Hugh walked rapidly to town and through Main Street. He saw Tom Butterworth walking in the street with Steve Hunter, but turned a corner to avoid a meeting. “My chance has come,” he kept saying to himself as he hurried along Medina Road. “Clara’s in some kind of trouble. My chance has come.”
By the time he got to the door of the Butterworth house, Hugh’s new-found courage had almost left him, but before it had quite gone he raised his hand and knocked on the door. By good fortune Clara came to open it. Hugh took off his hat and turned it awkwardly in his hands. “I came out here to ask you to marry me,” he said. “I want you to be my wife. Will you do it?”
Clara stepped out of the house and closed the door. A whirl of thoughts ran through her brain. For a moment she felt like laughing, and then what there was in her of her father’s shrewdness came to her rescue. “Why shouldn’t I do it?” she thought. “Here’s my chance. This man is excited and upset now, but he is a man I can respect. It’s the best marriage I’ll ever have a chance to make. I do not love him, but perhaps that will come. This may be the way marriages are made.”
Clara put out her hand and laid it on Hugh’s arm. “Well,” she said, hesitatingly, “you wait here a moment.”
She went into the house and left Hugh standing in the darkness. He was terribly afraid. It seemed to him that every secret desire of his life had got itself suddenly and bluntly expressed. He felt naked and ashamed. “If she comes out and says she’ll marry me, what will I do? What’ll I do then?” he asked himself.
When she did come out Clara wore her hat and a long coat. “Come,” she said, and led him around the house and through the barnyard to one of the barns. She went into a dark stall and led forth a horse and with Hugh’s help pulled a buggy out of a shed into the barnyard. “If we’re going to do it there’s no use putting it off,” she said with a trembling voice. “We might as well go to the county seat and do it at once.”
The horse was hitched and Clara got into the buggy. Hugh climbed in and sat beside her. She had started to drive out of the barnyard when Jim Priest stepped suddenly out of the darkness and took hold of the horse’s head. Clara held the buggy whip in her hand and raised it to hit the horse. A desperate determination that nothing should interfere with her marriage with Hugh had taken possession of her. “If necessary I’ll ride the man down,” she thought. Jim came to stand beside the buggy. He looked past Clara at Hugh. “I thought maybe it was that Buckley,” he said. He put a hand on the buggy dash and laid the other on Clara’s arm. “You’re a woman now, Clara, and I guess you know what you’re doing. I guess you know I’m your friend,” he said slowly. “You been in trouble, I know. I couldn’t help hearing what your father said to you about Buckley, he talked so loud. Clara, I don’t want to see you get into trouble.”
The farm hand stepped away from the buggy and then came back and again put his hand on Clara’s arm. The silence that lay over the barnyard lasted until the woman felt she could speak without a break in her voice.
“I’m not going very far, Jim,” she said, laughing nervously. “This is Mr. Hugh McVey and we’re going over to the county seat to get married. We’ll be back home before midnight. You put a candle in the window for us.”
Hitting the horse a sharp blow, Clara drove quickly past the house and into the road. She turned south into the hill country through which lay the road to the county seat. As the horse trotted quickly along, the voice of Jim Priest called to her out of the darkness of the barnyard, but she did not stop. The afternoon and evening had been cloudy and the night was dark. She was glad of that. As the horse went swiftly along she turned to look at Hugh who sat up very stiffly on the buggy seat and stared straight ahead. The long horse-like face of the Missourian with its huge nose and deeply furrowed cheeks was ennobled by the soft darkness, and a tender feeling crept over her. When he had asked her to become his wife, Clara had pounced like a wild animal abroad seeking prey and the thing in her that was like her father, hard, shrewd and quick-witted, had led her to decide to see the thing through at once. Now she became ashamed, and her tender mood took the hardness and shrewdness away. “This man and I have a thousand things we should say to each other before we rush into marriage,” she thought, and was half inclined to turn the horse and drive back. She wondered if Hugh had also heard the stories connecting her name with that of Buckley, the stories she was sure were now running from lip to lip through the streets of Bidwell, and what version of the tale had been carried to him. “Perhaps he came to propose marriage in order to protect me,” she thought, and decided that if he had come for that reason she was taking an unfair advantage. “It is what Kate Chanceller would call ‘doing the man a dirty, low-down trick,’” she told herself; but even as the thought came she leaned forward and touching the horse with the whip urged him even more swiftly along the road.
