He jumped off the ‘Shake in front of the store before Sayre had stopped. “Wait here. I won’t be long.” With one bound he reached the closed door, opened it and disappeared.
Sayre sat tense behind the wheel, grateful for her father’s preoccupation with Hitty, who had been startled out of sleep by the ‘Shake’s jerking movements. The men who had been in front of the store had disappeared. The empty street was wrapped in the perfect quiet of a country-town night. To Sayre it seemed as if every inch of her were listening; only, there was nothing to hear. Oh, yes, there was. Voices. From within the store, uttering indistinguishable sounds. Or was it only one voice, that high, nervous voice, growing more and more shrill, more and more uncontrolled with anger? It sounded, too, as if it were approaching nearer and nearer the door.
Sayre jumped over the wheel. “I’m going in, Dad.”
Before she reached the door that high-pitched jumble of sound, rising to a crescendo of fury, became distinguishable words. “Believe you, you snake in the grass? Y-you immigrants’ and school-teacher’s tool! You experienced community adviser! How about my boy? Did you let anybody believe him when he said he knew nothing about that turkey-stealing—you slick, smooth-faced crook, with your good looks and your winning ways? The public’s on to you at last. They’re finding out now a thing or two. As for me, get out of here and stay out! But don’t think I’m done with you. I’ll find a way to settle this matter between us!”
The door swung open dramatically from the inside, and out of it Charley walked. His movements appeared dazed. At the same time they were not without a certain boyish dignity. Sayre threw one glance toward the angry man who still held his hand on the inner door-knob. It was a frightened look from the eyes of a frightened girl. Just the same, there was a flare in those eyes which, without consciousness of the words, said just as eloquently, “So this is what the important, gracious Mr. Hoskins is like when he really lets himself go!”
Charley flung himself into the empty wagon box of the ‘Shake. “Head for home, Sayre,” he muttered and lapsed into silence.
“Charley,” his father began.
But Sayre in her quivering sensitiveness laid a restraining hand on her father’s knee. “Oh, please, Dad,” she begged. “Not now.” Much though she herself longed to be enlightened, she knew that this was not the time. And Dad understood.
Both the tension and the silence had lessened but little when they reached home. Mr. Morgan got out at the back door to carry Hitty into the house, but Charley did not move until Sayre had driven the ‘Shake into the makeshift shed which served them as garage. Then he leaped out and stood waiting for his sister to turn off the car lights.
“You, too, Sayre?” The bitterness of the words cut into the quiet.
“Me what?”
“Believe it? Mr. Hoskins said my own family believed it of me. Even my own father. Said Dad had been trying to apologize to him, for my boyish thoughtlessness.”
Sayre’s eyes blazed. “Believe it?” she cried. “Me? Of you? I should say not. Not now or ever. Not for one instant! No matter what!”
Charley leaned back against the wall of the shed, eyes suddenly downcast. A quiver passed over the lower part of his face.
Sayre, seeing it, wanted to cry. Was this Charley, the brother whose decision, whose self-control, whose courage in going straight to Mr. Hoskins, she had been admiring every minute since they had met him on that corner down town? Had he really been like this all the while underneath? Just a deeply hurt and very lonely boy? She stepped lightly out of the ‘Shake and moved close to him.
“Chuck,” she said, “before we go in, tell me, please, won’t you, exactly what this thing is Mr. Hoskins thinks you’ve done?”
“You mean that you don’t know?”
“I don’t have to know, Charley, to be sure you haven’t done one single thing that’s crooked.”
Charley’s somber face lighted with gratitude, but his answering voice was grim. “Mr. Hoskins got a telegram today. A hot one. The State of Missouri has placed an embargo on all hay from the whole Pawaukee Irrigation Project. And if Missouri won’t admit our hay—” There was no need to finish his sentence. Charley merely added, “That carload we shipped two weeks ago today had alfalfa weevil in it.”
Sayre sank to a sitting position on the running board of the car. Weevil! The pest that every grower was so afraid of! That was so much more deadly than any other. So fearfully hard to check. That parts of Utah were fighting so desperately. That Wyoming had always been so proud, publishing the fact far and wide, never to have had within her borders. The girl’s mind reached out frantically, trying to grasp the full meaning of her brother’s statement.
