LONELY O'MALLEY
CHAPTER I
In which Lonely finds himself an Outlander
THE sun mounted higher in the turquoise sky. The birds sang more sleepily. Faint and far away, from the flats down by the river, a few belated frogs still trebled and fluted. Then, lazily, the warm breeze stirred, and died away, and stirred again, scattering a drifting shower of cherry-blossoms through the heavy, indolent sunlight, murmurous with the hum and drone of many wings, where, for the hundredth time, a song-sparrow preached his vagabond philosophy of "Sweet! Sweet! Idleness—Idleness—idleness!"
It was a cloudless Saturday morning, and the end of May. There was something more than the smell of buds and young leaves in the air, something more than the sound of frogs and sparrows and bobolinks,—for when Piggie Brennan, the butcher's son, had delivered his roast of beef at Widow Tiffin's back door, he drew a generous slice of bologna from his trousers pocket, wiped it deliberately on his sleeve, and then wagged his head twice, solemnly, and with much conviction. This done, he poked his empty basket well in under Barrison's stable, and whistled three times, softly, for Redney McWilliams.
Redney, under stern inspection from the back kitchen window, was engaged in a deal of puffing and blowing and wheezing, as he intermittently wielded a buck-saw on a stick of elm cordwood, for some twenty languid strokes, and then, for an equal length of time, gazed vacuously and dreamily at his feet, "to spell his muscles," he had explained to the uncomprehending parental mind, preoccupied with stewing rhubarb in the back kitchen.
"S-s-stt! s-s-stt there, Redney!"
Then there came a discreet pause.
"Redney! Hi, there, Redney!"
The boy at the buck-saw, as he heard that husky whisper from the knot-hole in the back fence, slowly and cautiously turned his head, without in the least moving his labor-bent body.
"She 's watchin'!" he ejaculated, under his breath. Then there was another discreet pause.
"C'm' on fishin'!" whispered the husky voice, at last, through the knot-hole.
THE BOY AT THE BUCK-SAW
Redney cast a furtive glance toward the kitchen window. Then, whistling artlessly, he strode with great deliberation to the very woodshed door, to reconnoiter. Still whistling, he mounted the wood-pile. There he made a great pretense of throwing down fresh fuel for his energy. When he heard a stove-door slam shut he knew that his moment had come, and stepped quickly from the wood-pile to the neighboring fence-top, and then dropped quietly into the back alley.
Once he had thus crossed his Rubicon, his entire manner took on a sudden transformation, and at Piggie Brennan's repeated declaration that it ought to be mighty fine fishing weather again, he gave vent to a vigorous and abandoned can-can, quite belying the exhausted muscles of the buck-saw laborer.
Two lots further down the alley they discovered Billie Steiner blithely raking up the back yard, wrapt in the happiness of innocent content. They peered in at him, over the fence-top, silently, and with impassive faces. But the tongue of Billie, the unconscious artist, was out, and it worked contemplatively back and forth with every stroke of his rake. An audible snicker broke from the two boys, as they dropped down out of sight.
"Say, Billie, c'm' on fishin'!"
"Heh!" said the startled husbandman.
"Aw, c'm' on fishin', Billie!"
At the magic of that mysterious call, floating in on his honest labor, all the world seemed to change. The boards about Billie Steiner became a prison wall; the heavy rake fell from his listless hand. The seed of revolt sank deep in his breast. He scuttled secretively down toward the back fence. There he held converse with certain unseen conspirators, through a narrow crack between the imprisoning boards.
A moment later he had scaled his audacious way out to liberty. In the freedom of the alley, on the sunny side of the Steiner chicken-coop, the three boys talked things over, Piggie producing matches and Redney McWilliams a supply of punk and dried spatter-dock stems. A happy and pensive silence fell over the little group as they lit up. There was no hurry; the whole day was before them and it was not until their three throats were dry and their three tongues well blistered that they felt they had had their fill of the weed, and decided to move on.
Pud Jones was moodily receiving his first lesson in garden-making, under the wing of his rheumatic, care-taking, and yet somewhat short-tempered old grandfather, when a tiny pebble hit him on the bridge of the nose.
PUD JONES WAS MOODILY RECEIVING HIS FIRST LESSON IN GARDEN-MAKING
He started violently, and looked cautiously at the fence in the rear. But he said nothing.
