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HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
NEW LEAF MILLS
B Chronicle
W. D. HOWELLS
***&**&.
^
HARPER &* BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
M C MXI I I
PS
COPYRIGHT. 1913. BY HARPER ft BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED JANUARY. 1913
M-M
NEW LEAF MILLS: A CHRONICLE
NEW LEAF MILLS: A CHRONICLE
The opinions of Owen Powell marked a sharp dif-
ference between him and most of his fellow-townsmen
in the town of the Middle West, where he lived sixty
years ago. A man who condemned the recent war upon
Mexico as a wicked crusade for the extension of slavery,
and denounced the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law
as infernal, would have done well to have a confession
of spiritual faith like that of his neighbors; but here
Owen Powell was still more widely at variance with
them. He rejected the notion of a personal devil, and
many others did that; but his hell was wholly at odds
with the hell popularly accepted ; it was not a place of
torment where the lost sinner was sent, but a state
which the transgressor himself chose and where he
abode everlastingly bereft of the sense of better things.
Even so poor a hell saved Powell from the reproach
of Universalism ; but in a person so one-ideaed, as peo-
ple then said, through his abhorrence of slavery, it was
not enough. He was valued, but he was valued in spite
of his opinions; they were distinctly a fact to his dis-
advantage in that day and place.
His younger brother Felix, after the wont of prosper-
ous merchants, kept out of politics, and he carried his
prayer-book every Sunday to the Episcopal service.
NEW LEAF MILLS
But he quietly voted with Owen, and those who counted
on a want of sympathy between the brothers were apt
to meet with a prompt rebuff from Felix. He once
stopped his subscription and took away his advertising
from the Whig editor who spoke of a certain political
expression of Owen's (it was in a letter to the editor's
paper) as having the unimportance of small potatoes,
and he extorted a printed retractation of the insult
before he renewed his patronage. He felt, more than
any of his words or acts evinced, the beauty of the large
benevolent intention which was the basis of Owen's
character, and he was charmed, if he was not con-
vinced, by his inextinguishable faith in mankind as a
race merely needing good treatment to become every-
thing that its friends could wish; by his simple cour-
age, so entire that he never believed in danger; and
by his sweet serenity of temperament. Felix was in
delicate health, and he was given to some vague super-
stitions. He had lost several children, and he believed
that he had in every case had some preternatural warn-
ing of their death ; his young wife, who was less openly
an invalid, shared his beliefs, as well as his half-mel-
ancholy fondness for his brother. She liked to have
Owen Powell's children in her childless house; and
she had some pretty affectations of manner and accent
which took them with the sense of elegance in a world
beyond them.
They came to her with their mother every Sunday
night, and heard their father and uncle talk of their
boyhood in the backwoods ; of their life in a log cabin,
and of the privations they had gladly suffered there.
The passing years had endeared these hardships to
the brothers, but their wives resented the early poverty
which they held precious; and they hated the memory
of that farm where the brothers had lived in a log
NEW LEAF MILLS
cabin, and had run wild, as it appeared from the fond
exaggeration of their reminiscences, in bare feet, tat-
tered trousers, and hickory shirts. Sometimes the
brothers reasoned of the questions of theology upon
which the mind of the elder habitually dwelt; but
Felix disliked argument, and Owen affectionately fore-
bore to assail him as a representative of the Old Church.
After the pioneer stories, the children fell asleep on
the sofa and the carpet, and did not wake till they
heard the piano, where their young aunt used to sing
and their uncle accompany her with his flute; he re-
mained associated in their memories with the pensive
trebles of his instrument and the cadences of her gentle
voice.
There came a time when the summer days were
clouded in their home by an increasing care, which
they felt at second hand from their father and mother ;
then there came a Sunday night when there were no
rosy visions of the past ; and, by the matter-of-fact light
of the Monday following, Felix saw that the affairs of
his brother were hopeless. Owen's book and drug store
had never been a flourishing business, and now it had
gone from bad to worse beyond retrieval. On the
afternoon of the morning when the store was not
opened he walked with his boys a long way into the
country. It was very sultry, and he repeated a de-
scription of summer from Thompson's Seasons. As
they returned along the river-shore he pointed out the
lovely iridescence of the mussel-shells which he picked
up, and geologized in passing on the stratification of the
rocks in the bank.
An interval of suspense followed this stressful time,
which their young memories took little note of. On
the Sunday evenings at their uncle's the talk seemed
to the children to be all of a plan for going to live
3
NEW LEAF MILLS
in the country. Apparently there was to be a prop-
erty which the brothers were to hold in common, and
it was to be bought as soon as the younger could get
his business into shape. Two brothers in other towns
were to be invited to close up their affairs and join
in the enterprise. Then, with something of the un-
surprising inconsequence of dreams, the notion of a
farm had changed in the children's apprehension to
the notion of a mill, and more dimly a settlement of
communal proportions about it. They heard their
elders discussing the project one night when they woke
from their nap, and crowded about their mother's chair
for warmth, with the fire now burning low upon the
hearth.
" The best plan," their uncle said, " will be to find
a mill privilege with the buildings already on it. We
could take out the burrs," which the boys understood
later were millstones, " and put in paper machinery.
When we were once settled there we could ask people
that we found adapted to join us, but at first it would
have to be a purely family concern."
" Yes," their father said. " One condition of our
being able to do any good from the start would be our
unquestionable hold of the management. That would
be the only orderly method. I would give all hands a
share in the profits, so as to interest and attach them,
but till they were educated up to our ideas they oughtn't
to be allowed anv control."
Felix cleared his throat by a husky effort habitual
with him before speaking again. " We could indirectly
benefit them from the beginning enough to satisfy any
reasonable expectation."
After that it might have been weeks before the enter-
prise took clearer shape. From time to time the chil-
dren forgot it; they played through the long summer
NEW LEAF MILLS
vacation; but when the first keen mornings of the au-
tumn came, and the neighbors' children went by with
their books, they did not return to school. The privi-
lege, with a grist-mill and sawmill on it, had been
found and bought, they did not know where, any more
than how, but it was ten or twelve miles from the town
in another county. Their father and mother had
driven out with their aunt and uncle to look at it;
their uncle had taken his gun, and he brought back
some squirrels in the bottom of his carriage; he said
that he had almost got a shot at a wild turkey. With
such facts before them Owen's boys could not under-
stand why their mother should be low-spirited about
going to live at the mills. They heard their father
talking with her after they went to bed, and she said:
" But all that wildness makes my heart sink. I had
enough of that when I was a girl, Owen. You know
I never liked the country to live in."
" I know, I know. But we shall soon have quite
a village about us. At any rate, we shall have a chance
to begin life again."
" Oh yes. But it's beginning so far back."
In the morning she was cheerfuler, and their father
told the children that they were to move out to the
mills at once, and that he was to have charge of the
property till the paper machinery could be put into
the grist-mill. At the sawmill he was to get out the
stuff for a new house that was to be built; but their
hearts leaped when he told them that they were to live
that winter in a log cabin.
It was Sunday, and the night was the last they spent
at their uncle's in the old way. It was not quite the
old way, though. The piano was not opened, and the
flute lay shut in its case. The brothers went over
their plans, and they spoke of whom they might invite
NEW LEAP MILLS
to join them after their success became apparent. It
seemed that thej meant to be careful, and ask only
those who could take up the enterprise in an enlightened
spirit. Owen Powell believed that a responsive feeling
would be awakened in the neighbors when they saw
that the new-comers did not wish merely to make money
for themselves, but to benefit all by improvements that
would increase the price of their land and give employ-
ment to their children.
Felix listened with his melancholy smile, absently
rolling his cigar between his thumb and finger. " What
shall we call the place?" he asked.
" I don't know," Owen said. " Something that
would imply our purpose of turning over quite a
new leaf."
They talked further of the details of their under-
taking, and the children went on with their play. They
were dramatizing their arrival at the mills, and one
of them was shouting to a supposed inhabitant, " Is
this place New Leaf Mills ?"
" Hey ? Hey ?" their uncle called to them. " What's
that?" "
" We're just playing," they explained.
" New Leaf — New Leaf Mills," he repeated, musing-
ly. " That wouldn't be bad. What made you think
of that name ?" He bent a sidelong glance on the con-
scious group.
The eldest of the boys ventured, " Why, father said
you would turn over a new leaf at the mills, and we
just called them that."
" Yes, yes ! Very good," he said. " Do you hear
that, Owen? We've got a name for our place. We
can stencil it on our flour-barrels now, and when we
get in our paper machinery we can make it our water-
mark."
II
The leaves were falling from the maples along the
road, but they still hung brown and harsh on the
sycamores that fringed the island between the tail-race
and the river when Owen Powell and two of his boys
passed the groaning and whistling mill and stopped
with their wagon at the door of the old cabin. It was
empty, but the door yielded to the hand that drew the
leathern latch-string and lifted the rude wooden latch,
and Powell made his boys note that this was a genuine
log cabin, such as the pioneers of old dwelt in, and just
such as he had himself lived in when a boy. He said
that the string might have hung out of the cabin door
of Daniel Boone; within, the ladder that climbed to
the loft from a corner of the room could have led to
the sleep that came from being chased by Indians;
the hearth, that stretched half across the end of the
cabin, was of the right backwoods dimensions; he ex-
cused the ax-hewn whitewashed walls as the sophistica-
tion of an age which had outgrown the round logs,
chinked with moss and daubed with clay, of the true
primitive architecture.
When he went back to the wagon to get their tools
and provisions after the first moments of rejoicing,
he dispersed the cows and pigs surrounding it as gently
as if they had been a deputation from the neighbors
who hung about the door of the mill and viewed with
sardonic amusement the sole greeting offered the new-
NEW LEAF MILLS
comers. They waited in silence till the Powells had
gone into the cabin again, but they shouted together
in laughter when the miller appeared at an upper door
and launched a curse at the cabin walls. They tried
to provoke him to greater bitterness as he rested his
weight by one hand upon the rope that lowered the
bags of flour to the backs of their horses; then one
after another they mounted upon the balanced load
and jogged away from the mill.