A mile south of the Butterworth farmhouse the road to the county seat crossed the crest of a hill, the highest point in the county, and from the road there was a magnificent view of the country lying to the south. The sky had begun to clear, and as they reached the point known as Lookout Hill, the moon broke through a tangle of clouds. Clara stopped the horse and turned to look down the hillside. Below lay the lights of her father’s farmhouse—where he had come as a young man and to which long ago he had brought his bride. Far below the farmhouse a clustered mass of lights outlined the swiftly growing town. The determination that had carried Clara thus far wavered again and a lump came into her throat.
Hugh also turned to look but did not see the dark beauty of the country wearing its night jewels of lights. The woman he wanted so passionately and of whom he was so afraid had her face turned from him, and he dared to look at her. He saw the sharp curve of her breasts and in the dim light her cheeks seemed to glow with beauty. An odd notion came to him. In the uncertain light her face seemed to move independent of her body. It drew near him and then drew away. Once he thought the dimly seen white cheek would touch his own. He waited breathless. A flame of desire ran through his body.
Hugh’s mind flew back through the years to his boyhood and young manhood. In the river town when he was a boy the raftsmen and hangers-on of the town’s saloons, who had sometimes come to spend an afternoon on the river banks with his father John McVey, often spoke of women and marriage. As they lay on the burned grass in the warm sunlight they talked and the boy who lay half asleep nearby listened. The voices came to him as though out of the clouds or up out of the lazy waters of the great river and the talk of women awoke his boyhood lusts. One of the men, a tall young fellow with a mustache and with dark rings under his eyes, told in a lazy, drawling voice the tale of an adventure had with a woman one night when a raft on which he was employed had tied up near the city of St. Louis, and Hugh listened enviously. As he told the tale the young man a little awoke from his stupor, and when he laughed the other men lying about laughed with him. “I got the best of her after all,” he boasted. “After it was all over we went into a little room at the back of a saloon. I watched my chance and when she went to sleep sitting in a chair I took eight dollars out of her stocking.”
That night in the buggy beside Clara, Hugh thought of himself lying by the river bank on the summer days. Dreams had come to him there, sometimes gigantic dreams; but there had also come ugly thoughts and desires. By his father’s shack there was always the sharp rancid smell of decaying fish and swarms of flies filled the air. Out in the clean Ohio country, in the hills south of Bidwell, it seemed to him that the smell of decaying fish came back, that it was in his clothes, that it had in some way worked its way into his nature. He put up his hand and swept it across his face, an unconscious return of the perpetual movement of brushing flies away from his face as he lay half asleep by the river.
Little lustful thoughts kept coming to Hugh and made him ashamed. He moved restlessly in the buggy seat and a lump came into his throat. Again he looked at Clara. “I’m a poor white,” he thought. “It isn’t fitten I should marry this wo
man.”