“And Mr. Hoskins thinks you knew it?” she gasped.
“Worse than that: says it was all a put-up job. Says I made Frank take that south ditch field hay and let him bale it because I knew it had weevil in it. That they’d probably bred in those tangled weeds along the ditch bank; it’s just the place for them. Says I hustled that particular hay into that particular car on purpose. First, to queer his vocational agriculture alfalfa contest. And then to stop this Pawaukee Project’s sale of hay. Says it’s all spite work of mine because he happens to be Frank’s father, and because he does not agree with Mr. Kitchell about alfalfa selling on the Pawaukee!”
13
Sayre Tells Her Dream
“How can anybody really believe a thing like that about Charley?” Sayre, lying awake in the blackness of the night, repeated the thought for the fiftieth time. “Yet Mr. Hoskins said that even Charley’s own father believed it, and he’s probably told that to goodness only knows how many people.”
Sayre, of course, understood Dad. He was always too easily crushed by the first blow from bad tidings. But he was just as incapable of believing any ill of anyone for long. He would free Charley from all blame, she knew, the very first time he heard Charley say he was not guilty. “Only it’ll be hard for Charley to forget very soon that right in front of Mr. Hoskins, Dad believed what that man thought about him even for a moment. And Dad’ll feel bad about it, too. Poor Dad, out of a job again after he’s grown contented in that store as I never can remember his being.
“But it’s Charley and this mess he’s in that I’ve got to think a way out of first.” How far would Charley’s popularity help him now? Not very far, the girl’s clear-headedness realized. What she had seen and heard on the street of Upham that very evening had already shown her that.
“It’ll be the same way at school. The father of just about everybody there sells hay. And there’s the alfalfa contest. That’s ruined.
“School’s bad enough. But the baling crew’s worse. Every one of those men has raised all the alfalfa he could as his one money crop. How much will they talk? They’ve certainly seen plenty these last few weeks of how things are between Frank Hoskins and Charley.”
The girl recalled in detail how disgusted the crew boss had been by Frank’s and Charley’s warfare in their midst. There was no telling, either, how many foolish speeches, such as those that she herself had overheard, Charley had made before that bunch. And such speeches, repeated and exaggerated far and wide throughout the community as Sayre knew only too well they would be, were enough to destroy anybody’s confidence. Even people too generous to believe all Mr. Hoskins accused Charley of would think he’d done the wrong in a spirit of thoughtless, boyish spite.
Besides school and the baling crew, there was Charley’s pea project, the thing that had given the boy the chance to talk and champion everywhere Mr. Kitchell’s ideas about the community’s mistake of wholesale alfalfa marketing.
One by one Sayre’s mind milled over every happening of Charley’s connection with that fateful hay. The way in which the details piled up circumstantial evidence left the girl appalled.
“As for Frank and his father,” the torturing candor of her mind went on, “there’re those lawsuits of Mr. Hoskins coming on, and all those expenses to meet when he can’t sell a
ny hay. Mr. Hoskins will know how to make the most of that. He’ll have people feeling sorry for him and for Frank, in a way they never have been before. And being real sorry for a person’s just about the same as being his friend.
“Another thing. What did Mr. Hoskins mean by not being ‘done with Charley’? What can he do to him?” Here Sayre’s thinking only groped. She was far too inexperienced to have any understanding of the legal situation. “Surely there isn’t any way to make a boy pay when neither he nor his father has anything to pay with, not even a job. But there’s jail!” Sayre shied away from that idea with a long quiver of her body.
For relief she turned deliberately to that side of the situation which she had not yet dared to face, their chance for school. School for herself? Yes. But even more, school for Charley. “How is it ever to be managed with all of us out of paying work? There’s no use pretending Charley can get a part-time job now as easily as he used to. There hasn’t been any kind of job easy for anybody to get anywhere on this irrigation project this whole miserable season. And now, after all this, when nobody can sell his hay, when the demand for work’ll be worse than it’s ever been—” Sayre stared, wide-eyed, at the future in the spirit of middle-of-the-night hopelessness.