Powell was glad to find that his hand had not for-
gotten the cunning of one of the several crafts to which
he had turned it in his early life when he came to
glaze the broken panes in the small, weather-worn
sashes of the four windows lighting the two rooms
of the cabin ; he had to replace the rotten flooring with
smooth-sawn boards of poplar instead of the riven oak
puncheons of pioneer times, but he was consoled to find
that the floor of the garret could best be mended by
throwing loose planks over its cracks and knot-holes.
After their day's work was done he strolled out with
his boys to explore the region in which he hoped to
found a new home. From the road that crossed the
tail-race below the grist-mill and crept eastward into
the woods rose an isolated hill to a height notable in
that country of broad bottom-lands. It was steep on
the north, next to the mill ; it sloped more gently away
toward the south, but on the east and west it was steep
again. It was thickly wooded with broad-girthed oaks,
slim maples and ashes, and a host of shag-bark hickories
hanging full of the nuts that now shone white through
the gaping seams of their greenish-brown husks, and
dropped about the feet of the Powells as they climbed
upward through the fallen leaves. A company of pigs
feeding on the mast under the trees lifted their heads
at the approaching steps with looks of impudent de-
8
NEW LEAF MILLS
fiance; then they hooted in alarm and ran down the
sides of the hill, just as they did in the passage which
Powell remembered from Bloomfield's poem of " The
Farmer Boy." A covey of quails throbbed away from
a pile of brush ; a squirrel clattered up the shaggy side
of one of the hickories. The simple incidents touched
his heart as he climbed to the top of the hill and looked
out upon the peaceful landscape. Below was the huge
grist-mill, gray and weather-beaten, but strong as when
first built; a wall of primeval forest lowered the east-
ern horizon, but north and south the woods retreated
and left the interval yellow with a hundred acres of
standing corn, and green with broad spaces of meadow-
land. The straight ribbon of the head-race stretched
to the full dam of New Leaf Mills, whose smooth water
spread up into the woods on the north. On the western
hillsides were the openings of farms, where the blue
smoke curled from the cabin chimneys. On the east
a road stole out of the woods, down between the corn-
fields and the meadows, and lost itself in the woods
upon the island framed between the mill-races and the
river; another road wound round the hill and kept the
course of the river southward out of sight.
The grist-mill fronted an acre of open space, with the
hitching-rail for the farmers' horses in the middle, and
a few rods beyond it crouched the sawmill among piles
of lumber and saw-logs. The saw, which had been
hissing sharply at its work, now stopped for so long
a breath that Powell knew the water-gate had been
closed for the night, and the soft treble of the grist-
mill alone filled the nearer silence. From a distance
the melancholy note of a farm boy calling his cows in
the woods struck upon his ear; the miller appeared
in the open space with a measure of bran under his
arm, and, calling " Pig, pig, pig, poo-ee !" was an-
9
NEW LEAF MILLS
swered from the fence corners and wayside nooks with
greedy cries, and then with shrill laments and plaintive
protests against the kicks which he distributed among
them with savage fairness. He held the measure in
his left hand like a tambourine, and danced a goblin
figure with his floury face bobbing to and fro and up
and down as he leaped and kicked.
" Come, boys," said Powell ; " I see the other ISTew-
Leafers are having their supper. It's time for ours,
too."
They descended to their cabin and broiled their
rashers of pork on the hickory coals; the tea-kettle
swung from the crane above, and sang to itself ; almost
with the last mouthful they stretched themselves on
the floor, and, with the scanty bedding they had brought
under and over them, they fell asleep.
In the night one of the boys woke, and saw his father
sitting up, and heard him softly groaning.
" What are you doing, father ?" he asked, sitting up
himself and speaking for the companionship of his own
voice in the weird play of the firelight dying on the
hearth.
" I was wondering," Powell said, " whether we
hadn't laid these boards with the hard side up."
They had a laugh together, and lay down to sleep
again. Before he slept the boy fancied something at
the window, a face looking in like the white-painted
face of a clown with dark streaks running downward
from the corners of the mouth ; it vanished, and in the
morning he thought he had dreamed it. He told his
father, and his father said, " Very likely ; one might
dream anything on a bed like that."
Ill
The miller at New Leaf Mills had been there many
years before that name was imagined ; so many that he
felt the mills a part of himself. He always meant to
buy the privilege, with the farm on the shore above the
dam and the island in the river. He was not afraid
that the property would be sold away from him; he
had been as good friends with the two old brothers
who owned the mills as it was in his nature to be;
and he somehow thought they shared his expectation
that he should one day buy them.
He was not of the Virginian poor white stock which
mostly peopled the region up and down the river ; he
had wandered into the place from somewhere farther
north when he was a half-grown boy, and finished his
growth in the family of the old miller to whom he had
apprenticed himself and whom he succeeded in his
house and home after marrying his daughter. He was
now a man of forty, surly, solitary, and of a rude force
of will and savage temper such as none of the farmers
who stored their wheat with him in the deep bins of
the mill would have cared to trifle with. Some of them
called him Jacob and some Jake in the neighborhood
familiarity, but with him they did not pass to the jokes
or pranks they played among themselves. He was some-
times hospitable with his jug, but no one ventured to
make free with it : and usually he was a sober man for
the time and place. When he heard that the Larrabee
2 11
NEW LEAF MILLS
brothers had sold the mills away from him without
giving him warning, he thought first of his gun, and
of going to the little town where they lived, and killing
them each with a barrel of it; then he thought of his
jug, perhaps because both the gun and the jug stood
in the same corner. But after faltering a moment
between them he only cleared the place of the farmers,
who had come with their grists, and went over to the
sawmill, where he presented himself in such violent pan-
tomime that the saw-miller, Bellam, stopped his saw in
the middle of a log and submissively joined him in the
spree with which Overdale began to solemnize his
wrong.
On the second story of the mill where the runs of
stone were, with the bolting-cloths and the barreling-
machine, a small space had been portioned off to serve
as an office and a sleeping-room for Overdale when he
ran the burrs at night. On dull days it was haunted
by country loafers sodden with rain and drink; when
he came in the loafers usually slunk out with the dogs
that shared the buffalo robe forming his bed. He now
pushed Bellam into his den and steeped his brain in
whiskey raw from the still two miles away; and he
drank so deep of the scathing liquor himself that
Bellam drunkenly argued with him that no man ought
to swill so much whiskey as that under any provocation.
He pleaded tenderly with the miller, who had such
longing for pity through his fury that when Bellam
put out his hand with a maudlin wish to soothe him
Overdale caught it and rushed him crazily through the
mill, shouting out the details of the bad news with a
flame of oaths. " Yes, they've sold the mills, and never
give me a show. Sold 'em to a pack of lily-livered city
folks that don't know an elevator from a cooling-floor,
and couldn't dress a burr to save their souls from brim-
12
NEW LEAF MILLS
stone. Look at that run of stones! I've dressed 'em
ever since they came into the mill, and there ain't
flour anywhere on the river up to the flour they turn
out ; I can tell their tune as far as I can hear it ! Who'll
set the bolting-cloths when I'm gone 1 They'll be
barreling shorts, I'll take my oath, in less than a month,
and their flour won't be worth a curse in the market.
Shorts ? It '11 be bran !"
Bell am ventured in a doubt of getting so far away as
the end of his sentence which gave stateliness to his
speech, " I thought you said it was going to be turned
into a paper-mill I"
" Hell, yes ! So I did. The burrs has got to
come out ; and they'll be setting up a lot of milk-
poultice tubs in their place, and you won't see clean
wheat in the bins any more, but rags all over the
place, and the air fit to kill you with the steam
and stink."
He plunged about among the machinery with Bel-
lam's rough hand in one of his and a smoky lamp held
even with his forehead in the other, throwing gigantic
formless shadows on the walls, and on the windows deli-
cately laced with cobwebs and drifted with the floating
flour. The two men stumbled to the basement, where
the tall turbine wheels stood motionless in their tubs,
with the water sullenly wasting under them, and then
clambered back to the floor, where the elevator filled
the cups of its long belt with wheat and followed it
to the top of the mill where it discharged them into the
machine which blew it clean of cockle and smut and
left it ready for the hoppers. Everything was in order,
and at every point Overdale poured out his boastful
lamentation. He gathered, as he passed the different
heaps where they lay, now a handful of wheat, now of
bran, now of middlings ; he stopped at the bins under
13
NEW LEAF MILLS
the bolting-cloths and swept up a double handful of
the flour, white, airy, clinging and light as April snow,
and played with it, testing its smoothness with tipsy
pathos; and so lapsed from his noisy grief in a dumb
despair.
As the miller grew silent Bellam grew sleepy; he
was dimly aware at last of being dragged back to Over-
dale's den and kicked forward onto the buffalo robe
with a soft and muffled kick. When he woke the ma-
chinery of the mill was rattling and whistling round
him; and he could hear the mad hum of the burrs,
which sent out a gunpowdery odor from the flints
triturated under the empty hoppers. He tumbled
tremulously down to the gates to shut off the fear-
ful head of water rushing on the wheels, and found
Overdale stretched on the wet stones beside them. The
miller's face was always white from the flour, but now
it was of such a different white that Bellam thought
he was dead. He dragged him within reach of the
spray from the tubs, and the miller opened his eyes.
He opened his mouth, too, and blasphemed so lucidly
that there could be no doubt for Bellam that he was
in his right mind; without bating a curse he jumped
to his feet and shut off the water. Bellam took the
path that led to the sawmill and started the saw where
he had stopped it the evening before, and then waited
in a drowse till breakfast-time. As he went home to
his cabin on the island, past the grist-mill, he saw
Overdale sitting in the doorway of the second story.
The machinery had got back its mellow note of con-
tented industry, and the miller was smoking a quiet
pipe. He drew down his shaggy brows in his habitual
frown of greeting as Bellam passed, but neither spoke,
though Overdale quelled in himself a crazy impulse to
ask the saw-miller about the dream which was hanging
14
NEW LEAF MILLS
cloudily in his brain. It was as if Bellam must know
about it if he had broken in upon it when he pulled
Overdale from the stones beside the wheels. Overdale
was not sure that he was dreaming it precisely then, but
he seemed to have first become aware of it when he came
to himself, and he was conscious of an instant effort
to resist it and put it away. That would have been
easier if the thing had been at once anything but a
formless dread in which the sale of the mills away from
him had begun to weigh like doom. As nearly as he
could grasp the significance of it, with his rude mind,
unused to any hold on mystery, it meant that the mills
from being the daily wont of him had suddenly be-
come a vital part, and that he could not be separated
from them and live. He would not have put his vague
foreboding in these words if he could have put it in any,
as yet. It was there in his sense, destined to gather
weight and point, and have power upon him from every
superstitious vagary which he had heretofore supposed
unheeded hearsay, but which he should hereafter find
inexorably remembered.