Still another pebble hit him, a weightier one, this time on the calf of the leg. He jumped therefore unexpectedly, and rubbed the spot briskly.
"Sufferin' sassafras, Kilvert Jones! Can't you stand stiddy a minute? First thing you know you 'll be havin' St. Vitus Dance!" complained the old gardener, already exasperated by his young ward's eloquent argument that garden-digging was a ruthless destruction of innocent worm-life, a destruction so horrible to his stern young sense of mercy, he had intimated, that it promised to take the heart out of his day's work.
Pud's backward glance toward the fence held a touch of vindictiveness. His unsuspecting tutor turned away, mumblingly, for the spade that leaned against the grape-arbor. When he hobbled back to the little garden-plot his young grandson had disappeared, as completely as though the earth had opened and swallowed him.
"Why,—why, bless my soul, he 's—he 's gone!" ejaculated the old gentleman, weakly, rubbing his chin. And with his hand to his eyes he peered dazedly about.
If the hearing of Pud's grandfather had been the least bit sharper, that bewildered old gardener might have caught the excited murmur of happy young voices drifting off down the alley, and the mystic whistled call which echoed softly out from behind Johnson's barn, where Dode Johnson rebelliously and languidly gathered chips, in an old market-basket, and made patient and needlessly exhaustive observations on the traveling powers of a wood-slug.
"Hey-oh, there, Dode!" cried a muffled voice.
"Goin' fishin'?" demanded Dode, softly, without rising from his knees, as he caught sight of that telltale little band and sniffed at the penetrating yet mysteriously fragrant odor of burning punk and dock-stems.
"Sure!" said Piggie Brennan, turning over a board in search for worms. "Can't you make your sneak, Dode?"
Dode looked about him, guardedly. A moment later he emerged, puffing, dirt-covered, red-faced, worming his way out from under the driving-shed.
"I thought you had to clean them turnips up out o' your cellar?" he said to Redney McWilliams, as he lit up luxuriously.
"W'at turnips?" demanded Redney, vacuously.
"Why, them winter turnips you said 'd rotted down there!"
"Oh, who cares for turnips!" cried Redney, abandonedly. "This is fishin' weather!"
HE EMERGED FROM UNDER THE DRIVING-SHED
The sun mounted still higher, the frogs still trebled and fluted down on the river-flats, the warm breeze stirred lazily once more. The alleys and back yards of the town of Chamboro grew quieter; the robins sang on undisturbed; the noisy rattle of an occasional pump-handle echoed through the blossom-muffled stillness. Even the wooden soldier windmill on the peak of Barrison's stable refused any longer to wheel and flaunt his faded red arms.
A capering, reckless, and emancipated band of ragged nomads crept and dodged stealthily out past old Captain Steiner's orchard, past the graveyard, and past Judge Eby's cow-pasture, to essay for "shiners" and "punkin-seeds," and to adventure with life among the rafts and odorous logs of the old river. For in an hour, almost, a new and all-conquering infection had swept through Chamboro. Few were to escape the disease, for once more the sleepy little river town was in the throes of spring-fever.
Piggie Brennan stooped down and tried the water that stood in a stagnant little pool just in front of Curry's greenhouse. He reported it, jubilantly, to be warmer than milk. Then Billie Steiner tried it, and remained discreetly silent, for, pending the drying of a belated washing, he had fallen back on a pair of his sister's stockings, with the too-voluminous tops carefully stretched and tucked up under his trouser-legs—and he did not care to have the fact known.
But others soon confirmed Piggie's verdict, and a sudden decisive "Gee, then, here goes!" from Pud Jones was followed by the feverish ripping off of an all too-confining boot.
In three minutes every member of that band of adventurers sat at the roadside, bare-footed, wriggling toes, and half dreamily contemplating thin young legs, as bleached and white as grass that had grown up under a board. But a month of fishing-weather, they knew, and the right butternut-brown would be there again, and there would be no more need of gingerly picking one's way across stubble and gravel-patches!
From this mysterious rite of denudation, indeed, a sort of Dionysian madness seemed to ensue. The band went mad of a sudden; one and all they capered, galloped, yelled, curveted, with every sound and movement of ecstasy, plunging and splashing through ditches, puddling in mud-pools, skimming over velvety young grass-plots. Then the shoes and stockings were hidden, in a sadly mixed-up heap, under Smith's cow-stable, and the band took up its way toward the river. It was fishing-weather once more!
