He hesitated, the golden