He let Bellam go, but he was still smoking, irreso-
lutely wishing he had kept him and put his shapeless
trouble to the best of his knowledge, when a voice be-
fore the mill door under him called up in a high thin
pipe:
" Hello, Overdale ! Have you heard the news ?"
The miller leaned forward and glowered down into
the face of the man below. It was the young lawyer,
Captain Bickler. As he sat his horse there he showed
himself a spare, graceful figure in a black broadcloth
coat and black cassimere pantaloons covered to the
knees with green baize leggins. He wore a silk velvet
waistcoat, with a gold watch-chain crossing it ; the peak
of a flat oilcloth cap came over his forehead to his shifty
15
NEW LEAF MILLS
hazel eyes; his dark hair fell from the sides in locks
carefully turned in at the ends. His clothes were of a
cut that the neighbors understood to be fashionable;
it was known that he got them at a clothing-store in
the City, as the people of the region called the large
town that formed its center.
The miller paused long enough before answering to
spit to the leeward of the horseman. " What news ?"
he grunted, with his pipe between his teeth.
" About the mills. You're sold out of house and
home," the horseman said.
" I know it," the miller answered, but so quietly
that Captain Bickler must have felt at a loss how to
go on. He said, with his eyes fixed in uneasy in-
quiry on the miller's white mask, " They're to put
in paper machinery, I hear, in about a year from
now."
The pipe fell from the miller's teeth and broke at the
bay mare's feet.
" Well, what of that ?" he demanded.
" Nothing. But I think it's a damn shame."
" Yes. Is it any of your damn business ?"
The lawyer took the retort as a joke, and forced a
laugh. " Well, I just wanted you to know how we feel
about it around here."
" Well, now I know."
" The Larrabees ought to have let you have notice.
Wasn't there some kind of promise ?" The miller said
nothing, and the lawyer added, " Well, you know where
to come if you want any law; that's all. It won't
cost you anything." He waited for whatever answer
did not come, then he shook his rein and rode from
under the glare of the miller's floury face, down into the
road and across the tail-race.
Over dale looked after him with a pang such as holds
16
NEW LEAF MILLS
one motionless and mute, while he felt the drunken
dream which still hung in his brain shape itself as
with an electric pulse into something definite, a
prophecy of death, capriciously derived, but distinctly
dated in event.
IV
In the month that passed between the sale of the
mills and the coming of Owen Powell with his boys,
Overdale had begun trying to look upon his dread as
something he should be ashamed to own. His success
was greatest when he woke in the morning, for that
moment when disaster seems improbable and death is
not in the world. Through the forenoon the shadow
of his fear was in abeyance, and at noon it shrank,
like the shadow that he cast in the sun, almost to noth-
ing, and troubled him as little as at dawn. The familiar
tasks, the traits of custom and habit, made him forget
it; the murmur of the grist-mill working so smoothly
and quietly, and the shrill hissing of the sawmill filled
his sense and stilled the dread within. As he sat
smoking his pipe and looking out on the road, where
now and then a farmer jogged by and sent him a hello,
it seemed impossible that he should be troubled by it
again. All the things of every-day life denied it. The
ducks and geese waded about the edges of the pool
backed up from the head-race, and made a vulgar,
friendly clamor; his hounds slouched by drowsily in
the warm sunlight, with their air of weariness from
coon-hunting the night before ; his pigs rooted among the
leaves on the hillside, or paraded to and fro under the
mill door, greedy for their noonday feed; the turkeys
and chickens strayed over the open space before the
mill and among the saw-logs, or rustled through the dry
18
NEW LEAF MILLS
stalks of the corn. At times from the heart of the
field came the note of a quail ; from the pastures the sad
trill of a belated meadow-lark.
The inward stress which these sights and sounds com-
bined to banish had not yet grown to be that second
consciousness through which everything must pass from
the world to him, taking color of its dread. But when
the shadow of the mill began to lengthen before it in
the afternoon, and at last to be lost in the shadow of
the western upland beyond the island, the miller found
his place at the door intolerable, and went to look for
something to do in the mill. If there was nothing, he
left it and walked up the path beside the race to the
sawmill, where the loud noise put him in some heart
again, and he shouted in talk with Bellam. When he
went back after his supper the rush of the water on
wheels beat dreadfully upon him, and he ran up-stairs
to light his lamp. The light cheered him for a little
time, and he was glad of the growing cool of the eve-
nings, that he might have some excuse to kindle a fire
in his stove and listen to its roar. But his feints and
defenses were of brief effect, and in the night hours
that he spent in solitude he had but one other resource.
The neighbors saw that he had begun to drink a great
deal; he offered his jug to all who came, and tilted it
up himself whether they joined him or not ; but no one
could say that he had seen him drunk. His fear was
like a strong poison in his veins; the fiery liquor did
not consume him, but was consumed in him; it only
raised his heart to the level of other men's. The day
when Powell came with his boys and began work upon
their cabin the last of the farmers who rode away from
the mill door left Overdale clinging to the rope that
had lowered the grist to his horse's back, and listening
to the blows of the hammer in the cabin. They fell like
19
NEW LEAF MILLS
shocks upon the miller's heart ; the invisible forces there
seemed to embody his fear to him, and it passed crazily
through him that he might wreak his anguish on them
and annul his fear. The notion, diffuse as the floating
dust that settled on the cobwebs in the mill, gathered
shape in the will at least to look upon the impersonation
of his fear; and with finally no clearer purpose than
this he took his shotgun with him from the corner of
his room when he yielded to his longing. If Powell,
when he awoke that night and made his joke about
his hard bed, could have looked through the window
black before his eyes, he might have owned for once
that there was danger in the world. But it would have
been like him to contend afterward that Overdale was
there through mere curiosity; and the miller him-
self, after he had looked upon his enemy's face and
heard his friendly voice, might not have confessed any
other motive.
He stumbled back to his den in the mill and roused
the fire in his stove, and then he went out to the door
again to look at the night. It could hardly be called
the night any longer. The pallor of dawn was begin-
ning to steal into the east; a planet shone sharp above
the kindling sun, and the stars crisply twinkled about
the sky; but there was that warning of day in the air
which did not need the corroboration of a cock crow
sounding faintly from one of the distant farms. Over-
dale drowsed where he stood ; he flung himself upon the
buffalo robe in the corner of the warm room and fell
into a heavy sleep.
When Powell came back from town with his whole
family to take possession of his new home, early in
October, nothing abont the place had kept quite the
poetic aspect which rejoiced him when he first came
with his boys. He was forced now to see it with the
unsparing eyes of his wife, which robbed it of the
glamour it had worn to his retrospective vision. The
touches of construction and decoration which he had
given the cabin showed bungling and ineffective;
the floor wavered in spite of his relaying or on
account of it; the repairs of the clapboarded roof
did not keep out the rain, or, later, the snow when
it came.
The pigs of the earlier tenants of the cabin had been
sold to the miller, but they had not forgotten the com-
fort of their former home. When they had finished
their midday feed before the mill they hurried to the
cabin, and beaded the cleft between the door and the
threshold with their pink snouts and appealed to the
charity of the Powells with sharp menace and soft
insinuation. After their evening feed they resorted to
the warm chimney-back, at the base of the gable, as they
had always done; the boys made forays into the dark
to dislodge them, but the pigs returned before the boys
were well indoors again. The mother could not share
the younger children's pleasure in making believe they
were wolves; she remembered the real wolves of the
21
NEW LEAF MILLS
mystical region which they knew from her abhorrence
as Out on Sandy, where she used to hear them howling
through the dark when she was a little girl; and she
told the children the comfortable grunting of the
quiescent pigs was nothing like it.
There was an echo of it in the nightly baying of
the coon-dogs that came hulking to the mill at the heels
of the farmers' horses on grist-day and showed them-
selves large, lop-eared, liver-colored hounds. They were
of no use by day, but by night when the moon was
up, and they had treed a coon in some deadening where
the girdled walnuts and hickories shone like bleached
skeletons in the light, they called the boys and the
loutish men of the farms from their beds to the su-
preme joy of the local year. There were other pleas-
ures of the region which the women shared : the frolics
where they met with the men for parching corn and
candy-pulling; the huskings and apple-peelings, where
neighborly help was given for neighborly hospitality;
and the house-raisings and barn-raisings, where the
women gathered and waited upon the men at the meals
they had cooked for them. Separately the women had
their quiltings, and the men at Christmas had their
shooting-matches, where turkeys were the prizes of their
rifles ; they had their squirrel-hunts, in which the squir-
rel was the unit of every kind of game ; and their wild
frolics, where the jug went round and the stag-dance
shook the beams and rafters. Quoits and foot-races and
jumping-matches drew the men together, but the sexes
united again in revivals and baptisms and spelling-
matches. A fierce religiosity, choosing between salva-
tion and perdition, was the spiritual life which an open
atheist here and there sweepingly denied. Camp-meet-
ings assembled old and young from far and near; the
instinctive communism of the pioneer times prolonged
22
NEW LEAF MILLS
itself in the social life by mutual help in the things
which could not be done in severalty. But otherwise
the farmers dwelt apart on their wide acreages in a
solitude unbroken from Sunday to Sunday for their
wives. When they came to the mill with their grists
the men made it the center of neighborhood gossip or
political debate, but, except for a visit with their women
to one of the small towns of the region for buying or
selling, they kept to their houses, or preferably their
barns. The barns oftener than the houses were of
frame and clapboarded; the dwellings were mostly re-
productions of the log cabins of the first settlers ; they
repeated the primitive shapes of the past, but the logs
were squared and plastered like those of the Powells'
cabin. The few houses were of brick, and faced upon
the road with two front doors, one for visits of cere-
mony from the neighboring wives, and the other never
opened except for weddings or funerals.
