Plain Mary Smith: A Romance of Red Saunders

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  Plain Mary Smith

  A Romance of Red Saunders

  By Henry Wallace Phillips

  With Illustrations By Martin Justice

  New York The Century Co. 1905

  Copyright, 1905, by THE CENTURY CO.

  Copyright, 1905, by FRANK LESLIE PUBLISHING HOUSE (Incorporated)

  _Published October, 1905_

  THE DE VINNE PRESS

  "I grabbed cans of tomatoes, and pasted the heap"]

  CONTENTS

  I "BUT WASN'T IT A GORGEOUS SMASH!"

  II "THE VILLAGE PRIDE"

  III SANDY GRAY

  IV THE FIGHT

  V "ON MY BUREAU WAS A KNIFE--"

  VI "I'M MARY SMITH"

  VII "SAVE ME, ARTHUR!"

  VIII ARCHIE OUT OF ASPINWALL

  IX ENTER BROTHER BELKNAP

  X "YOUR LIFE, IF YOU HURT HIM!"

  XI SAXTON'S STORY

  XII BILL MEETS A RELATIVE

  XIII RED MAKES A FEW REMARKS

  XIV BROTHER BELKNAP'S REVOLUTION

  XV TOMATOES BY THE QUART

  XVI RED PLAYS TRUMPS

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  "I grabbed cans of tomatoes, and pasted the heap"

  "'You git married and shuck them clothes'"

  "'You fight that boy fair'"

  "I left home ... mother and father both waving me good-by in the road"

  "The _Matilda_ saw a whale, or something, and shied"

  "He grabbed up his wooden box and made a miracle"

  "'Still wearing your legs cut short, I see'"

  "I laid two strong hands on Archie's mane"

  "I crowded my victim down against the saddle with my left hand"

  PLAIN MARY SMITH

  A ROMANCE OF RED SAUNDERS

  I

  "BUT WASN'T IT A GORGEOUS SMASH!"

  Old Foster used to say the reason some women married men they entirelyshould not was because nature tried to even up all round. Very likelythat's it, but it's a rocky scheme for the Little Results. When mymother married my father, it was the wonder of the neighborhood. I don'tfully understand it to this day, as many things as I've seen.

  She was a beautiful, tall, kind, proud woman, who walked as if she ownedthe world and loved it; from her I get my French blood. Was there a doggot his foot run over? Here he comes for mother, hollering andwhimpering, showing her the paw and telling her all about it, sure she'dunderstand. And she did. 'Twixt her and the brutes was some kind ofsympathy that did away with need of words. Doggy'd look at her witheyebrows up and wigwag with his tail, "Left hind leg very painful. Fixit, but touch lightly, _if_ you please."

  Father was a gaunt, big man, black and pale; stormy night to hersunshine. A good man, estimated by what he didn't do (which is a queerway to figure goodness), but a powerful discourager on the active side.He believed in Hell first, last, and all the time; I think he felt somescornful toward the Almighty for such a weak and frivolous institutionas Heaven. How much of this was due to his own nature, and how much tothe crowd he traveled with, I don't know. He had to have it in him to gowith them; still, I like to think they led him off. Left to mother'sinfluence, he'd have been a different man--more as I remembered him whenI was a little chap. This "church" of his was down on everything thathad a touch of color, a pleasant sound, or a laugh in it: all such waswickedness. I remember how I got whaled for kissing Mattie. A boy thatwouldn't kiss Mattie if she'd let him should have been trimmed to apeak. However, I got whaled for anything and everything. In this he wassupported by his fellow church-members, most of 'em high-cheek-boned menwith feverish eyes, like himself. "Take heed to the word, BrotherSaunders," they'd say: "'Spare the rod and spoil the child.'" Sofather'd refuse to spare the rod, and he'd spoil me for the time being,anyhow.

  They weren't all men of that stamp, though. You can't get a crowd offools to hold together unless there's a rascal to lead them. Anker wasthe boss of the business--and a proper coyote he was. A little man, him;long-nosed and slit-eyed; whispered, mostly, from behind his hand. Hehad it in for me, most particular. First place, I nicknamed him "Canker"and it stuck; next place, one day me and Tom, Mattie's brother, beingthen about sixteen apiece, come up from swimming and stopped at Anker'spatch to pull a turnip. While we sat there, cutting off slices andenjoying it, never thinking of having harmed the man, Anker slides outto us, so quiet we couldn't hear him till he was right there, and callsus a pair of reprobates and thieves. I never liked the sound of thatword "thief." He got the turnip. He'd have got worse, too, but Tom slungthe sleeve of his shirt around my neck and choked me down.

