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"I don't see nothin' the matter with it. 'Tain't rainin' anyhow. Now don't you upset anything while I go fer the lard. I have t' keep it down cellar, it's so hot up here." Bob knew this. In fact, he counted on it for what he was about to do. No sooner had the storekeeper started down the cellar stairs than Bob pulled from his pocket a long, stout piece of cord.
"I have hopes of you, Stephen," he said. "Do not forget me." Stephen Brice never has. Why was it that he walked to the station with a heavy heart? It was a sense of the man he had left, who had been and was to be. This Lincoln of the black loam, who built his neighbor's cabin and hoed his neighbor's corn, who had been storekeeper and postmaster and flat-boatman.
Every spare man was called upon to help comb the hills for the wild steers that ran the wooded water-sheds, as untamed as the deer and the lynx. Even the storekeeper, Benwell, was pressed into the service. 'Rastus and the nester were the only men about the place, the deputy sheriff having been recalled to Noches on the collapse of Healy's story.
For a moment I was overwhelmed with dismay; then it was a case of send for the manager, send for the storekeeper, call up all the servants, get hold of extra men, fetch water, put up ladders, unfasten ropes, pull down planks, take away bedding, pick up broken glass bit by bit, wrench nails from the wall one by one.
Ye'd better send some men up at once. "They're a stupid lot of blockheads down there," he growled, as he hung up the receiver. "They didn't know where Kidd's Island is jist think of that. And they wanted to know how long it would take a motor-boat to reach the place." "I guess they'll get a hustle on, though," the storekeeper replied.
"W'y, Lawd!" breathed the section-boss, realising the whole import of the news. A railroad would mean immeasurable good fortune to the trio of settlers who, like young prairie-chickens that fear to leave the side of their mother, had chosen quarter-sections near the guarding fort. And to him, penniless, with motherless girls, it meant "The ferrying's so good right here," went on the storekeeper.
It was the last paragraph especially which caused a young man, the following day in the little hamlet of Tafelberg, to whistle as he carefully read it over. "I am glad that I am not the mad king of Lutha," he said as he paid the storekeeper for the gasoline he had just purchased and stepped into the gray roadster for whose greedy maw it was destined. "Why, mein Herr?" asked the man.
Petersburg, Paris and Vienna, where every concierge, every porter, every storekeeper, every housekeeper, is required to report to the police at least once a week all the details of strangers with whom they may have come in contact, it should be no wonder that criminals can elude the police in New York and other American cities.
We children asked why they put nothing in the box but hay and a little wool in the middle, but she bade us hold our tongues, the whole lot of us. Father was in a better humor, and explained that he was going to bring a lamp from the storekeeper, and that it was of glass, and might be broken to bits if he stumbled or if the sledge bumped too much.
But the next time I went to the Cross-Roads, the woman asked me: "Is your Pa for the Congress?" "What's that?" said I. "I reckon he ain't," said the woman, tartly. I recall her dimly, a slattern creature in a loose gown and bare feet, wife of the storekeeper and wagoner, with a swarm of urchins about her. They were all very natural to me thus.
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