The Powells had come from town without provision
for the winter, and they had to trust for supplies to
the farmers, who sometimes granted them surlily and
sometimes cheerfully, but always as a favor. Owen
went for them with his boys or sent the boys alone
with the small one-horse wagon provisionally represent-
ing the dignity of the ISTew Leaf enterprise to the lords
of three or four hundred acres, who took the road with
teams of tall Hambletonians, shining with fatness in
their brass-mounted harness. The farmers viewed the
one-horse wagon with silent scorn or kindly derision ;
but they opened for Powell's money the caves in their
gardens where they kept their winter store of apples,
potatoes, cabbages, and turnips, taking and giving odor
and savor under a low roofing sodded over and banked
in with earth against the frost.
Some of the kindlier farmers were German or Scotch-
23
NEW LEAF MILLS
Irish folk from western Pennsylvania, with here and
there a French-Canadian family, but mostly the people
were Virginians and Marylanders of a fierceness bred
by contact with slavery and with a poor white revolt in
their hearts against any one imaginably their betters.
But their revolt did not include the superiority of the
retired merchant who had come out from town and
lived with his motherless daughter in a house having
more than any the stateliness of a mansion. The
gentleness of the Bladens was akin by blood to the
fierceness of the rudest tribe of the neighborhood,
and how the shy, pure girl could keep herself un-
contaminate from that savage cousinhood was a riddle
which remained unread for Ann Powell; she only
saw that the tribe paid the Bladens, father and
daughter alike, a deference which they rendered to
no one else.
The women were better than the men, and they with
the other farm wives of the little neighborhood which
had formed itself within a mile of the mills came to
offer Ann what welcome they knew how to give. With
a few she found herself in neighborly kindness; but
if she could have got away she would have been glad
never to see any of them again. For her it was all
a reversion to the barbarism of the new country where
her childhood was passed, and which she had so gladly
escaped from to the civility of the towns where she
had lived ever since she left the farm with her young
husband. Now, when they were both middle-aged peo-
ple, she seemed to have been dragged back to conditions
worse than those of the backwoods. Nothing at New
Leaf Mills made her days endurable but the promise of
the early coming of her sisters-in-law to form the heart
of the communal body nebulously projected in the
vision of their husbands. The change from town had
24
NEW LEAF MILLS
been simple enough for Owen Powell, who had brought
only the hope of a starry future from the ruin of his
affairs; but his brothers had each to sell out or close
up his business, and the delay was protracting itself
to an end that seemed to his wife further off every
day.
She could have borne the visits of the farmers' wives,
but she could not bear the visits of the farmers, who
came on wet days to sit with her husband before the
cabin fire. Their coats dripped with the rain, and
their stoga-boots, that reeked of the pig-pen and the
barnyard, gave out their stench in the heat while they
told their long stories and cracked their old jokes and
spat in the hot ashes or the bristling coals where she
must cook the family supper when they were gone.
They had begun at once to call Powell by his first
name, which she resented as a token of the general
lapse from the town civilities she prized, and which she
resented the more because she perceived that no friend-
liness went with the freedom. They could not help
despising a man apparently so unfit to cope even tenta-
tively and provisionally with the business he had under-
taken. Felix Powell soon added a two-horse team and
a blue-painted wagon of the proper pattern to the scanty
equipment of Owen's first days at New Leaf, but even
this did not convince the neighbors of that future of
universal prosperity which they believed they had been
promised.
Owen Powell was personally unimpressive in his
circumstances; yet he was finally of a dignity which
in spite of his wife's fears the neighbors did not grow-
ingly infringe. It was not their fault that they could
not imagine him ; he knew this ; but it was not in him
to feel unkindness toward them for it. He felt the sort
of liking for them which tolerance breeds. If they
25
NEW LEAF MILLS
laughed at his wit, he laughed at their rude drolling;
he did not resent their conceit or their tedious advice;
he knew as well as his wife that they were boors, and
not pioneers; but it did not make him unhappy. It
amused him that they cherished the largest landowners
among them as a sort of social chiefs because of their
more acres and their better horses, and valued their
consequence above his own civilization. With his
Quaker origin he could not mind their calling him by
his given name or even trying for a nickname from it ;
but he could not help sharing his wife's relief when-
ever the last of his visitors 'hulked out of the cabin
door, which they did not always remember to shut after
them.
The family was safe from them after nightfall.
Then, when Mrs. Powell and her little girls had cleared
the supper away, she sat down with her family in the
firelight, while Powell read to them by the candles
which in his retrospective romance he had cast in some
old-fashioned candle-mtolds of their earliest housekeep-
ing. He read poetry sometimes, sometimes a book of
travel, sometimes a novel ; on Sunday nights he read a
chapter from Swedenborg's Heavenly Arcana or a
Memorable Relation of Things Seen and Heard in the
Spiritual World, or a New Church sermon, which, by
the virtue inherent in sermons, soon had the children
scattered about him on the floor. When they were
gathered up and got to bed, the boys in the cabin loft
and the little girls in their mother's room, Powell
and his wife lingered awhile before the fire to
talk of that future which had lured them to New
Leaf Mills, but which from time to time needed
for her the constructive touches he was so willing
to give it.
She lived in the memories which he promised it
26
NEW LEAF MILLS
should renew in the things dear to her home-keeping
heart. All her married days she had worked hard
with head and hand to get together and keep together
the few things which dignified her simple house in
town. There were notably six cane-seated chairs which
Felix had given her for the distinction of her parlor,
and which she now hid in her own room rather than
set them out in the place where those hulking farmers
could spoil them ; she would indulge some of the neigh-
bors' wives with the use of them when these worthier
women came alone; she would show them her pieces
of old silver, and in moments of signal intimacy bring
out her black silk and her best bonnet, which could not
otherwise be seen; for the Powells did not go to the
service of any sect of the Old Church in the village
where the country women wore their finery. She had
her air-tight parlor stove put up in her bedroom, with
the bookcase which held her husband's library, and his
portrait done in his young manhood, and the mahogany-
framed engraving of Swedenborg which visibly attested
Owen's religious persuasion and hers. She kept her
flowered carpet there, sacred from the men's boots, for
the parlor of the new house. Powell was to begin
building it in the spring, as the first of that group of
dwellings in which the brothers were to embody their
community to the sense of the neighborhood, and she
trusted in that house with a faith potently helped by
the accumulation of black-walnut logs at the sawmill
for the weather-boarding and shingles which were to
cover the frame in and save the cost of paint by their
natural coloring. She measurably believed in all the
things of her husband's faith, even in the harp which
he had made in his hours of leisure with his own hand,
and which he expected some day to play upon when
he had the opportunity of learning how; failing that
a 27
NEW LEAF MILLS
hitherto, he already struck it with a hopeful if uncer-
tain touch.
He was so wholly her spiritual life that she could
give herself altogether to her house and her family;
and if she was an earth-bound spirit it was because she
realized in her home a heaven such as she could not
imagine elsewhere. Of course she expected in due
course that immortality which the Doctrines promised
her with such scientific precision; but for the present
she was content with, the affection which came back to
her here from those whom she loved and who made her
paradise. If the log cabin and the conditions which it
implied were not the setting for this paradise which her
house in town had been, this could be fitly domiciled
again when the new house was built after the plans
which Owen's invention supplied, and which he had
begun to draw out in the evening as soon as they were
settled for the winter in the cabin.
That helped keep her from fearing herself perma-
nent in it ; but there were other evenings when Powell
put the harp in order after one of its frequent seasons
of disuse and complicated disability. In form it was
not as other harps are; it was triangular, with a slant-
ting bar at top instead of the traditional sinuous arch ;
but he held that this structural aberration did not af-
fect its musical potentiality and was of antique au-
thority. For the present he struck the strings some-
what at hazard, but if he accompanied them with his
voice loudly enough, he could drown anything like dis-
sonance in their response. His wife listened with
tolerance, if not unfailing acceptance, to his perform-
ance, and his children, without closely examining the
evidence of their senses, thought that he played as
well as sang the piece which he liked best to give
them:
28
NEW LEAF MILLS
" When in death I shall calm recli-i-ne,
Oh, bear my heart to my mistress dear;
Tell her it lived upon smi-i-les and wi-i-ne
Of the brightest ftue while it lingered fcere.
Bid her not shed one tear of sorrow,
To sully a &ear£ so brilliant and Kflf/ii,
Bu-u-t balmy drops of the red grape borrow,
To feaffee the refo'c from morn till night"
VI
His harp was one out of many proofs which Powell
was always giving of his ingenious aptness with his
hands and of his inventive skill. In the leisure from
his failing business which had latterly grown so much
too great he contrived himself a barometer, for which he
long wanted a glass tube till once his eldest boy re-
turned from a visit to his birthplace Tip the River,
bringing from the glass-works there a tube in the barrel
of a gun which an uncle had given him. It exactly
fitted the barrel and came endeared to Powell's humor
by the novelty of its conveyance; he framed it in a
cedar case which he carved for it, and it entered upon
a long lease of usefulness in predicting fair and rainy
weather. It was really a more practicable instrument
than the harp, or even the flute which he got for the
next younger boy, and then left him to nature in the
art of playing on it. He believed that you could do
what you wished to do if you wished it potently enough ;
and he left the boy likewise to nature in his struggles
with the grammars of some foreign languages which
he began attempting while he was failing with the flute.
He did not struggle very hard with the grammars;
he preferred his reveries of triumphs achieved without
a struggle which he could indulge when to other eyes
he seemed to be hoeing corn, or not hoeing, or wander-
ing with the family gun on his shoulder through the
woods. He amused his father, who called him the
30
NEW LEAF MILLS
Dreamer, and let him off from going to school. Powell
was more this boy's companion than his eldest son's,
though he respected the business faculty of the other
so much and relied upon his help in all practical mat-
ters ; he talked most with the younger, and tried to have
him like the same authors, but the boy could not al-
ways share his father's tastes ; he could not like Burns,
though he liked Scott's poetry enough for his father's
purposes and he liked Byron a little.