  The turnip sent him to grass. As he got up, smiling with half his mouth,and wiping turnip off his manly brow, "You'll regret this, young man,"says he; "some day you'll be sorry for this."

  Poor Tom had his hands full holding me. "Well, you'd better run along,"says he; "for if this shirt gives way, _you'll_ regret it to-day."

  Anker was a man to give advice, generally. When he cast an eye on me,foaming and r'aring, he concluded he'd take the same, for once, andambled out of that.

  He kept his word, though. He made me regret it. You'd hardly believe aman near fifty years old would hold a grudge against a sixteen-year-oldboy hard enough to lie about him on every occasion, and poison the boy'sfather's mind, would you? That's the facts. He stirred the old man up bythings he "really didn't like to tell, you know, but felt it his painfulduty"--and so forth. Yes, sir; he made me regret it plenty. You mightsay he broke our home up. And so, if ever I meet that gentleman in thehereafter, above or below, him and me is going to have some kind of ascuffle--but shucks! There's no use getting excited over it at my age.The good Lord's attended to his case all right, without any help fromme.

  In all kinds of little things mother and father were separated by miles.Take the case of old Eli Perkins, the tin-peddler, for instance. Motherused to love to buy things from Eli, to hear him bargain and squirm,trying his best to give you a wrong steer, without lying right out."Well, now, Mis' Saunders," he'd say, "I ain't sayin' _myself_ thet thetpan is solerd tin; I'm on'y repeatin' of what I bin tolt. I du' know esit _be_ solerd tin; mebbe not. In thet case, of course, it ain't wuthnineteen cents, es I was sayin', but about, about ... well, well, now!I'll tell you what I'll do, ma'am. I'll say fourteen cents and a few ofthem Baldwins to take the taste out 'n my mouth--can't do no fairer thanthet now, kin I? Yassam--well, nuthin' more _to_-day? Thankee, ma'am."And Eli'd drive off, leaving mother and me highly entertained. Butfather'd scowl when his eye fell on Eli. It seems that the poor old cusswas a child of the devil, because he would take Chief Okochohoggammee'sCelebrated Snaggerroot Indian Bitters for some trouble Eli felt drawingtoward him and tried to meet in time. When Eli got an overdose of thechief's medicine he had one song. Then you heard him warble:

  "Retur-n-n-n-i-n' from mar-r-r-ket, Thebutterneggsallsold, And--will you be so kind, young man, And tie 'em up for _ME_? Yaas I will, yaas I will, w'en we git UPon the hill. And we joggled erlong tergether singin' TOORAL-I-YOODLE-I-AAAAAAAAAAAAY!!"

  Well, sir, to hear it, and to see Eli, with his head bent back near tobreak off, his old billy-goat whisker wagging to the tune, was to obtaina pleasant memory. The way that "TOORAL-I-YOODLE-I-AY" come out used tostart old Dandy Jim, the horse, on a dead run.

  Another offspring of the same split-hoof parent was Bobby Scott, theone-legged sailorman that used to whittle boats for us boys when he wassober, and go home from the tavern
Saturday nights at the queerest gaityou ever saw, playing his accordion and scattering pennies to the kids.I always liked any kind of music; pennies didn't come my way sooften--how were you going to make me believe Old Bob was a wickedsinner? I didn't, nor that Eli was neither. I thought a heap of both of'em.

  But railroading was what gave me the first wrench from the home tree. Ithappened one evening I wandered over the hills to the end of the littlejerk-line that ran our way, and watched the hostler put the engine inthe shed for the night. It was a small tea-pot of an engine that one ofour Western 'Guls could smear all over the track and never know there'dbeen an accident, but, man! she looked big to me. And the hostler! Well,I classed him with the lad that hooked half-dollars out of the air atthe Sunday-school show, and took a rabbit out of Judge Smalley's hat.But the hostler was a still more wonderful man. I tried to figure ifhe'd ever speak to me, and what I should do if he did. Every time I gotthe chores done early, I skipped it over to the railroad, till finallythe hostler he sees a long-legged boy eating him with his eyes, and hesays:

  "Hello, bub!"