Long before they reached his street, the new boy had caught the sound of their shrill-noted merriment. With an animal-like instinct common to his kind, he had guessed and understood everything. They were going fishing!
He wondered, in a foolish little flutter of hope, if they would call companionably in as they passed, just hollering off-hand over the fence for him to get a move on, and come along if he wanted to!
Then the new boy remembered the events of the day before, and the hope died down. Certain disturbing signs had already been driven home to him. He was an outlander, an intruder, with his right still unestablished. And besides all that, things were not going to come out right, bitterly maintained Lonely O'Malley. Nothing good ever came of getting at a place on Friday—there was trouble ahead, of some kind. And twice on the way, too, he had seen a black cat, plain as day, on his path.
For Lonely O'Malley was indeed a new boy in Chamboro. From the sandy little neighboring hills, the afternoon before, he had caught a disconsolate sight of the sleepy old town, basking like a gray kitten in the sun, under a sky far more cloudless than Lonely's unhappy soul.
It was, to him, neither a moving nor an inviting sight, that first glimpse of his new home; for like many another strange town, Chamboro lay sprawling brokenly along the valley of a strange river which twined and curled and wound slumbrously down through a dark and alien country, wooded with maple and willow and sycamore. Through the limpid valley quietness of the May afternoon rose the puffing and churning of a river-tug or two, the rhythmical cling-clang of the blacksmith's anvil, the periodic hum and whine and scream of the sawmill. But the hills here seemed to stretch before him not half so green as the older and fairer hills of remembrance. The water here seemed not half so silvery as was the river at Cowansburg. The bobolinks and bluebirds could not sing so well, the very cherry-blossoms did not smell so good. To this bald new country, indeed, clung none of that golden enchantment which haloed the new boy's lost home, now forty long miles behind him. And Lonely felt so bad about it all that he wondered whether or not he was drawing near to an untimely death,—and to be on the safe side, secretly made his will, up in the hay-loft, and duly signed it in his own blood.
The migration from Cowansburg had not been of a kind to suit Lonely's spirit. It had been effected slowly, placidly, and laboriously, by means of a venerable old wagon from which two hub-bands and five wheel spokes were conspicuously absent, together with a raw-boned, long-haired, and ineffably meek-spirited steed of gigantic proportions, answering to the name of Plato.
Tied to the tail-board of the wagon with a piece of clothes-line, had followed Lonely's faithful goat, Gilead,—a stubbornly home-loving creature, who, on different occasions, had been duly sold or traded to nineteen youths of Cowansburg, only at the first opportunity to return to his original owner, with a blind and indomitable instinct that was as profitable as it was touching.
Lonely, for this overland journey through a new and unknown country, had armed himself with great care and forethought. A kitchen knife had been secretly pointed and sharpened, even a hickory bow and arrow had been strapped on the wagon's back axle. His calico waist had also bulged out on the one side with a long-used and well-tried sling-shot, on the other with a goodly stock of leaden pellets, made by means of a rusty old bullet-mould, hired from a comrade spirit for the occasion.
ARMED HIMSELF WITH GREAT CARE
But neither buffalo nor Indian had crossed Lonely's path. Not a wild animal had molested them; not even a road-agent had interrupted their journey, nor a highwayman prowled about their camp!
To Lonely it had seemed very slow traveling. For on his broken-springed and sadly overloaded wagon the adventurous Timothy O'Malley, lately returned from the gold-fields of the Klondike, carried not only all his goods and chattels, but also his own inebriate self and his pensive-browed, hollow-cheeked wife, to say nothing of a lusty-throated infant daughter, named Alaska Alice,—so christened in honor of the sturdy mustang which had once dragged the wandering gold-seeker over White Pass and delivered him for the last time from the hardships of a most inglorious and unremunerative vagabondage. Learning of an opening in Chamboro, Timothy O'Malley was turning from the glories of the Open Trail to his humble but honest old trade of bread-making.
There had been a great deal of talk, in Chamboro, of the affluent young Klondiker who was to take up his residence in that busy and progressive town. Much speculation was indulged in as to whether the newcomer would enter into the banking business, conduct some sort of brokerage concern, or live in quiet luxury on the harvests of his northern adventures.