He could follow his father still less in the ingenious
use of his hands, but there he could at least admire its
effects with the rest. Before the family came to the
mills, but when it was decided that the change from
a grist-mill to a paper-mill was not to be made at once,
Powell gratified his artistic instinct by cutting a stencil
plate for the heads of the flour-barrels. He studied
from nature a sycamore leaf, and crowned it with the
legend of New Leaf Mills. When this, by the applica-
tion of a shoe-brush, transferred its shape to a sheet
of white pasteboard, it commanded the respect of the
whole household. Ann herself could not deny it her
praise, though she abhorred every mention of the mills ;
the children exulted in it as the anticipation of their
brightest hopes; their young aunt was generously in-
dignant in her admiration of it when Felix said, with
his melancholy smile : " You can make so many other
things, Owen, that it's no wonder you never made your
fortune. If the mills fail you can support us all by
stencil-cutting," and Powell had an affectionate laugh
with him.
When he transferred his family to New Leaf, he
lost no time in preparing for the navigation of the
river. He shaped a skiff, very graceful and fit in its
lines, from two elastic boards for the sides and a broad
plank for the bottom, which was his pride and the joy
31
NEW LEAF MILLS
of his boys, who stole in it on the wild ducks they never
could shoot; he built a flatboat, commodious for the
whole family, and on the still Sunday afternoons of the
Indian Summer he made them all, mother and children,
go with him up the stream, so wide and still above the
dam. He punted against the slow current, walking
down the gunwale with a pole pressed against his
shoulder, as he told them the keel-boatmen used to do
on the Ohio Eiver ; and then he let it drift back to the
dam while they lay in the straw-strewn floor of the boat,
and he talked and the rest listened, or he joked with
them. When the mother did not wish to joke, for even
in this safety from the intrusive neighborhood she
could not forget her exile, Powell had to turn from his
talking and laughing and hearten her with promises
from his unfailing faith in the future. But the small
pleasure she had in those flatboat voyages was spoiled
one Sunday when they found the boat gone and had to
wait till some of their bold young neighbors brought
it back. Powell scolded them, saying, if it was worth
having, it was worth asking for; and the fellow would
not betray that one of Powell's boys, flattered into au-
thority by their asking him for it, had said he did not
believe his father would mind their taking it. It
was the Dreamer who had done this, and now he longed
with his whole soul to own that he had given those
fellows leave to take the boat, but he could not own it
for the shame it must bring him. He passed days of
wistful inability trying for some form of avowal by
which he should appear so noble to his father that his
father would praise him rather than blame him, but
he could not contrive anything so imperatively mag-
nanimous ; or anything which would not lead to his
going with his father and apologizing to those neighbors
for his want of candor. He could not imagine any out-
32
NEW LEAF MILLS
come creditable to himself even with his mother, who
was so tender with him, but would not spare him in such
a wrong, and he let her remain in her fear of the re-
venge which the neighbors would take on his father,
though it never came to more than an increase of in-
tangible ill-will.
Her refuge from this fear, as from her father's
troubles, was in the visits which Felix and Jessainy
paid her in her exile. The Indian Summer lingered
late into November, and on one of the dim afternoons
Felix Powell drove from town to the mills with his
wife. Ann kissed them, and got out for the early sup-
per that best china which she could not have touched at
any other time without a pang for the lost state which
it symbolized. But for the dear young pair who seemed
a part of the town life she had lost, she hurried forward
one of the meals which her family thought matchless
in cookery. Her husband sat the feast through with
his innate gaiety of heart heightened by his brother's
presence, and did not seem to note any vagueness in
the talk of Felix about the enterprise which he re-
ported his progress in pioneering. If Ann felt some-
thing unwonted in the tone of her brother-in-law, pride
kept her from pressing any question of it; and during
a visit which left Powell with his spirits as high as
ever, she could not bear to dash them with her secret
fears. The most tangible reason for her fears was
nothing more tangible than her sister's letting fall in
their women's talk together her belief that Felix would
never be willing to live beyond the sound of church-
bells ; and Ann remembered, with a sinking heart, that
there were no church-bells within three miles of ISTew
Leaf Mills. She bade them both a cheerful good-by
when they drove away from the cabin in their buggy,
looking back, one on each side, to prolong their fare-
33
NEW LEAF MILLS
wells, with smiles and nods ; then she turned and ran
back into the cabin with her apron over her head.
" What is the matter, what is the matter, my poor
girl ?" Powell entreated her, and she said, Oh, nothing ;
she was not feeling very well. But after the children
were abed and she was alone with him she told him
what she was afraid of.
" They will never come here in the world, Owen.
She let it out in that about the church-bells. I don't
blame either of them. Who would want to live in such
a God-forsaken hole ?"
" ISTot quite a hole, my dear," he tried to comfort
her, " though it may look like one from the inside."
He became fascinated with his notion, and added : " But
it isn't really such a bad hole, even from the inside;
and we will soon better it. I don't wonder you're dis-
heartened with a winter in the cabin before you, but
we shall begin to build our new house as soon as the
frost is out of the ground in the spring. I have got
together most of the logs already; and I was think-
ing " — but Powell had, perhaps, just that moment
thought — " that we would go in the morning and
definitely choose the site of the house. I have an idea
that the level at the foot of the hill, just opposite the
mill, would be the proper place. But you shall decide
yourself."
She probably knew that this decision of hers would
be directed by his judgment, but she could not refuse
the consolation his promise offered her, and with her
reliance on his hopes she began to doubt her fears. A
mild Sunday morning dawned in pale sunshine, and
after the breakfast, which her little girls helped her
redd up, she went for the walk with her husband and
children which he considered so much better for them
all than a religious service of the Old Church. ~No
34
NEW LEAF MILLS
chime invited them to their worship, but when they
had climbed the hill above the site fixed for their new
house, he made her listen and almost made her hear
the sound of a bell from the village three miles to the
southward. The children were sure that they heard it,
and Powell triumphed in their agreement. " There !"
he said. " If Felix can't live beyond the sound of the
church-going bell, he can come up here, any Sunday
morning when the wind is right, and hear it."
He shared the shock which Ann felt at sight of the
huddle of neglected graves on the hilltop, with their
sunken barrows and their slanting stones, and the
miller's pigs rooting for the mast among the dead
leaves ; but he said that she must not judge their neigh-
bors too harshly for the neglect; the state of these
graves did not express the callousness it would in a
more enlightened community. At any rate, one of the
first things he should set about doing, as soon as he
could spare the time, would be sawing out a lot of
palings to fence the graveyard. That would be a lesson
in civilization which could offend no one; he had per-
ceived that he must not, begin to educate the neighbor-
hood without due tenderness for its barbarity. While
he talked with the mother and cajoled her from her
gloom into the sunshine of his own spirit, till she yielded
with the lamentation, "Oh, Owen, Owen!" the chil-
dren foraged for the fallen hickory-nuts, and filled the
little bags they had brought with them. They came to
him to show their store, and he made the elder even
up with the younger ones for a lesson in the unselfish-
ness which he told them was not only one of the first
attributes of the angels in Heaven, but was due always
from the stronger to the weaker in this world. Then
he gave his hand to their mother and lifted her from
the little knoll, where thev had been lying, and raced
l35
NEW LEAF MILLS
her down the hillside. The young children ran scream-
ing joyously after, and the elder boys bore with what
patience they might the incorrigible youthfulness of
their father.
It was the last pleasant day of a long series of pleas-
ant days. In the night the autumnal haze turned to
mist, the clouds gathered, and the boys, sleeping in the
cabin loft, woke in rapture at the sound of rain on the
clapboards over their heads and the pelting of the finer
drops in their faces. The rain lasted, off and 'on, for
a week, and by grist-day the open space before the
mill, which had been so pleasant to their bare feet with
its velvety dust, was trodden into mire by the miller's
pigs, and then patted smooth by the web feet of his
geese, and again cut by the wheels and pitted by the
hoofs of teams bringing in the farmers' wheat for
storage.
It was at the sawmill that Powell spent most of his
time, coming home to his meals with aches and pains
unfelt during the years of his town life, but now un-
grudgingly recognized as experiences of his rustic past.
He had mastered such simple science of the sawmill
work as Bellam was able to impart, and he had applied
his universal genius to the invention of improvements
in the double tramway which carried the sawn lumber
down from the mill and brought the logs up into it.
The iron dogs which held the sticks of timber in place,
and the cogs that pushed them against the saw, received
some creative touches, and he added to the other
equipments a circular saw that bit diagonally half
through Bellam's thumb the first time he pressed upon
it the block of walnut which it was shredding into
shingles for the new house. Owen stayed the sufferer
in his burst of terror and put back the dangling frag-
ment, which he secured so skilfullv in place that, though
36
NEW LEAF MILLS
it always stood a little awry afterward, it remained a
monument to his surgery.
Ann refused to hear the particulars which the chil-
dren would so willingly have furnished; they had en-
joyed the most favorable places in the front row of the
crowd which Bellam's lamentations had called to wit-
ness their father's skill ; she told them she should be
only too glad if they got away from the mills in pieces
large enough to hold their lives. Overdale was left
alone in the grist-mill during the affair, and he showed
no more interest than Ann in the procession which took
the saw-miller to his home on the island, mounted on
a led horse, and supported in his seat by eager hands.
When the doctor came he justified the popularity which
Powell had won ; he said that just the right thing had
been done for Bellam's thumb, and that nothing was
left for him but to dress it now and then.
VII
Powell, had been careful not to add to the grudge
in Overdale which he could riot ignore, and he had
left him in full control of the grist-mill until the paper
machinery should be put in; the miller was told that
the new owners won Id be glad to have him stay, and
he signified a surly willingness to remain, more by
staying than by saying that he would stay. His life
did not vary under the new ownership ; he came and
went from his house beyond the sawmill so early be-
fore dawn and late after dark that he was seen to come
and go only at noonday; he slept in the grist-mill, as
he had always done. ■ His sprees were wilder, but they
were not so frequent, and they ended sooner in the
drunken sleep in which the machinery was apt to run
riot. The saw-miller had always taken leave to shut
off the water at these times, and during Bellam's dis-
ability Powell put himself briefly in authority. He
no more disliked Overdale than he disliked any other
fellow-creature, and he accounted for the miller's rude-
ness toward himself as the impatience of a man who
was somehow sick beyond self-command. What his
sickness was, whether of soul or body, he could not
make out. Sometimes he thought he must be the prey
of a disease which he was trying to keep secret from
himself; sometimes he conjectured that the miller had
some misdeed of the past on his mind ; he decided that
more probably he was the victim of some form of hvpo-
38
NEW LEAi MILLS
chondria. He philosophized him to Ann, without effect
other than to alarm her for his owa safety.