  I scuffed my feet and said, "Good morning."

  The hostler spit careful over the top of the switch and says, with oneeye shut, "Like a ride?"

  Well!!

  Howsomever, it seemed manners to me to refuse all pleasant propositions,so I said "no" and prepared to slide away. But he was a wise man.

  "Better come down to the shed," he says. So I climbed aboard with nomore talk.

  "This is the throttle," says he. "You pull that and she goes: try it."

  Notwithstanding I expected that engine to explode and scatter us theminute a strange hand was laid on her, I wrastled my nerve together andmoved the lever a tiny bit. "Chow!" says the old engine,"Chow-chow-chow!" and I near had a fit with pride and scaredness. It_is_ a great sensation to hold them big critters under your hand. Inever knew an engineer yet that got rid of it entirely.

  So there was me, white in the face with grandeur, hogging the engineinto the shed. I couldn't sleep much that night. When I did doze off, itwas to travel a great many miles a minute on a road-bed laid flatagainst the side of a mountain, with an engine that had wash-tubs fordrivers, and was run by winding up by a crank, like the old clock in thehall. Lord! how I whizzed around the turns! Grinding away like alunatic, until the road ended--just ended, that's all, and off we wentinto the air. From that on I had business at the railroad every eveningI could get off.

  I went over to my engine one night. There wasn't a soul around. Myfriend was as ingenious a Yank as ever helped make this world a factory.He'd got up a scheme for a brake, almost the identical thing with theair-brake they use to-day, except Jerry took pressure into hisbrake-pistons straight from the boiler. He spent every cent he had toget one made and put on his pusher. How he used to explain it to me, andtell me what we'd do when he sold his patent! For he was a great friendof mine, Jerry was, and I knew the workings of that brake as well as hedid himself. The reason he wasn't around was that he'd taken the pusherdown the line to show his scheme to some railroad people. So there stoodan engine all alone--the one I was used to, I thought--and it occurredto me there'd be no particular harm if I got aboard and moved her up anddown the track a foot or two--you see, I'd never had her single-handed.So I started easy, and reversed her, and played around that way for awhile, till naturally I got venturesome. One stunt that Jerry and Iloved to try was to check her up short with his patent brake. The poorold pusher never got put to bed without being stood on end a half-dozentimes; that suggested to me that I'd slam her down on the shed doors andsee how near I could come to them without hitting. I backed 'way off,set her on the corner, yanked the throttle, and we boiled for the shed,me as satisfied with myself as could be. I didn't leave much margin forstopping, so there wasn't a lot of track left when I reached down forthe brake-lever, and found--it wasn't there! If some day you reach forsomething and find your right arm's missing, you'll know how I felt. Inthe little bit of time before the smash, there wasn't a scrap of mybrain working--and then, Holy Jeeroosalum! How we rammed that shed! Thedoor fell over, cleaning that engine to the boiler; stack, bell,sand-box, and whistle lay in the dust, and all of the cab but where Isat. Quicker'n lightning we bulled through the other end, and the restof the cab left there. How it come I didn't get killed, I don'tknow--all that remained of the shed was a ruin, and that had a list toport that would have scart a Cape-Horner. I woke up then and threw herover kerbang, but she went into the bunker squirting fire from herdrivers. I shut her down, took one despairing look, and says out loud,"I guess I'll go home."

  I felt about as bad as falls to the lot of man at any age. Jerry wassure to get into trouble over it; he'd make a shrewd guess at who didit, whether I told or not, and his confidence in me would be a thing ofthe past--nothing but black clouds on the sky-line, whilst inside of mesome kind of little devil was hollering all the time, "But wasn't it agorgeous smash!"

  I went home and to bed that night without speaking, resolved to let mymisfortunes leak out when they got ready. That's the kind of resolutionI've never been able to keep--I've got to face a thing, got to get itdone with, swallow my medicine, and clean the table for a new deal.

  Next morning I told father. You can imagine how easy it was--mestumbling and stuttering while he sat there, still as if he'd beenpainted for the occasion.

  "Have you entirely finished?" says he, when the sound of my words hit myears with such a lonesome feeling that I quit talking.

  "Yes, sir," I says, "that's about all of it."

