Caddie Woodlawn's Family, Page 3

  Caddie couldn’t help resenting this a little, because she felt, with some justice, that she was as accomplished in men’s arts as any of them. Couldn’t she plow, couldn’t she whittle a willow whistle, couldn’t she ride a wild horse bareback, as well as any of them? The answer, of course, was yes.

  Yet all through the furious snow battles which had been waged that winter between Tom’s and Obediah’s forces, Caddie had had to stand on the side lines or content herself with manufacturing snowballs inside the fort. If she made tactical suggestions or began hurling snowballs herself, Tom said, “Say, you keep out of this. This is no fight for girls.” George would have let Caddie in on an equal footing with the boys, but Tom said, “No. Ma will skin me alive if I let her get a black eye. She’s got to stay out. This is men’s work.”

  The worst of it was that Obediah’s side was nearly always victorious. If it had been a contest in spelling or arithmetic, Tom’s side would have had an easy victory; but outdoors on the schoolgrounds the Jones boys’ superior size and toughness gave them the advantage.

  It usually happened (accidentally, I suppose) that Miss Parker’s bell rang just in time to save Tom’s warriors from serious injury. But during the last snow battle of the season Ashur had tied up the clapper of Teacher’s bell and, before she could get it untied again, Tom’s crowd had suffered a black eye, a cut lip, and numerous bruises. Caddie felt shame for them. She also longed to see the Jones boys humbled. But before anything further was done the snow had all vanished like magic, and spring was at hand.

  With the melting snow had come a truce and an interval of peace which must have raised poor Teacher’s hopes.

  School was almost over now for the season. Soon the boys would have to stay at home to help with the plowing and seeding, and the weeds could grow untrampled in the empty schoolhouse yard until the summer days when work was slack again and school would be resumed.

  It was just at this moment in the spring that Caddie saw the innocent, sweet cattails standing thick and promising in the marsh behind the schoolhouse.

  “Millions of them,” Caddie said to Maggie, pointing them out.

  “Millions of them!” breathed Maggie.

  “They’ve been there all winter, too,” said Jane, “and we never even saw them!”

  During several recess periods thereafter the girls were busy cutting cattails, and storing them under the school-house steps. They carried them tenderly, like sleeping babes, so that none of the loosened fuzz should be disturbed.

  One or two of the younger boys asked “Watcha doing?” and the girls were vague in their replies—something about stuffing for doll pillows, it seemed. The older boys were too scornful of feminine folly to pay the slightest attention to these preparations. They had their own concerns, for it seemed pretty certain that Obediah’s crowd would not suffer school to close without a final showdown.

  Still the last week passed uneventfully, and the closing program went down in history with nothing more remarkable to commemorate it than Caddie’s spirited rendering of “Woodman, Spare That Tree.”

  But, when the last note of the last song had faded on the air, Obediah and Ashur were the first pupils out of the schoolhouse.

  They went out grinning and whistling through their teeth, and Caddie said to Maggie and Jane, “Now! It better be now. We haven’t got much time to lose.”

  They hurried into their coats and caps without bothering to gather up their books and slates. There was a scent of battle on the wind.

  The first blow fell when Tom and George emerged from the schoolhouse with the rest of their crowd close at their heels. Obediah and Ashur were waiting outside. With nice timing each one thrust out a long, ill-clad foot just as Tom and George were reaching the last step. Tom and George had expected the attack to come from above rather than below. They were caught off their guard and promptly fell upon their noses in a very tidy but disconcerting manner.

  Pushed from behind by some of Obediah’s fellows, Warren, Silas, and Sam tripped over the prostrate bodies of Tom and George; and the whole of Tom’s crowd suddenly found itself in a pile of flailing arms and legs, unable to arise and defend itself. Obediah’s crowd now fell upon Tom’s crowd with yelps of glee, and a tremendous uproar of shouting and howling arose which might have been heard as far as the Tavern on the other side of the river.