“Just the same,” she vowed fiercely to herself, “I will not give up school for either of us. How can I, when every hope and plan I’ve lived for this whole last year through depends on our going to school?” The girl clenched her hands hard and lay rigid under the bedclothes.
After a while she sat up in bed to relieve her sense of strain. Then she covered the sleeping Hitty with the blankets her own restlessness had swept away, lay down again herself, turned over on her side and dropped at last into a troubled sleep. In her dream she was talking to Charley, not the Charley of last night, but the old, good-natured, irresponsible Charley, who was laughing at her for worrying, and announcing with off-hand confidence, “Oh, I’ll get a job all right. Of course, I’ve got to quit school.”
“Quit school!” she blazed at him. “Quit! Even Frank Hoskins didn’t quit. Everybody’s had it in for him all fall, and what’s he done? Taken a real hold of things, worked better than he’s ever done before. He’s sure, now, to make the stock-judging team. Is he the fellow you’re going to let prove himself more of a man than you are? Not if you’re my brother, you’re not. I’ll tell you one thing. We Morgans always used to be quitters; but when we landed on this good-for-nothing Wyoming claim, we quit being quitters, and we’re going to stay quit!”
Then she opened her eyes to see, outside her window, day breaking over the wide Wyoming plains.
A little later Charley arose from the constraint of the breakfast table. “I’m going into town, Sayre. Don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“He’s going to Mr. Kitchell,” Sayre’s swift intuition told her. “And it’s just the thing to do.” Aloud she said, “Does Mr. Kitchell know?”
“Must, by now. Didn’t last night. I got it from a fellow I bumped into on leaving his place.”
Sayre’s heart lightened a little as she set about clearing the breakfast table. Why hadn’t she thought more last night about the way Mr. Kitchell understood and befriended boys? Surely the man who had won Charley’s respect and confidence as no other person ever had would guide her brother skilfully.
Charley came home in mid-afternoon. Silent and serious though he still was, Sayre realized at once, not without a pang, that he did not need her now as he had needed her last night.
“You’ve been with Mr. Kitchell?” she ventured.
“You bet I have,” came with a flash of Charley’s old spontaneity, which vanished as he added: “There’s an assistant janitor needed at the school. He hopes that with Nels Hansen’s pull I may have a chance at the job. I didn’t mean to tell you, though, till it was something more’n a chance.”
“It’s part-time work? You aren’t quitting school?”
“Of course I’m not quitting school.” The resentment in Charley’s tone was not against Sayre. “What good would quitting do? I couldn’t get a full-time job around here now for love or money, could I? And I’ve got a fine new reputation to live down in this community before I shake its dust off my clodhoppers. You didn’t expect me to clear out, did you, and leave the whole load of defending me on the shoulders of a girl? I’m not exactly that brand of fellow.”
After all, there were little bubbling springs of happiness even in the most barren stretches of life.
Charley’s appointment to the assistant janitorship did not materialize. “Didn’t get it,” was the boy’s curt statement to his sister after the school-board meeting. “Mr. Hoskins’s still president, you know!”
The Morgans soon learned that Mr. Hoskins’ influence was enough to keep Charley from getting any work his friends tried to seek out for him. A boy with such a cloud of dishonor over his name, all that circumstantial evidence that the community had become so glib about, could not, of course, be trusted with a job anywhere.
Beyond the exerting of damaging influence, however, Mr. Hoskins’ prosecution of Charley did not go. Why? Sayre often wondered. She did not put one bit of faith in those speeches of Mr. Hoskins which some member or other of the Hansen family reported to her from time to time. Sayre could imagine just how the man looked when he said them. “I can’t bring myself to push my just claims against a mere boy, however guilty,” or “I pity the father too much to demand punishment. I can’t bring myself to add to the burdens of a man who has such a boy for a son.”