"Well, Owen, be careful n 5o provoke him with
you, if he's crazy in some way, or beginning to go crazy.
Oh, I wish we had never seen the mills ! Now, you
keep out of his way all you can, Owen, or I won't have
a minute's peace, day or night."
" You needn't be afraid of my taking any chances,"
Powell promised, in the cheerfulness he always had in
disowning the possibility of danger ; and then he began
to laugh softly to himself as if he had not half taken
her anxiety in.
" What is it ?" she asked, hopelessly.
" Oh, nothing. But Elder Griswell says it's the
religion that is working in Overdale; all you've got
to do is to throw the religion out, and nothing will
throw it out like immersion. That will bring the
religion to the surface, just like measles, and then
Overdale will be all right."
Ann laughed too at a phase of the Old Church
theology which Powell conld make so amusing. But
her anxiety returned upon her when she went to pay
that first visit to the miller's wife which the woman
had failed to make her as the new-comer. She had
talked the matter over with her husband and had de-
cided to waive ceremony in a case of what she had
decided to be uncouth shyness and not intentional of-
fense in the gaunt, silent slattern, whom she charac-
terized in a parlance of her own as a harmless sloom.
Her magnanimity was rewarded by such politeness in
Mrs. Overdale as standing with her door ajar and
speechlessly regarding the visitor outside.
" May I come in, Mrs. Overdale ?" Ann asked ; and
the sloom set her door a little farther open.
" Why, I reckon," she said ; and when Ann entered,
39
NEW LEAF MILLS
she so far realized her obligation to hospitality as to
ask, " Won't you set ?"
She pushed Ann one of the wooden chairs of the
dining-room, which was also the living-room of the low-
ceiled, close-shuttered room, and then took a rocking-
chair herself and silently rocked in front of her while
she studied her visitor's face in an abstraction scarcely
broken by her brief assents to Ann's suggestions about
the weather. But Ann soon came to the end of these,
and then the miller's wife broke the silence that fol-
lowed.
" Your man got anything ag'inst him V
Ann recalled the backwoods use of pronouns by which
wives and husbands shunned explicit mention of each
other.
" Why, no, Mrs. Overdale. What should Mr. Powell
have against your husband ?"
After a season of dreamy reflections the sloom re-
sponded, " I don't know, but it 'pears like, from his tell,
that your man wanted to do him a mischief."
" What in the world do you mean ? What kind of
mischief should my husband want to do yours ?"
" Well, he don't come round much, exceptin' fur his
meals. But from his tell one night after he'd been
at the jug, when he wouldn't have any supper, 'pears
like your man was goin' to kill him, or somepin. He
kep' sayin' your folks buyin' the privilege would be
the death of him."
A hot flush of anger followed the cold thrill of dis-
may which the woman's first words had sent through
Ann Powell. " Well, I can tell you what, Mrs. Over-
dale, I won't have any such talk about Mr. Powell in
the neighborhood."
" Oh," Mrs. Overdale listlessly interrupted, " I
reckon he don't talk any. I reckon he don't talk much
40
NEW LEAF MILLS
to me when he's sober. It's on'v when he's been at
the jug."
" He had better keep away from the jug, then," Ann
began again; but the miller's wife put in:
" That's what I always been tellin' him, but he don't
seem to take any notice."
Ann refused to be stayed by this impression. " Mr.
Powell and all his brothers are good men; they don't
want to do anything but good here, and it's abominable
for any one to say anything else even when they've been
at the jug."
" Well, that's what I told him at the time," Mrs.
Overdale agreed, as she rocked comfortably to and from
her visitor. " I told him your man could have the
law of him."
" We don't want the law," Ann retorted, " but I shall
certainly have my husband find out what Mr. Over-
dale means." She said much more to the same pur-
pose ; she could not recur to the smooth generalities of a
ceremonious call ; and then she rose and made her way
to the door.
She was fairly out of it before the miller's wife
remembered to rise and follow her for leave-taking.
" Well, call ag'in," she drawled.
Ann was still angry, but she answered, " I hope you
will come to see me, Mrs. Overdale."
" Well, I will, the first chancet I git. But don't you
wait."
VIII
After the children left the dinner-table that day,
and Powell had taken his hat to go out, Ann asked
him, " Are you going to the grist-mill ?"
" I'm going to the sawmill to help Bellam. He's
rather weak-handed still with that thumb of his."
"Well, don't saw your thumb off, Owen," she said;
and Powell laughed at the wild notion. " And another
thing, I don't want you to go near Overdale again till
we've had a talk."
" I don't know that I follow you, exactly, Ann, but
it's easy for me not to go near Overdale. What is it ?"
She went to the cabin door and looked out. The
children were playing Indians on the hillside well out
of hearing across the road. She turned back to her
husband. " I thought I could tell you to-night when
they were all in bed, but I'd better do it now; I don't
want you to run any risks. Owen, that worthless
drunkard has been saying dreadful things. I don't
feel as if your life was safe with him."
Owen put down his hat, and at this sign of concern
for her, if not for himself, she hurried to tell him what
the miller's wife had said.
He took her anxiety with seriousness instead of
the teasing lightness which he so often tried her
patience with. " Well, my dear, I don't wonder you're
a little uncomfortable. But you mustn't be troubled.
There isn't the least danger in the world, not the least,"
42
NEW LEAF MILLS
he said, and his spirits mounted with the courage of a
man who had never believed himself in any sort of
peril. " But I promise you I won't go to the grist-
mill till I've seen you again. I will talk with Bellam
about the matter."
" That poor lout ?" Ann despaired. " Really, Owen,
you are enough to provoke a saint."
" Yes, but we're neither of us saints, Ann," he an-
swered, and she laughed helplessly. " Bellam has the
making of a philosopher in him — that is, he believes
I'm a much greater man than I am."
Ann's mind went off at a tangent. " Has that old
wretch been after him lately ?"
" If you mean Elder Griswell, no ; I believe not
since last week. The elder is as much afraid of Over-
dale as you are, my dear. I understand that now,
as he can't get Bellam to go back to him and work out
his debt, and can't collect the money of him, he's going
to sue Overdale. He regards him as harboring his
fugitive slave, but he doesn't like coming in reach of
him. Bellam wasn't his slave exactly, either; only his
peon."
Ann sighed. " If you get the right word for a thing,
you feel almost as good as if you had righted it, Owen."
" But peon is so uncommonly right. It's about the
only good thing we've ever got out of that rascally war."
Owen never spoke less violently of the Mexican War ;
but he valued the service which the volunteers had
done in bringing back the name of a system of labor
among the Mexicans so exactly fitting the case of Bel-
lam and Elder Griswell.
The saw-miller had worked on the Elder's farm for
years as his insolvent debtor, and at the end of each
vear was no nearer industrial freedom than at the be-
ginning; the Elder's advances were always a little
4 43
NEW LEAF MILLS
greater than Bellam's wages, as they might easily be.
But one day when Bellam came to the mill with his
grist, he opened his heart to Overdale, and asked him
what he would do in his place.
" Hell !" the miller said. " Walk off."
The idea worked in Bellam's intelligence, and he
walked off between two days, or on a Sunday when the
Elder had gone to church. He reported to Overdale
with his wife and children, and his poor belongings on
the cart drawn by the rangy colt which he had somehow
kept his own in spite of the Elder. Overdale could
not be bothered at the time by the implications of the
case; but he felt bound by the counsel he had given,
and he told Bellam to drive over to the empty cabin
on the island and put up there till he could think.
" But if the Elder comes after me," the escaped peon
entreated.
" When he hears tell where you are I reckon he
won't come," the miller said ; and after he had time to
hear from the Larrabees Bellam was put to work in
the sawmill.
The picturesqueness of the incident had charmed
Powell from his first knowledge of it. When he sub-
jected it to examination in the light of the Doctrines,
he had found it a singularly beautiful proof of those
Remains of Good in a perverse soul like the miller's, by
which his chances in another life might be hopefully
regarded. His action might be merely an effect of
Natural Good, and was to be esteemed only as such, or
it might be an Influx from the Spiritual World moving
him to a right course in contravention of temperament.
Powell had often recurred to it in talk with his wife,
and always with a softening toward the miller and a
trust to the Remains in him which she could not
share.
44
NEW LEAF MILLS
" You needn't be troubled, my dear," he ended one
of their talks. " I won't take any chances with Over-
dale, or, for the matter of that, with Bellam, either —
that is, I won't be ruled by anything he says ; I'll only
be ruled by what you say."
He laughed again, and his wife sadly with him, and
she watched him anxiously from the back door of the
cabin as he made his way among the logs lying round
the sawmill, like a herd of saurians crept up from the
waters and sleeping on the muddy shore. The tram-
way, which from time to time carried one of them up
into the mill, passed over the gate, letting the water in
on the wheel, and Powell now mounted the track and
disappeared within. He came out with Bellam and
stood talking with him in the wide low doorway, while
the yellow heads of Overdale's children bobbed about
in play along the banks of the head-race. Then a cry
came from the children, and they ran toward the mil-
ler's house, where their mother stood idly watching
them. At the same time Ann saw her husband break
from Bellam's side and jump from the mill door to
the bank and stoop over the race close to the head-
gate. He rose with a child in his arms, and started with
it toward the miller's house. She began running to
him, but before she reached him, stumbling over the
rough ground in her heedless dismay, Owen was coming-
back to her laughing and flapping the water from his
clothes.
" I haven't been in the head-race myself," he called,
gaily, " but it was almost as wet work getting that little
scamp home after I got him out. A moment more and
he would have been in on the sawmill wheel, and
then — "
She would not let him stop more than to explain
that one of the miller's bovs had tumbled into the race ;
45
NEW LEAF MILLS
but as she hurried him to change his clothes she under-
stood how he had saved the child's life.
" And his mother — what did his mother say when
you took him to her?" she required, after she gave
Owen a dry coat and hung his wet one over a chair
before the fire.