When, accordingly, the O'Malley equipage, after a humble but happy enough all-night camp on the roadside trail, appeared unexpectedly on the outskirts of the town, there was a sudden great to-do in the streets of Chamboro. As Plato, with his languid yet majestic stride, slowly hauled the strange load into the little town, lending to the invasion the solemnity of a catafalque, there was much barking of dogs, and bobbing of heads from open windows, and crowding of doorways, and calling over back-yard fences.
NOW, WHAT STRANGE CRAFT MIGHT THAT BE?
As for the dogs, Lonely's sling-shot mysteriously though effectively attended to them, desperately engaged as he was in holding upon the top of the load six lengths of stovepipe and an ever-sliding mattress. The resentment of Lonely's father was more open, for in the very main street of all Chamboro he publicly flung two empty whiskey-bottles at the Harrison's bull-pup—a fact which was duly noted, remembered, and commented on.
"Now, what strange craft might that be?" querulously demanded old Cap'n Sands, of old Cap'n Steiner, as the two bent figures leaned on their sticks and watched her float majestically into port.
Yet so remarkably did the O'Malley conveyance resemble a gypsy camp in transit that many of the smaller children fled incontinently, while the fat old town constable guardedly followed the strange vehicle to its destination. And when it was discovered that the once myth-like and much-talked-of Argonaut of the Frozen North was to occupy the humble little house and bake-shop of the late Widow Elkins, and that he had boasted of being able to mix, mould, and bake six hundred loaves a night, the town of Chamboro felt that it had been cheated out of some glory, vaguely denominated, it is true, but still a glory. Nor had the first impression of the O'Malley family been changed by the discovery that, pending the re-shingling of their house, they were camping out in the front yard, cheerfully and contentedly, under the smoke-stained canvas of the very tent which had once stood amid the subarctic snows of Twenty Mile Creek.
All this Lonely had seen and resented. So as he caught sight of the barefooted, reckless band, that bright Saturday morning, and heard their telltale whistles and shouts and cat-calls, he had a little battle of his own to fight out. He wondered, in a moment of weakness, if it would not be better to hide Alaska Alice. He remembered the odium attaching to the boy who openly "minded the baby." An avocation so servile and effeminate branded one, he was fully aware, as with the brand of Cain. Yet he took his own joy, he knew, in the company of Alaska Alice. He even had a sneaking love for toting her about. And he was n't going back on her. Animal-like, he pugnaciously claimed the right to stand by his own.
He saw the band stop in front of the Preacher's house, and in buttery and gleeful imitation of an over-affectionate mother's voice call out: "Lio-o-o-o-nel! Lio-o-o-o-nel Clarence!" and then inquire, mockingly, if Curly Locks wanted to come fishing.
At this Lonely remembered that the Preacher's son wore his hair in longish yellow-brown curls, and dressed, usually, in a black velvet suit, with ruffles, and a hopeless white collar.
So Lonely looked at Alaska Alice once more, half affectionately, half defiantly, and realized that his Waterloo was not far away. He made one desperate effort, while there was still time, to waken the grass-gorged and ruminant Plato from an attitude of hopeless and demeaning melancholy. This he tried to do by means of an adroitly flung pebble or two. Plato, however, instead of being stung out of his woe-begone abjection by these unjust missiles, merely whisked his thin tail languidly and stood on three legs, in meek and monumental pensiveness.
Then Lonely waited for the outcome.
"Git onto the bone-yard!" cried a voice from the advance guard of the approaching enemy. A moment later a stone or two fell about the old horse.
"An' look at Irish, mindin' the baby!" was the next derisive cry that smote on Lonely's tingling ears.
"Lambast the redhead!" suggested Pud Jones, genially.
Lonely caught up Alaska Alice and hunched her up firmly on his hip, his body between her and the assailers. His thin, hungry-looking face went very white, as the line of audacious, jeering, tyrannical, relentless young savages drew up and peered over the low picket fence.
AUDACIOUS, JEERING, TYRANNICAL
He was, he knew, at least standing his ground with dignity. And all might still have been well, had not Alaska Alice set up a sudden, energetic, and inopportune wail, which grew into a bawl, and from a bawl became a paroxysm.
A shout of derisive laughter swelled up from the street. A tomato can hit Lonely on the shin-bone, a pebble or two cut through the canvas of the little tent.