From the high spot in the road Clara looked down at her father’s house and below at the lights of the town, that had already spread so far over the countryside, and up through the hills toward the farm where she had spent her girlhood and where, as Jim Priest had said, “the sap had begun to run up the tree.” She began to love the man who was to be her husband, but like the dreamers of the town, saw him as something a little inhuman, as a man almost gigantic in his bigness. Many things Kate Chanceller had said as the two developing women walked and talked in the streets of Columbus came back to her mind. When they had started again along the road she continually worried the horse by tapping him with the whip. Like Kate, Clara wanted to be fair and square. “A woman should be fair and square, even with a man,” Kate had said. “The man I’m going to have as a husband is simple and honest,” she thought. “If there are things down there in town that are not square and fair, he had nothing to do with them.” Realizing a little Hugh’s difficulty in expressing what he must feel, she wanted to help him, but when she turned and saw how he did not look at her but continually stared into the darkness, pride kept her silent. “I’ll have to wait until he’s ready. Already I’ve taken things too much into my own hands. I’ll put through this marriage, but when it comes to anything else he’ll have to begin,” she told herself, and a lump came into her throat and tears to her eyes.
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CHAPTER XVI
AS HE STOOD ALONE IN the barnyard, excited at the thought of the adventure on which Clara and Hugh had set out, Jim Priest remembered Tom Butterworth. For more than thirty years Jim had worked for Tom and they had one strong impulse that bound them together—their common love of fine horses. More than once the two men had spent an afternoon together in the grand stand at the fall trotting meeting at Cleveland. In the late morning of such a day Tom found Jim wandering from stall to stall, looking at the horses being rubbed down and prepared for the afternoon’s races. In a generous mood he bought his employee’s lunch and took him to a seat in the grand stand. All afternoon the two men watched the races, smoked and quarreled. Tom contended that Bud Doble, the debonair, the dramatic, the handsome, was the greatest of all race horse drivers, and Jim Priest held Bud Doble in contempt. For him there was but one man of all the drivers he whole-heartedly admired, Pop Geers, the shrewd and silent. “That Geers of yours doesn’t drive at all. He just sits up there like a stick,” Tom grumbled. “If a horse can win all right, he’ll ride behind him all right. What I like to see is a driver. Now you look at that Doble. You watch him bring a horse through the stretch.”
Jim looked at his employer with something like pity in his eyes. “Huh,” he exclaimed. “If you haven’t got eyes you can’t see.”
The farm hand had two strong loves in his life, his employer’s daughter and the race horse driver, Geers. “Geers,” he declared, “was a man born old and wise.” Often he had seen Geers at the tracks on a morning before some important race. The driver sat on an upturned box in the sun before one of the horse stalls. All about him there was the bantering talk of horsemen and grooms. Bets were made and challenges given. On the tracks nearby horses, not entered in the races for that day, were being exercised. Their hoofbeats made a kind of music that made Jim’s blood tingle. Negroes laughed and horses put their heads out at stall doors. The stallions neighed loudly and the heels of some impatient steed rattled against the sides of a stall.
Every one about the stalls talked of the events of the afternoon and Jim leaned against the front of one of the stalls and listened, filled with happiness. He wished the fates had made him a racing man. Then he looked at Pop Geers, the silent one, who sat for hours dumb and uncommunicative on a feed box, tapping lightly on the ground with his racing whip and chewing straw. Jim’s imagination was aroused. He had once seen that other silent American, General Grant, and had been filled with admiration for him.
That was on a great day in Jim’s life, the day on which he had seen Grant going to receive Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. There had been a battle with the Union men pursuing the fleeing Rebs out of Richmond, and Jim, having secured a bottle of whisky, and having a chronic dislike of battles, had managed to creep away into a wood. In the distance he heard shouts and presently saw several men riding furiously down a road. It was Grant with his aides going to the place where Lee waited. They rode to the place near where Jim sat with his back against a tree and the bottle between his legs; then stopped. Then Grant decided not to take part in the ceremony. His clothes were covered with mud and his beard was ragged. He knew Lee and knew he would be dressed for the occasion. He was that kind of a man; he was one fitted for historic pictures and occasions. Grant wasn’t. He told his aides to go on to the spot where Lee waited, told them what arrangements were to be made, then jumped his horse over a ditch and rode along a path under the trees toward the spot where Jim lay.
