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"I cain't ask you to come in jist yit. What's wanted?" He had not said two words when I knew him for Old Man Fewkes, whom I had last seen back on the road west of Dyersville, on his way to "Negosha." Where was Ma Fewkes, and where were Celebrate Fourth and Surajah Dowlah? And where, most emphatically, where was Rowena? I stepped forward at McGill's side.
It was away off to the westward, he said; and years afterward I made up my mind that the name was made up of the two words Nebraska and Dakota not very well joined together. Mrs. Fewkes was not strong for Negosha; and when Fewkes offered to go to Texas, she objected because it was so far. "Why," said the old man indignantly, "it hain't only a matter of fifteen hundred mile!
I recollected how she had always seemed to be mortified by her slack-twisted family, and I could see her as she meeched off across the prairie hack along the Old Ridge Road, as if she belonged to another outfit; and yet, I knew how much of a Fewkes she was, as she joined in the conversation when they planned their great estates in the mythical state of Negosha, or in Texas, or even in California.
I thought she seemed rather to like this; and that evening I went over and offered Mrs. Fewkes some butter and milk, of which I had a plenty. I was soon on good terms with the Fewkes family. Old Man Fewkes told me he was going to Negosha a region of which I had never heard.
She could only tell of living a year or so at a time on some run-down or never run-up farm in Indiana or Illinois, always in a log cabin in a clearing; or of her brothers and sisters who had been "bound out" because the family was so large; and now of this last voyage in search of an estate in Negosha. "I can make bread," said she, after a silence. "Kin you?"
Celebrate believed that if he could once get out among 'em he could do well as a hunter and trapper; while Surajah kept listening to the honking of the wild geese and planning to catch enough of them with baited hooks to feed the whole family all the way to Negosha, and provide plenty of money by selling the surplus to the emigrants.
When we had finished this her father was calling her to come, as they were starting on toward Negosha; and I gave Rowena money enough to buy her a calico dress pattern at the next settlement. She tried to resist, and her eyes filled with tears as she took the money and chokingly tried to thank me for it.
He was still more stooped and frail-looking than when I saw him last; and when I told him I had settled down for life on my farm, I could see that I had lost caste with him. He was pining for the open road. "Negosha," he said, "is the place for a young man. You can be a baron out there with ten thousan' head of rattle. But the place for me is Texas. Trees is in constant varder!"
An' the trees is in constant varder!" He still harped on Negosha, though, and during the evening while we were fattening up on my bread and meat, which I had on a broad hint added to our meal, he told me that what he really wanted was an estate where he could have an artificial lake and keep some deer and plenty of ducks and geese.
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