Sayre writhed at these speeches when she first heard of them. Later she came to a comforting conclusion: “The real reason he doesn’t do anything to Charley is the influence of Mr. Kitchell and Mr. Hansen and Mr. Cowan.” Those three men remained Charley’s staunch friends.
It did not take Sayre long to become aware that Mr. Kitchell’s quiet, firmly outspoken confidence in Charley never wavered in spite of all the appearances that the teacher could not explain away; it did not waver even before the discredit that the teacher’s support of the boy soon began to cast upon his own reputation.
Sayre was too keen not to realize, too, that the air had grown thick with such insinuating hints and rumors. “The teacher ain’t never indorsed that alfalfa contest, ye know.” “Don’t believe he’s weepin’ any ’cause it ain’t come to nothing.” “Not so very surprising that Kitchell stands up for the Morgan kid. How much do you reckon he suspected, or, um-m-m, knew, mebbe, huh?—about that boy’s performances beforehand?” Hearing such speeches made Sayre sick with helpless resentment. What a return, she often thought, for all Mr. Kitchell had done for them!
What effect was the realization of such talk having upon Charley? The girl believed that her brother was taking it to heart even more deeply than she, for he never spoke about it. There were to be so many things, later that winter, about which the grim, different, doggedly-working Charley never talked.
Mr. Hansen, of course, was as outspoken in his defense of Charley as Mr. Kitchell was, and he was even more widely gossiped about because of the part he had played in the shipping of the luckless hay. But that fact did not worry Sayre at all. Why should it when the big Norwegian himself was so indifferent? Not for a moment did any of the talk affect his independence of attitude. All that winter, wherever he was, he alternately chuckled and droned with characteristic humor and insinuation about both his own and Mr. Hoskins’ parts in the whole alfalfa affair.
Part of the time, during the weeks that followed the alfalfa embargo, Sayre did not sleep very well, not nearly so well as a girl should. Instead she spent many a wakeful night hour milling over in her mind both her own and Charley’s plans in the face of the financial situation and the pressing family needs.
“How can I be so selfish as to refuse to spend my project money for things we’ve simply got to have? Yet I really haven’t much money. If only I hadn’t lost those early potatoes! I’ve learned Mr. Hansen thinks that my late ones will net about two hundred and fifty dollars. And I’ve
got a hundred and seventy-five dollars clear from my fries and early eggs, and that forty dollars I made selling garden truck to Yellowstone tourists. The turkey market’s only just beginning, too. I ought to get a good deal in from that. But I’ve got to keep all my best birds—both pullets and cockerels, for my continuation project next year.
“I’ve done pretty well, I guess. But there are all those notes of Aunt Hitty’s I’ve got to meet at the bank. If I’m not going to borrow again next year, and I’m determined I’m not, even from Aunt Hitty, it’s time we stopped doing that; I’ve got to hang on to every cent I can take in. There are my old projects and my new ones to finance, and all my other plans. I’m not going to give up one of them. That would be—quitting.
“So would it be for Charley, too. He can’t spend what he gets on the family any more than I can, because he’s got to pay for that purebred Rambouillet ram he’s bargained for, and for those purebred Rambouillet ewes. There’s Dad’s pigs he took over, of course. But it took all seven farrows out of the spring litter to pay for the old Hampshire sow; her being registered made her so expensive.
“Thank goodness we don’t owe Mr. Hoskins one cent. That’s one comfort. He’d like to have us, I believe. That’s why he acted so funny—it was two days before the embargo, too—when Charley cancelled Dad’s note for the sow. Seems to hurt him to see a Morgan make good at anything.
“There’s the gilts. But there were only three of them. And those we’ve got to hang onto till they farrow in the spring. That’s the only way to get livestock.
“Of course, there’re Charley’s peas. A good crop like that, at three and a half cents a pound, will net him ’most three hundred dollars. I’m not worried any more about his selling them, the way I was right after the embargo, when people were so mad at Charley that they began taking away their orders. Now his buyers are coming back, all right; that’s Mr. Hansen’s doing, I suppose. Still, they really want those peas even though they do make horrid jokes about the pests they’re afraid are hidden in the crop, and things like that.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 115