  Caddie did not wait to tie her bonnet strings. At the sound of battle she and Maggie and Jane burst out of the schoolhouse and began to pull their store of cattails out from under the school steps.

  Thus armed, they darted into the edges of the fight and began beating Tom’s opponents over the head with the fuzzy ends of the cattails. A long-stemmed cattail makes a surprisingly good weapon. Like a long thin rapier it allows the one who wields it to keep well out of range of his enemy’s fists, and every blow is accompanied by a wonderful explosion of choking fuzz.

  Obediah’s warriors began to cough and choke and sneeze. Their eyes began to water. They were enveloped in a cloud of flying fur. Gradually they gave over trying to beat the life out of Tom’s gang, and started to pursue the cattail wielders. Screams of the girls were added to the general hubbub. Now, in this instant’s respite, Tom’s men were on their feet again and hot after the girls’ pursuers.

  They were caught of their guard

  Cattail fighting is something which even the smallest scholars can take pleasure in. Hetty and the little Hankinson half-breeds and all of the younger boys and girls armed themselves with cattails and began to beat Obediah and Ashur and their sympathizers over the head with them. The air was hazy with flying fur, and a most enjoyable howling and yammering and sneezing arose to the blue spring heavens.

  In vain Miss Parker clapped her hands and rang her bell. Her efforts only added to the general pandemonium.

  At last Obediah and his fellows turned tail and ran, followed by a few persistent boys and by a trail of cattail fur. Some of the more enthusiastic members of the victorious party began beating one another over the head with cattails just for the pure delight of the sport, and because they hated to see a good thing come to an end. But fortunately the supply of cattails which the girls had cut was presently exhausted. The shouting began to subside, although the sneezing continued for some time. The children looked at one another and gradually their savagery gave place to laughter.

  “Look at you!”

  “Say, but you’re a sight!”

  “What’ll your Ma say, anyhow!”

  Miss Parker’s neat and tidy scholars had turned into furry beasts. The cattail fuzz was stuck all over their woolen garments as securely as if it had grown there.

  “All we need is tails,” said Caddie.

  Warren picked up a discarded cattail reed and began to wag it behind him like a tail.

  “Look! Look! I’ve got one!” he shouted. “Look! I’ve got a tail!”

  Victorious and pleased with themselves, the good children of school all caught up tails and began to wag them joyously behind them. In twos and threes and fours they took their various ways homeward, all of them prancing and capering, barking or yowling, and wagging their tails behind them.

  So school dispersed that year, and the uncomprehending mothers of Dunnville welcomed home strange beasts whose sturdy homespun garments were coated for weeks with a mysterious fur which defied all brushing and shaking and hanging in the wind.

  Wagging and prancing contentedly between Tom and George, Caddie suddenly remarked, “You know, Tom, cattails were my idea.”

  “It wasn’t bad,” said Tom. “I might have thought of it myself, only I didn’t get around to it.”

  “I think it was pretty good,” said George admiringly. “I think we’d ought to let her in on our side, Tom—honest I do.”

  “Well—” said Tom, his voice more friendly than his words, “I don’t see how we’re going to keep her out. It looks like she’s in already.”

  Caddie gave her cattail tail an extra wag. She had no idea what Mother would say at the appe
arance of her coat, but she knew that any punishment she might have to endure would be a small matter beside the satisfaction of seeing the fur fly around Obediah’s ears and of hearing Tom say, “It looks like she’s in already!”

  FOUR

  The Willow Basket

  “THEY’RE SHIFTLESS—that’s what they are!” said Mrs. Woodlawn decidedly.

  Shiftless was a terrible word in pioneer Wisconsin. Caddie, Tom, and Warren exchanged discouraged glances. They had been delighted to see the McCantrys come back—even if the father, mother, and four children had returned on foot, wheeling all of their possessions in a wheelbarrow.

  Mr. and Mrs. McCantry and the four children were standing in the road now, casting wistful glances at the Woodlawns’ cozy white house while they waited for Tom and Caddie to inform their parents of their old neighbors’ return.

