In the Sixties. Frederic Harold
stand answerin’ to the same name as Jeff Davis,” he says.
“I suppose you folks put him up to that,” I made bold to comment, indignantly.
The suggestion did not annoy “Ni.” “Mebbe so,” he said. “You know Dad lots a good deal on names. He’s downright mortified that I don’t get up and kill people because my name’s Benaiah. ‘Why,’ he keeps on saying to me, ‘Here you are, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, as it was in Holy Writ, and instid of preparin’ to make ready to go out and fall on the enemies of righteousness, like your namesake did, all you do is read dime novels and cut up monkey-shines generally, for all the world as if you’d been named Pete or Steve or William Henry.’ That’s what he gives me pretty nearly every day.”
I was familiar enough with the quaint mysticism which the old Abolitionist cooper wove around the Scriptural names of himself and his son. We understood that these two appellations had alternated among his ancestors as well, and I had often heard him read from Samuel and Kings and Chronicles about them, his stiff red hair standing upright, and the blue veins swelling on his narrow temples with proud excitement. But that, of course, was in the old days, before the trouble came, and when I still went to church. To hear it all now again seemed to give me a novel impression of wild fanaticism in “Jee” Hagadorn.
His son was chuckling on his seat over something he had just remembered. “Last time,” he began, gurgling with laughter—“last time he went for me because I wasn’t measurin’ up to his idee of what a Benaiah ought to be like, I up an’ said to him, ‘Look a-here now, people who live in glass houses mustn’t heave rocks. If I’m Benaiah, you’re Jehoiada. Well, it says in the Bible that Jehoiada made a covenant. Do you make cove-nants? Not a bit of it! all you make is butter firkins, with now an’ then an odd pork barrel.’ ”
“What did he say to that?” I asked, as my companion’s merriment abated.
“Well, I come away just then; I seemed to have business outside,” replied “Ni,” still grinning.
We had reached the Corners now, and my companion obligingly drew up to let me get down. He called out some merry quip or other as he drove off, framed in a haze of golden dust against the sinking sun, and I stood looking after him with the pleasantest thoughts my mind had known for days. It was almost a shock to remember that he was one of the abhorrent and hated Hagadorns.
And his sister, too. It was not at all easy to keep one’s loathing up to the proper pitch where so nice a girl as Esther Hagadorn was its object.
She was years and years my senior—she was even older than “Ni”—and had been my teacher for the past two winters. She had never spoken to me save across that yawning gulf which separates little barefooted urchins from tall young women, with long dresses and their hair done up in a net, and I could hardly be said to know her at all. Yet now, perversely enough, I could think of nothing but her manifest superiority to all the farm-girls round about. She had been to a school in some remote city, where she had relations. Her hands were fabulously white, and even on the hottest of days her dresses rustled pleasantly with starched primness. People talked about her singing at church as something remarkable; to my mind, the real music was when she just spoke to you, even if it was no more than “Good-morning, Jimmy!”
I clambered up on the window-sill of the school-house, to make sure there was no one inside, and then set off down the creek-road toward the red or lower bridge. Milking-time was about over, and one or two teams passed me on the way to the cheese-factory, the handles of the cans rattling as they went, and the low sun throwing huge shadows of drivers and horses sprawling eastward over the stubble-field. I cut across lots to avoid the cheese-factory itself, with some vague feeling that it was not a fitting spectacle for any one who lived on the Beech farm.
A few moments brought me to the bank of the wandering stream below the factory, but so near that I could hear the creaking of the chain drawing up the cans over the tackle, or as we called it, the “teekle;” The willows under which I walked stretched without a break from the clump by the factory bridge. And now, lo and behold! beneath still other of these willows, farther down the stream, whom should I see strolling together but my schoolteacher and the delinquent Jeff!
Young Beech bore still the fish-pole I had seen him take from our shed some hours earlier, but the line twisted round it was very white and dry. He was extremely close to the girl, and kept his head bent down over her as they sauntered along the meadow-path. They seemed not to be talking, but just idly drifting forward like the deep slow water beside them. I had never realized before how tall Jeff was. Though the school-ma’am always seemed to me of an exceeding stature, here was Jeff rounding his shoulders and inclining his neck in order to look under her broad-brimmed Leghorn hat.
There could be no imaginable excuse for my not overtaking them. Instinct prompted me to start up a whistling tune as I advanced—a casual and indolently unobtrusive tune—at sound of which Jeff straightened himself, and gave his companion a little more room on the path. In a moment or two he stopped, and looked intently over the bank into the water, as if he hoped it might turn out to be a likely place for fish. And the school-ma’am, too, after a few aimless steps, halted to help him look.
“Abner wants you to come right straight home!” was the form in which my message delivered itself when I had come close up to them.
They both shifted their gaze from the sluggish stream below to me upon the instant. Then Esther Hagadorn looked away, but Jeff—good, big, honest Jeff, who had been like a fond elder brother to me since I could remember—knitted his brows and regarded me with something like a scowl.
“Did pa send you to say that?” he demanded, holding my eye with a glance of such stern inquiry that I could only nod my head in confusion.
“An’ he knew that you’d find me here, did he?”
“He said either at the school-house or around here somewhere,” I admitted, weakly. ‘An’ there ain’t nothin’ the matter at the farm?’
“He don’t want me for nothin’ special?” pursued Jeff, still looking me through and through.
“He didn’t say,” I made hesitating answer, but for the life of me, I could not keep from throwing a tell-tale look in the direction of his companion in the blue gingham dress.
A wink could not have told Jeff more. He gave a little bitter laugh, and stared above my head at the willow-plumes fora minute’s meditation. Then he tossed his fish-pole over to me and laughed again.
“Keep that for yourself, if you want it,” he said, in a voice not quite his own, but robustly enough. “I sha’n’t need it any more. Tell pa I ain’t a-comin’!”
“Oh, Tom!” Esther broke in, anxiously, “would you do that?”
He held up his hand with a quiet, masterful gesture, as if she were the pupil and he the teacher. “Tell him,” he went on, the tone falling now strong and true, “tell him and ma that I’m goin’ to Tecumseh to-night to enlist. If they’re willin’ to say good-by, they can let me know there, and I’ll manage to slip back for the day. If they ain’t willin’—why, they—they needn’t send word; that’s all.”
Esther had come up to him, and held his arm now in hers.
“You’re wrong to leave them like that!” she pleaded, earnestly, but Jeff shook his head.
“You don’t know him!” was all he said.
In another minute I had shaken hands with Jeff, and had started on my homeward way, with his parting “Good-by, youngster!” benumbing my ears. When, after a while, I turned to look back, they were still standing where I had left them, gazing over the bank into the water.
Then, as I trudged onward once more, I began to quake at the thought of how Farmer Beech would take the news.
CHAPTER III—ABSALOM