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Updated: June 9, 2025
Farmer Weitbreck stood leaning on the big gate of his barnyard, looking first up and then down the road. He was chewing a straw, and his face wore an expression of deep perplexity. These were troublous times in Lancaster County.
The old man, irritated by the secret knowledge that he had nobody but himself to blame for the present dilemma, still more irritated, also, by this proof of what was always exceedingly displeasing to him, his son's having adopted American standards and opinions, broke out furiously with a wrath wholly disproportionate to the occasion, "You be tam, Johan Weitbreck.
To John's sharpened perceptions the fact that Carlen was not as usual helping in this labor loomed up into significance. "Why does not Carlen help you, mütter?" he said hastily. "What is she doing there, idling with Wilhelm in the stoop?" Frau Weitbreck smiled. "It is not alvays to vork, ven one is young," she said. "I haf not forget!" And she nodded her head meaningly. John clenched his hands.
So young, so sad, thus alone in the world; who ever heard of such a fate? "But there were people who came with you in the ship?" said John. "There is some one who knows who you are, I suppose." "No, no von dat knows," replied the newcomer. "Haf done vid too much questions," interrupted Farmer Weitbreck. "I haf him asked all. He stays till harvest be done. He can vork.
I think that must be it, don't you think so, mütter?" Frau Weitbreck was incarnate silence and reticence. These traits were native in her, and had been intensified to an abnormal extent by thirty years of life with a husband whose temper and peculiarities were such as to make silence and reticence the sole conditions of peace and comfort.
Look, father!" he continued, his voice breaking into a sob, "he has left these flowers here for Carlen! That does not look as if he was crazy! What can it all mean?" On the top of a small chest lay the bunch of white Ladies'-Tress, with a paper beneath it on which was written, "For Carlen Weitbreck, these, and the carvings in the box, all in memory of Wilhelm."
The explanation of this nobody knew or could divine; but the fact was indisputable, and the farmers were in dismay, nobody more so than Farmer Weitbreck, who had miles of bottom-lands, in grain of one sort and another, all yellow and nodding, and ready for the sickle, and nobody but himself and his son John to swing scythe, sickle, or flail on the place.
All these traits "Old Weitbreck," as he was called all through the country, possessed to a degree much out of the ordinary; and it was a combination of two of them the obstinacy and the savingness which had brought him into his present predicament.
"Alvays you vimmen are too soon; it may be he are goot, it may be he are pad; I do not know. It is to vork I haf him brought." "Yes," echoed Frau Weitbreck; "we do not know." It was not so easy as Carlen and her mother had thought, to be like mother and sister to Wilhelm. The days went by, and still he was as much a stranger as on the evening of his arrival. He never voluntarily addressed any one.
"Never I am caught this way anoder year," thought he, as he gazed wearily up and down the dark, silent road; "but that does to me no goot this time that is now." Gustavus Weitbreck had lived so long on his Pennsylvania farm that he even thought in English instead of in German, and, strangely enough, in English much less broken and idiomatic than that which he spoke.
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