  “But, Mother,” said Caddie, “Emma is so nice, and all they’ve got left is what they can carry in a wheelbarrow.”

  “They had just as good a chance here as the rest of us,” said Mrs. Woodlawn severely. “They had a farm, but they must needs sell it for what they could get and go on to something finer. And now, it seems, they are back with nothing but a wheelbarrow.”

  “We must not judge people too hastily, Harriet,” said Mr. Woodlawn mildly, from the doorway.

  “Oh, Father, we may ask them in for the night, mayn’t we?” begged Caddie.

  “Well, now,” said Mr. Woodlawn, with a pleasant wink at Caddie over his wife’s smooth dark head, “we’d better let the McCantrys go on to the next farm. The Bunns or the Silbernagles will take them in for the night, and that will let us out of any obligation.”

  Mrs. Woodlawn whirled about with a suspicious look in her eyes and was just in time to catch her husband’s smile and the tail end of his wink.

  “Go along with you!” she said, beginning to laugh. “I never intended to let them go without supper and a night’s rest, and you know that. But I do feel better for having said what I think of them!”

  Tom and Caddie and Warren raced away to invite the McCantrys in to supper and comfortable beds. They were a dispirited-looking lot as they sat along the roadside, waiting for the hospitality of a former neighbor. The bottom of Mrs. McCantry’s dress was draggled with mud and dust, and the two boys were barefoot; but Mrs. McCantry had a bonnet of the latest fashion trimmed with purple velvet pansies, and Pearly, the little girl who was next to the youngest, had a new gold ring.

  Emma, the eldest of the four and Caddie’s own age, slipped a warm brown arm through Caddie’s and gave her a squeeze. Emma didn’t have gold rings or bonnets with pansies; but she was brown and solid and comfortable, and Caddie liked her best of them all. When a bird called out in the meadow, Emma could pucker up her lips and imitate it. It was Emma who looked after the little ones as much as her mother did.

  Casting wistful glances at the Woodlawns’ house

  Now Mr. McCantry picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow, and Caddie thought that his shoulders looked rounder and more bent than they had when he went away. The wheelbarrow creaked as he trundled it up the path to the front door. Caddie could see that it contained some patchwork quilts and cooking utensils, a set of Mrs. McCantry’s hoops, and a clock which was not running.

  “Why don’t you wind your clock?” asked Caddie. “I hate to see a clock that doesn’t go.”

  “It’s broke,” said Emma. “We still carry it around, but it’s like most of the rest of our things. It won’t work any more.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Caddie, but it gave her an idea.

  Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn met the McCantrys at the front door.

  “Well, well,” said Mr. Woodlawn heartily, shaking his former neighbor’s hand, “so you have come back to us again, McCantry? Dunnville is a pretty good place after all.”

  “It is that!” said Mr. McCantry. “I’m glad to be back. We’ve been a weary way.”

  “Now, Josiah, why do you say that?” cried Mrs. McCantry sharply.

  Caddie looked at her in surprise and saw that she had lost her discouraged look of a few moments ago and was quite the fine lady once again.

  “We have had a most edifying journey really,” she said, “and spent some months with my brother, who has a most elegant house which puts anything you have here in Dunnville quite to shame. Of course we were most elaborately entertained, and it is only by the merest chance that you see us in these circumstances. An unforeseen accident happened to our horse and carriage, and we just thought how healthful it would be to come along on foot.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Mrs. Woodlawn hastily. “Now do come in and wash yourselves for supper.”

  The two little boys went along with Tom and Warren—while Pearly was taken in charge by Caddie’s little sisters, Hetty and Minnie.

  Caddie squeezed Emma’s arm.

  “Come up to my room,” she said.

  “Wait,” said Emma, smiling mysteriously. “I’ve got a present for you, Caddie.”

  “A present for me?” Caddie was incredulous.

  “It’s not very good,” said Emma shyly, “but I made it myself. An old lady who took us in one night, when we hadn’t any money, showed me how.”

  She fumbled through the untidy bundle of quilts and skillets in the wheelbarrow and brought out a little willow basket.