  "Well, William, I see you're determined to make our name a disgracethrough the community," he begins again. That was out of whooping rangefrom the truth. I hadn't determined to do anything to our name, nornothing else, when I got aboard that engine. Far from me had it been todetermine anything, so I filed a protest.

  "Why, father," I says, "it was an accident--it was just as if you'dhopped into a neighbor's wagon, not noticing the head-stall wasn't onthe horse, and the critter'd run away, and things--" Here again I rundown with a buzz. He wasn't paying the least heed to the sense of what Isaid. It only interrupted him. He sailed right on, explaining how I wasthe most undiluted scoundrel of his acquaintance, an all-wool villain ofthe closest weave, built to hold sin like a Navajo blanket does water.

  Now I understand that the old gentleman did think a lot of me, and, ofcourse, wanted me to be as near like him as possible, as representingthe highest style of man--it was his disappointment he poured on me, nothis judgment. But then, I was sixteen by the clock, and I thought, ofall the fool laying-outs I'd heard, that crossed the rope an easy first.

  I wanted to respect my father; you can't guess how much I wanted to, butwhen he insisted on talking like Eli Perkins's mule, it simply wasn'tpossible. He stood there, black and sullen, and I stood there, red andsullen.

  "Get yourself ready to go with me," he says, turns on his heel, andwalks to the house, his hands clasped behind his back, and his big headleant forrard,--a fine, powerful chunk of a man, all right. Oh, Lord!What he could have been if he'd listened to mother instead of Anker!There wasn't a man in this county more respected, nor whose word wasbetter thought of on any subject outside of his own family, and thathydrophobia of a doctrine of his. Honest? Why, he was the savings-bankof the place. All the old hayseeds around there turned their surplus into him to take care of, instead of putting it in a sock,--and I want youto understand that the real old Yankee farmer, with tobacco juice on hiswhiskers, was a man you'd fool just once in a lifetime, and you'd sit upmore'n one night to figure how you got the best of it, then.

  Well, down him and me goes to the railroad office, and I have to tell mytale. I begged hard to be allowed to leave Jerry out of it, but no--thatwouldn't do: it would be a lie. I always stood ready to lie to anyextent to help a friend. I think that hurt me worse than the rest of it.

  After some parleying around the offices, we were shown up into a privateroom. There sat three men, officers of the company, and Jerry.

 
My father made few words of his part, simply saying he stood prepared topay all damages, although he could ill afford it, and that I would tellthe story.

  First off, I was embarrassed, but soon I was flying my arms around, andletting 'em know all about it, as if we'd played together for years.

  Two of those men had been boys once; they had an almighty hard job tokeep an official face on, as some of my interest in engineering, and mysatisfaction in having made a corking old bust-up of her while I was atit, crept into my discourse. The third man was in an ugly state ofliquor. He let out on me, although the others said, "Come! Come!"Father's face was something to look at when he saw the only man thatsided with him was three-quarters loaded.

  After giving me a blast, this bucko, who I believe was president of thecompany, kind of falls over on his desk and opens up on Jerry, while myheart broke entirely. He was about as reasonable toward Jerry as myfather had been toward me. The other two bit their lips, as if theyweren't going to stand for a whole lot more; everybody that knew Jerry,liked him.

  Howsomever, Jeremiah was a prophet in his own country. He belonged tothat tribe of Yankees that don't seem to be born very fast these days,but long may they wave! the good-natured, able kind that feared the faceof no man nor the hoof of no jackass, and always had something to saythat wrecked the situation.

  He walks carefully over to the side of the room to where the spittoonwas, so's he could talk with freedom, and sidles easily back again, andsays he, "Mr. Hawkins, you've lit on me like a sparrow-hawk. If Ithought you was in condition to make a speech, I'd feel tolerable castdown. As it is, I advise you to go out and take another snifter,--Iappeal from Caesar drunk to Caesar drunker." Well, sir, those other twolet out a yell and fell on the floor; the old president, he r'ars upwith massacre in his eye for a minute, and then it got the best of him.

  "Shut your noise, you damn fools," says he to the others; then to Jerry,"With the loan of your arm, I'll fill your prescription." So off hetoddles to the door. When he got there he turned around, and fixed uponmy father a stern but uncertain eye.

  "_I'm_ drunk with liquor, sir," says he, "and there's recovery in thatcase; but _you're_ drunk on your own virtue,--may God have mercy on yoursoul! Take the boy home and use him right,--there is no bill to pay."