"Soak the gypsies!" cried Redney McWilliams, as he took one last sly fling at the meek-eyed Plato.
"Ain't this the Klondike millionaire's?" mocked another.
"Say, Sis, what y' doin' in boy's clothes?" demanded Piggie Brennan, sweetly, as he kicked the little front gate open.
Lonely winced at that stab, and took a dark and studious look at the offender. There, above all, he told himself, was an enemy he was to remember and an offense he was to wipe out!
The band drifted aimlessly on, and a minute later was cutting fishing-poles from the Gubtill's lilac-bushes. They had not even so much as offered to fight! They had not even sent forth the inevitable challenge to the New Boy! And Lonely's last hope of companionship crumbled away.
The boy's mother, startled by the loud voices, came to the door, with a scrubbing-brush in her hand. She gazed down the street after the disappearing band.
"I guess I could keep an eye on Alaska Alice!" she hinted, as she caught the sound of the shrill, boyish voices, blown back to the doorway where she stood.
"Ain't I mindin' her?" demanded Lonely, moodily.
The woman gazed down at the solitary figure, and then out at the dusty road, studded with the prints of many bare feet. From somewhere in the distance a few hens clucked drowsily.
"Don't you want to go fishing?"
"Nope!" said the boy, as he hitched impatiently at his blue denim overalls.
"You—you don't want to go with those other boys?" she repeated, amazed.
He glanced down the dust-covered street, after the happy little band, and was silent. They were playing "Last-Tag" now, and he could hear the old refrain:
Nigger 's always last tag!
Fools always say so!
Up a tree and down a tree;
You're the biggest fool I know!
"Go on, Lonely, and have a good time with the others!" said his mother, commiseratively, once more looking back at the desolate figure in the bald little sunlit yard.
Lonely gazed at Plato, flung a stone at the fence, and peered angrily out from under his sandy little eyebrow at his mother. She did not understand.
"Don't want to!"
"Go on, Lonely," she urged once more.
"I tell you I don't want to go fishin'!" he shrilled out testily. And then he spat hard, a couple of times, to get rid of the sudden lump in his throat.
His mother went back to her work. The sound of his father's hammer echoed more and more unevenly from the back roof—due to the fact that much stimulant had been called into service to brace the gold-miner's nerves against labor so dull and menial. The chorus of boy voices grew fainter and far away. They passed down through the watery Flats, and out through the wooded gloom of the Upper River.
Only now and then Lonely could hear a low little burst of laughter and calling, a muffled shout or two. Through the clear, opalescent air he caught sight of the smoke from their bonfire. He watched it drift and fade and melt down the river valley. A dog barked in the distance, dismally. The sun mounted higher and higher in the cloudless sky.
"'Laska Alice, do you know what you 've up and done?" sternly demanded Lonely.
The innocent young lady thus contemplatively addressed continued to clutch at a dandelion head with ineffectual fingers, bubbling and crooning with untimely joy.
"'Laska Alice," repeated the boy, meditatively, "I think you 've been my finish, all right!"
And he looked down at her studiously, but with no resentment in his vacant eyes, as he remembered, half bitterly, that this was the town where he had dreamed that trumpeters in green tights like the trapeze performers at the circus, were to ride out and greet him, and for a whole day the fountains were to run with wine, and the Princess was to beckon down to him from her Tower!
Even a good fight, he felt in that dark hour, would have made him seem more at home.
- To Alicia—Ætat. 20
When you made custard tarts—of mud—
Which Tweedle vowed delicious—
And I with popguns sought the blood
Of Red-Men, huge and vicious—
That was our glad, mad, rainbow age,
Those days when we together
Climbed thro' the orchard wall to wage
Such wars—in lath and feather!
I sit and ponder sadly o'er
Each wound of poor old Tweedle—
Who shed her sawdust brave before
Her nurse could find a needle!
We stormed and took each orchard tree—
True, long the foe resisted!—
Then gave each captive, for his tea.
Mud-pies, as you insisted!
But now, they say, your trousseau 's made.
And you, poor child, will shortly
Be married to a person staid.
And rich, though somewhat portly!
Ah, me! My youth, mud-pies, and You,
Are gone—gone past recover!
Yet, Dear, I 'm still your old and true
And one unchanging lover!