That was an event Jim never forgot. He was fascinated at the thought of what the day meant to Grant and by his apparent indifference. He sat silently by the tree and when Grant got off his horse and came near, walking now in the path where the sunlight sifted down through the trees, he closed his eyes. Grant came to where he sat and stopped, apparently thinking him dead. His hand reached down and took the bottle of whisky. For a moment they had something between them, Grant and Jim. They both understood that bottle of whisky. Jim thought Grant was about to drink, and opened his eyes a little. Then he closed them. The cork was out of the bottle and Grant clutched it in his hand tightly. From the distance there came a vast shout that was picked up and carried by voices far away. The wood seemed to rock with it. “It’s done. The war’s over,” Jim thought. Then Grant reached over and smashed the bottle against the trunk of the tree above Jim’s head. A piece of the flying glass cut his cheek and blood came. He opened his eyes and looked directly into Grant’s eyes. For a moment the two men stared at each other and the great shout again rolled over the country. Grant went hurriedly along the path to where he had left his horse, and mounting, rode away.
Standing in the race track looking at Geers, Jim thought of Grant. Then his mind came back to this other hero. “What a man!” he thought. “Here he goes from town to town and from race track to race track all through the spring, summer and fall, and he never loses his head, never gets excited. To win horse races is the same as winning battles. When I’m at home plowing corn on summer afternoons, this Geers is away somewhere at some track with all the people gathered about and waiting. To me it would be like being drunk all the time, but you see he isn’t drunk. Whisky could make him stupid. It couldn’t make him drunk. There he sits hunched up like a sleeping dog. He looks as though he cared about nothing on earth, and he’ll sit like that through three-quarters of the hardest race, waiting, taking advantage of every little stretch of firm hard ground on the track, saving his horse, watching, watching his horse too, waiting. What a man! He works the horse into fourth place, into third, into second. The crowd in the grand stand, such fellows as Tom Butterworth, have not seen what he’s doing. He sits still. By God, what a man! He waits. He looks half asleep. If he doesn’t have to do it, he makes no effort. If the horse has it in him to win without help he sits still. The people are shouting and jumping up out of their seats in the grand stand, and if that Bud Doble has a horse in the race he’s leaning forward in the sulky, shouting at his horse and making a holy show of himself.
“Ha, that Geers! He waits. He doesn’t think of the people but of the horse he’s driving. When the time comes, just the right time, that Geers, he lets the horse know. They are one at that moment, like Grant and I were over that bottle of whisky. Something happens between them. Something inside the man says, ‘now,’ and the message runs along the reins to the horse’s brain. It flies down into his legs. There is a rush. The head of the horse has just worked its way out in front by inches—not too soon, nothing wasted. Ha, that Geers! Bud Doble, huh!”
On the night of Clara’s marriage after she and Hugh had disappeared do
wn the county seat road, Jim hurried into the barn and, bringing out a horse, sprang on his back. He was sixty-three but could mount a horse like a young man. As he rode furiously toward Bidwell he thought, not of Clara and her adventure, but of her father. To both men the right kind of marriage meant success in life for a woman. Nothing else really mattered much if that were accomplished. He thought of Tom Butterworth, who, he told himself, had fussed with Clara just as Bud Doble often fussed with a horse in a race. He had himself been like Pop Geers. All along he had known and understood the mare colt, Clara. Now she had come through; she had won the race of life.
“Ha, that old fool!” Jim whispered to himself as he rode swiftly down the dark road. When the horse ran clattering over a small wooden bridge and came to the first of the houses of the town, he felt like one coming to announce a victory, and half expected a vast shout to come out of the darkness, as it had come in the moment of Grant’s victory over Lee.
Jim could not find his employer at the hotel or in Main Street, but remembered a tale he had heard whispered. Fanny Twist the milliner lived in a little frame house in Garfield Street, far out at the eastern edge of town, and he went there. He banged boldly on the door and the woman appeared. “I’ve got to see Tom Butterworth,” he said. “It’s important. It’s about his daughter. Something has happened to her.”
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