Owen laughed again. " She didn't say anything ; she
spanked him."
" But you — you; I meant you."
" Well, she didn't say anything to me, either."
Ann Powell made " Tchk!" and did not speak; but
he knew that at the back of her mind she was dis-
appointed ; he knew she had hoped that somehow
this event would have been the promise of bringing
about a better feeling between him and the savage
whom she feared for him. He would not make her
own it: he only suggested, "Well, perhaps Overdale
will say something."
IX
The winter was wearing away without change in the
lives of the Powells toward immediate fulfilment of
the hopes which had brought them to New Leaf Mills.
Ann thought her husband lapsing, with his amiable ac-
ceptance of the order of Providence, more and more into
a country drudge. He worked like a laborer at any-
thing he could find to do about the mills, and she fancied
that with his growing content in the actual situation
the discontent of the neighbors was growing; she sus-
pected irony in the tones of the women's greetings when
she met them; she felt mocking in the slouch of the
men's hats and shoulders as they bestrode their grists
to and from the mill, and turned their glowering or
sneering faces toward her cabin windows. Perhaps the
tones were not sarcastic or the faces derisive; but if
they seemed so it was enough, and Powell could not
persuade her against it with all his cheerfulness. Once,
in the darkest hours of January, a New Church min-
ister came, and stayed over a Sunday ; and the familiar
talk of the Doctrines went on in the old way, with the
wonted jokes and stories in kindly satire of the Old
Church superstitions. For the time she could almost
believe herself back in Tuskingum, but she could hardly
share Owen's regret that there had not been time to
notify the neighbors and have them gather in the mill
for a New Church sermon; he had long given up his
scheme of a Sunday-school there, which he once had.
47
NEW LEAF MILLS
The roads, with the changes of snow and rain and
the freezing and thawing, were now so bad that Felix
could not drive out to see his brother, as he had done
every fortnight in better weather. He came only once
during the month, and his wife did not come with him.
Owen was as gay as at the other visits ; and that night,
after the older boys had gone to bed and the younger
children had fallen asleep on the stone hearth, he tuned
his harp and drowned the discords he extorted from it
in his songs of " Koy's Wife " and " Flow gently, Sweet
Afton " and " Banks and Braes of Bonny Doom" But
as he was rolling out :
" Then merrily we'll sing
As the storm rattles o'er us,
Till the dear shieling ring
With the light, lilting chorus — "
his wife called to him:
" Owen, Owen, for goodness' sake stop !"
He stopped, with his hands on the harp-strings.
" Why, I won't wake them."
" INTo, but you'll drive me crazy. I don't know how
you can bear to sing. How can you bear to live on in
this hovel, with no prospect of anything else?"
" No prospect ?" he returned.
" No ! We are doomed to live and die here, with
that wicked wretch hating you over there in the mill
that will never be anything but a grist-mill. Didn't
you notice how Felix avoided the subject when you
mentioned putting in the paper machinery ?"
" I didn't notice it. But I'm sure you're mistaken
if you think he isn't going f orward with the enterprise ;
and as for our living on in the cabin, you know that
I've got out all the shingles for the new house, with
most of the weather-boarding. We are beginning on
48
NEW LEAF MILLS
the oak flooring now, and I will have that kiln-dried if
we're late with it. But we won't be. As soon as the
frost is out of the ground we will put in the founda-
tions, and the carpenters will have the timbers ready
for the raising in June. You mustn't be downhearted
about it; everything is going finely. But I know!
You are run down. It's been a hard time for you.
Ann, you must have a girl. I wonder if Felix or his
wife couldn't get on the track of Eosy Hefmyer?"
" Oh, a girl !" Ann retorted. " Do you think a girl
could take the real burden off of me ?"
" Yes, the real burden ; but you must bear the un-
real burden yourself. I wish I could bear it for you."
Ann began to cry softly. Owen said, " Oh, my poor
girl, my poor girl!" and between her crying and his
coaxing she comforted herself.
" Oh, I can get along, Owen. You needn't worry
about me. But you must let me give way now and
then. I only want to know that you haven't forgotten
what we came for."
" Oh, my dear, don't you suppose I think of it all
the time?"
"Besides, I don't believe they could find Kosy.
With that old wretch of a mother of hers, there's no
telling what's become of her by this time. She always
said she would come back if I wanted her."
It would have been natural in Owen to allow the
affair to go with that, but Ann's listless resignation
remained after her rebellious outburst, and he saw that
something must really be done for her. There came
with February one of those interludes of soft weather
which the midwinter knows in that region. The birds
returned as if it were spring, bluebirds and robins;
the frost came out of the ground, and the roads cHed up.
" Now, Ann," Powell said one morning, " } )u had
49
NEW LEAF MILLS
better take advantage of this open weather and go away
for a while."
He could see that the thought had been in her mind,
too, for all she said : " Where can I go ? And leave
you and the children here ?"
" Not all of them. Take Dick and the buggy and
go down to Middleville, and see father and Jim's fam-
ily. You can hurry Jim up about coming here, and
they will all be glad to see you."
Ann's despair lost its blackness in the notion of a
family visit. " I might do that," she consented, " if
I could only believe that Jim was ever going to come."
" Well, ask. It will do him good to be stirred up.
He ought to have sold out by this time. Only don't
put too bright a face on things here."
Ann laughed forlornly, but his teasing saved her
further regret. " I believe in my heart I can really
do something," she said, defiantly; and in the morn-
ing she started with her son on the forty-mile drive to
Middleville.
She was aware only of the impossibility of staying
any longer at New Leaf Mills without going mad. She
did not forecast the future so far as to imagine how
she should keep sane after she came back. She was
at that point of homesickness when she was willing to
forsake every one dear to her for a glimpse of the life
from which she had been parted: simple as it was, in
contrast with the social squalor she had fallen into, it
was rich and fine and beautiful. She longed to escape
from her household back to the town which seemed to
her full of the things, the cane-seat-chair things, that
made living worth while. Tuskingum had become her
dream, her poetry, and the day that she now passed
with Felix and his wife was the realization of all that
she had imagined of it. She sat up late with them
50
NEW LEAF MILLS
in the pretty parlor, with its Venetian blinds and lace
curtains, and they played, Felix on the flute and
Jessamy on the piano, and she listened in her corner
of the rosewood sofa. In the morning she went to a
store with Jessamy, and Jessamy bought her a shawl,
so that she could keep warm if she and Dick were
driving in the cool of the evening or the weather
turned ; and after the midday dinner, which the hired
girl had cooked without the least help from Jessamy,
Ann started gaily on her journey again.
Jessamy was so much younger that she could daugh-
ter Ann, and the boy beside her on the buggy seat was
so old that Ann could almost sister him. She talked
gravely and confidentially to Dick of the state of things
at New Leaf Mills, and how little his father, with his
hopefulness and his trusting goodness, was fitted to
cope with the rude conditions, and with the brutal men
who could not understand him or value him. She
criticized Owen in her mind, but tenderly, being at a
distance from him; and she said: "He is the best
man in the world ; I know that well enough ; the will-
ingest to help others. He hasn't a selfish thought or a
mean one. But oh, if he would only be a little more
afraid! I wish he could have some of my fear. But
he is so contented, and so sure it will all come out
right. If only he would lose heart a little I could
have some."
Richard tried to comfort her, but her spirits sank
when they got beyond the outskirts of Tuskingum
among the high woods and the lonely fields again, and
she had to recover herself through tears. Then she
was cheerfuler, and as they drove along over the good
turnpike road she began to wonder what Jim's wife
would say when she saw them stopping at her door
in Middleville.
51
NEW LEAF MILLS
u
Well, she won't see us till to-morrow, mother," the
boy said.
" Yes, we will have to pass the night at Shawnee,"
she assented. " I was at the tavern there with your
father once, and it's a good piece from there to Middle-
ville. I suppose we will go to your grandfather's, any-
way."
It did not need the surprise they gave their kindred
to win their welcome. The old people were not visibly
moved, the grandfather from his gravity or the grand-
mother from her placidity; they were not only old,
but they had the quiet of the Old World in their greet-
ing; Jim's wife was noisily glad to see them, and
romped around Ann in claiming half their visit. She
wanted to hear all about the mills ; she was just crazy,
she said, to have Jim sell out and go there at once;
she was sick of Middleville.
She almost made Ann believe that she was a for-
tunate woman in getting there so soon, and she talked
as if the new house was almost finished. When Jim
came from his store he grinned at her excitement. He
said he didn't believe he could ever sell out. " Then
you give your old business away," his wife said; " I'm
going to New Leaf Mills. Ann '11 take me back with
her, I know."
" How is it, Ann ?" Jim asked. " Do they admit
any but Bobolitionists yet? Let down the bars to the
world's people ?"
He was anti-slavery, like all the Powells, but he liked
to say Bobolitionist for Abolitionist; the sound pleased
him, and he enjoyed the shock it gave his father by its
irreverence.
Ann and Richard stayed three days, and she enjoyed
every moment of it. Sally made a company tea for her,
and asked a dozen other ladies, old and young. She
52
NEW LEAF MILLS
let Ann help get the tea: stewed chicken, cold ham,
shortened biscuit, boiled potatoes, sweet tomato pickles,
pound-cake, cold slaw, and coffee. Throughout the
feast she stormed down the praises of her guests with
apologies for everything.
Ann noticed that the dishes, which were nicer than
hers, were some of them cracked ; the spout of the coffee-
pot was nicked, and Sally had no cane-seat chairs in
her parlor ; only yellow-painted Windsor chairs. When
Ann started home Jim put a canvased ham in the back
of the buggy. Grandmother Powell gave them a lunch
of her nice bread and butter, with sugar-cakes for Dick
and the children at home.
It was a happy time, and Dick thought they could
drive the whole way back to Tuskingum in one day.
But the heat increased, and the horse flagged. They
had not got as far as Shawnee when the wind rose
and blew the sky full of clouds. The thunder-heads
mounted, and before sunset it began to lighten, and it
grew so dark that they could scarcely see; but they
followed the white turnpike. Ann was scared, and she
was troubled about Owen and the children at the mills ;
but when in the blackness they came upon a man in
the road, mixed up with three horses he was trying to
lead and at the same time pick up his hat, which was
blown off, she had to laugh with Dick.