  “Why, it’s ever so pretty!” cried Caddie, sincerely pleased. “But you’d ought to keep it for yourself.”

  “Oh, I can make lots more of them,” said Emma. “Big ones, too; but we don’t have room to carry them, and I thought you’d like this little one.”

  “I’d love it,” said Caddie. “Thank you, Emma.”

  Meals were always good at the Woodlawns’, but any sort of company rallied Mrs. Woodlawn to extra effort. To night, besides the supper which she had already planned, she went to the smokehouse and took down one of the hams which had come from their own well-fed pigs and had been salted and smoked under her own direction. With a sharp knife she cut the tender pink slices and fried them delicately brown before heaping them on the big blue china platter. Each slice was half ringed around with a delicate layer of fat—just enough to give variety to the lean. Mr. Woodlawn filled the plates of the hungry-looking McCantrys with the generosity of a good host, and Emma and the littler boy fell to with a will. But Pearly set up a thin wail of protest.

  “I can’t eat this,” she said, pointing an accusing finger at the fat.

  “Me neither,” said Ezra, the littlest brother.

  “You can’t eat that tender bit of fat?” cried Mrs. Woodlawn in surprise.

  “They’ve got aristocratic stomachs,” Mrs. McCantry said proudly.

  For a moment Mrs. Woodlawn was speechless.

  “Maybe Mama could cut the fat part off for you, Pearly,” began Mrs. McCantry doubtfully.

  Mrs. Woodlawn’s earrings began to tremble as they always did when she was excited.

  “No,” she said, with that gleam in her eye which her own children had learned to obey. “If you can’t eat that good ham just as it is, fat and lean, you’re not very hungry. My children eat what is set before them with a relish. They know if they don’t they can go to bed empty. Anyone who eats at my table can do the same.”

  Over her tumbler of milk Caddie saw with twinkling eyes that Pearly and Ezra were eating their fat with their lean. Personally she thought the fat was the best part when it was all crisp on the outside and juicy on the inside, as Mother fried it.

  The McCantrys were not there for one night only; they stayed on for many days, but there were no more complaints about their meals.

  Caddie and Emma enjoyed the time very much. Together they went down to the swamp where the young willows grew thickly, and the boys helped them cut slender, pliant shoots to weave more baskets. The Woodlawn land and Dr. Nightingale’s land came together here at the edge of the swamp, and beyond their fences the swamp stretched away in a fairyland of tiny hummocks and islands on which grew miniature firs and ta
maracks. There were wild rice in the swamp in the autumn and quantities of wild cranberries.

  “What a pretty place this is!” said Emma. “If I were you, Caddie, I would build a little house on this hill overlooking the swamp. I like the nice spicy swamp smell, don’t you?”

  A red-winged blackbird, swaying on a reed, uttered a throaty call, and Emma answered it.

  Caddie remembered this later, when she heard her father and mother talking about a home for the McCantrys.

  “Really, Harriet,” said Mr. Woodlawn, “I’ve talked alone with McCantry, and they have reached rock bottom. He hasn’t any money left.”

  “To hear her talk, you would think they were millionaires.”

  “I know, my dear, but she’s a foolish woman. It’s her foolishness that’s “brought them where they are, I think. But we can’t let them starve for all that, and we can’t have them living with us always either. Somehow we’ve got to set them on their feet once more.”

  “Well, Johnny, grumble as I may, I suppose that you are always right about such things. What had we better do?” sighed Mrs. Woodlawn.

  “I thought we might give them a little land at the edge of our place somewhere. Perhaps one of our neighbors on the other side would contribute a little, too, and then all of the neighbors could get together and help build them a house. We could make a sort of raising bee out of it.”

  “A raising bee!” repeated Mrs. Woodlawn, her eyes beginning to shine. “Yes, we could do that.”

  “Oh, Father,” cried Caddie, forgetting that she had not been included in the conversation so far, “that would be lots of fun! And I’ll tell you the very place for the house.”