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Updated: August 21, 2024
I had gone to him with a part of a horse-rake which I had broken on one of my stony hills'. "Can you mend it?" I asked. If I had known him better I should never have asked such a question. I saw, indeed, at the time that I had not said the right thing; but how could I know then that Carlstrom never let any broken thing escape him?
Afar off I began to listen for Carlstrom's hammer, and presently I heard the familiar sounds. There were two or three mellow strokes, and I knew that Carlstrom was making the sparks fly from the red iron. Then the hammer rang, and I knew he was striking down on the cold steel of the anvil. It is a pleasant sound to hear. Carlstrom's shop is just around the corner from the main street.
The young man thought it should be prevented by law. I said nothing; but I listened and heard from the distance the steady clang, clang, of Carlstrom's hammer upon the anvil. Ketchell, the store-keeper, told me how Carlstrom had longed and planned and saved to be able to go back once more to the old home he had left.
Only the other day I heard the village school teacher say, when I asked him why he always seemed so merry and had so little fault to find with the world. "Why," he replied, "as Carlstrom, the smith says, 'when I feel like finding fault I always begin with myself and then I never get any farther," Another of Carlstrom's sayings is current in the country.
I found that several men of the town had been in to see Carlstrom and talked with him of his plans, and even while I was there two other friends came in. The old man was delighted with the interest shown. After I left him I went down the street. It seemed as though everybody had heard of Carlstrom's plans, and here and there I felt that the secret hand of the Scotch Preacher had been at work.
At the store where I usually trade the merchant talked about it, and the postmaster when I went in for my mail, and the clerk at the drug store, and the harness-maker. I had known a good deal about Carlstrom in the past, for one learns much of his neighbours in ten years, but it seemed to me that day as though his history stood out as something separate and new and impressive.
Such is the perversity of rival artists that I don't think Charles Baxter had ever been to Carlstrom with any work. But this morning when I went to town and stopped at Carlstrom's shop I found the gunsmith humming louder than ever. "Well, Carlstrom, when are we to say good-by?" I asked.
Now I'm an old man and I'm going home." "But, Carlstrom," I said, "we can't get along without you. Who's going to keep us mended up?" "You have Charles Baxter," he said, smiling. For years there had been a quiet sort of rivalry between Carlstrom and Baxter, though Baxter is in the country and works chiefly in wood. "But Baxter can't mend a gun or a hay-rake, or a pump, to save his life," I said.
I suppose the Scotch Preacher was saying the same thing to all the other men of the company. When we were preparing to go, Dr. McAlway turned to Carlstrom and said: "How is it, Carlstrom, that you have come to hold such a place in this community? How is it that you have got ahead so rapidly?"
"It's a good thing," he says, "when a man knows what he pretends to know." The more I circulated among my friends, the more I heard of Carlstrom. It is odd that I should have gone all these years knowing Carlstrom, and yet never consciously until last week setting him in his rightful place among the men I know.
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