The laugh seemed to carry away her care. She made
Dick stop at the first house and ask if they might pass
the night. The man of the house said they might, and
when he had helped Dick put up his horse he led them
in to his family, who were gathered round a wood-fire
on the hearth ; and while Ann dried herself at the blaze
her thoughts went again to the family at IsTew Leaf
Mills in anxiety for its safety; it seemed to her she
had been recreant to them all.
53
NEW LEAF MILLS
When the morning came, clear and cold after the
storm, she decided that they would go straight on to
the mills without stopping at Tuskingum; she did not
wish to impose upon Jessamy, she said. Her heart
did not go down, as she expected, at the sight of the
mills. Powell was waiting at the door of the cabin,
and the children ran out to welcome her and see what
she had brought them. She felt a glow of happiness
such as she had never known at ISTew Leaf before, and
she promised herself not to give way again.
" Well, I see it has done you good," Powell said,
with a look at her.
After a few days' cold the weather turned warm
again, and Felix came out sooner than Ann could have
hoped, and Jessamy came with him. He went with
Owen to the grist-mill, and looked it over with him;
he said he had found a Fourdrinier machine which
could be had cheap at second hand, and he would like
to see if it could be put in without too much change.
They came upon Overdale, who gave them no greeting
before he could lurk into his den. Felix did not notice
his rudeness, but it hurt Owen, who wished to be on
gentle terms with the whole world and had not his
brother's business preoccupations to defend him. On
their way back to the cabin he spoke of his vain efforts
to get into kindlier relations with the miller.
" I don't believe I'd worry about him, Owen," Pelix
said. " Of course, he thinks he will be out of a place
when we make the change, but we can work him into
our scheme somehow. I feel more hopeful about it
since I've looked over the mill."
" Do tell Ann so !" his brother entreated.
" I will. It's been a hard experience for Ann. She
ought to have some help in her work. She ought to
have a girl."
54
NEW LEAF MILLS
a
That's what I've been saying. I've been wondering
if you could find out where Rosy Hefmyer is."
Thev had come to the cabin, where the sisters-in-law
stood before the door in the sun. Ann was admiring
the fashions of the younger woman with unenvious
pleasure, asking where she got her bonnet and whether
she had trimmed it herself.
Felix called to her : " Ann, you remember that girl
of yours you liked so much — Rosy Hefmyer ?"
" Did Owen ask you to hunt her up ? It's too bad."
" No, he didn't ; but she's hunted herself up. She
came to me at the store. She wants to get somewhere
that her mother won't find her; she's just left a place
to get rid of her. I told her about you here ; and she's
crazy to come to you."
" Oh, Felix !" Ann could say no more ; but peni-
tence for all her impatience with Providence and her
husband glowed in her heart.
" I could have brought her with us to-day, but Jes-
samy thought there wasn't room for three in the buggy."
" Indeed, Ann, that wasn't the reason. I thought
you ought to have the chance of saying whether you
wanted her first, and I promised Mr. Powell " — for
so his wife always called Felix to himself as well as
others — "that I wouldn't tell you about it. And
have I?"
" Not a single word, Jessamy ; but if you had known
what a blessing it would be to me, you could have.
How can she get here, Felix ? When can she come ?"
" To-morrow, if you want. She can come by the
stage to Spring Grove, and you can send for her there,
can't you ?"
" Send ? I would go and carry her here." Ann had
got her breath now.
"Well, then, that's settled. Perhaps you'll like to
55
NEW LEAF MILLS
know that we can put the Fourdrinier machine into the
mill with very little change."
" You can ? And when — But I won't ask."
Felix smiled, with a cast of his eye at his brother.
" Owen's thought of some improvements he can make
in it alreadv."
" To be sure." Ann recognized the joke with a
laugh. " Well, it does seem as if the heavens were
opening."
" The Pit's been yawning a good while, Ann thinks.
She thinks it's time the heavens took their turn," Owen
said.
Jessamy watched her sister-in-law's face with shin-
ing eyes. She turned to her husband. " I didn't tell
her about the Fourdrinier machine, either."
" That's more self-denial than you asked of yourself,
Jessamy."
" I thought I'd better wait till you could see a place
for it in the mill."
" Well, Ann, I've found a second-hand machine, very
good and very cheap," Felix said.
She could only entreat him, " Oh, have you ?" and
then they all began to talk about it. They had talked
about the Fourdrinier machine so much that the
sisters-in-law believed they knew what it was like ;
the brothers really knew, and Owen knew best. He
explained that his improvements were no joke, and
specified them.
" Well, now, come in and have something to eat
before you go, if you must go," Ann said; and she
led the way indoors.
They had a joyful meal together. The little girls
helped their mother get it> and then asked to go with
their brothers and play Indians on the island. In the
talk the elders were left to themselves. Felix seemed
56
NEW LEAF MILLS
in no haste to leave; he and Owen recalled again the
jokes and joys of their boyhood.
When Felix rose from the table his wife said : " Now,
Ann, I'm going to ask you to let him lie down on your
bed a minute before we start. It does him so much
good to get a little nap after dinner."
" Oh, I don't need a nap," Felix protested.
But Ann said : " Take him right in, Jessamy. I'll
be redding up the table ; I won't make any noise."
In a little while Jessamy came out, leaving the
door ajar. " He wants me to sing," she said, in a
low voice. " I can't, very well, without the piano,
but—"
Owen cleared his throat; his wife thought he was
going to say he would accompany Jessamy on his harp,
and she frowned at him; Jessamy was swallowing as
if she were choking down a sob ; then she sang " The
Watcher " :
"A watcher pale and weary
Looked forth with anxious eye."
It was a song that every one sang in those days, a
wail of grief in which happy young people poured out
their joy. Jessamy sang it several times. When she
ended they none of them spoke for a while.
The sisters-in-law parted sadly; they said they did
not know why they should cry: everything was so
promising now. The brothers took leave with gay hope-
fulness.
Ann and Owen watched their guests across the tail-
race and out of sight. Then she asked, " How did you
think he looked, Owen ?"
" Why, uncommonly well."
" She's willing to have him come and live here now.
She thinks it will be better here than in town." She
57
NEW LEAF MILLS
scanned her husband's face. " Owen, Felix has had a
hemorrhage."
" A hemorrhage !" Powell's face twitched pitifully ;
then the light of temperamental hope glowed over it.
" Oh, well, it will be all right with him by spring. It
isn't as if it had been in the fall. And isn't it fortunate
he should have such a place as the mills to come to?
We must hurry forward the new house now. We can
easily take them in with us there."
" Yes," Ann said ; " there'll be no trouble about
that. But do hurry it, Owen ! It does seem to me you
have been such a long while about it. These delays,
they almost kill me."
" Yes, poor girl, I know that," Powell said. " De-
pend upon it, I'll hurry things forward." Ann went
into the other room and left him to cover the fire. His
heart ached for Felix, but he could not refuse the
comfort he found in the solid hickory chunk which he
saw would make a glorious bed of coals. When he had
bedded it deep in the ashes, he went to the cabin door
for a look at the night. The sky bristled with stars,
and he thought how the coals would bristle in the
morning. He felt the sweet unity of creation, the
little things and the great things, and he felt that life
and death in the measureless scheme were the same.
Ann, with her homesickness, was as important to the
Maker of the world as the largest of these flaming
planets ; He would care for her as He cared for them.
Powell looked across at the pretty place where the new
house was to stand, and he could almost see it stand-
ing there. Already Felix had come to them practically
well ; and they were all living there together, and New
Leaf Mills was fulfilling every promise of its imagined
usefulness.
There was a typical delay next morning when
Powell sent his eldest son to meet the stage at Spring
Grove and fetch Rosy Hefmyer. But it was not his
fault, exactly, that the only horse which consented to
be caught in the pasture for the service should be found
to have cast a shoe when she fell captive to a peck meas-
ure of bran. " You must drive fast, Richard," he
instructed his son, " so as not to keep Rosy waiting at
the Grove; she won't know what to do after the stage
gets in, but you must drive very carefully. Remember,
the mare has no shoe on her off hind foot. You'd better
go the river road; it's longer, but it's soft dirt the
whole way, and there are a good many stony spots on
the hill road."
With whatever speed he made, Richard did not get
back to the mills till Rosy had been there an hour.
She had come with Captain Bickler in his open buggy ;
he had found out at Spring Grove, where he had his
law-office, that she wanted to go to the mills, and, as
he was going that way, he brought her. He explained
the fact to Owen, who stood with his hand on the
buggy wheel talking politics with Bickler after thank-
ing him for his neighborly act. They did not disagree
widely. In his zeal for his own nomination for the
legislature Captain Bickler did not widely disagree
with any voter of the Whig ticket; and though Owen
would naturally have disliked a man who had got his
title of captain in the Mexican War, it was in Bickler's
5 59
NEW LEAF MILLS
favor that his company had been mustered in so late
that he never went to the front. What Owen wished
to make sure of was that Bickler favored a strong anti-
slavery platform for the Whig party at the next State
convention. There seemed no doubt of that, he reported
to his wife, while confessing his impression that Bickler
seemed rather a slippery character.
" Well, he's brought Rosy, at any rate," Ann said,
looking off to the hill where the girl was playing with
the children among the fallen leaves, which the sun of
the warm, dry spell had crisped again. " She's just
crazy about the place."
Ann's motherly heart had not ceased to glow with
the welcome she had given the girl when Eosy jumped
down from tne buggy and ignored her obligation to
Captain Bickler in her shy escape to Ann's arms. She
began to romp with the children as soon as she put
her little bundle of clothes into the house.
" I never expected to have you again, Rosy," the
mother said. " How well you do look !" she said the
next thing. She recognized the girl's beauty by this
tribute to her health: her blue, sweet eyes, her cheeks
like red peonies, and her smooth mass of yellow hair,
her firm, straight features, and her strong, full young
figure. She was rather short, but Mrs. Powell did not
notice that.
" Well, now, you'll feel more at home," Powell said
to his wife.
" Oh yes," she answered. " I have nothing to ask
for now. But we mustn't stand here talking. I won't
have a moment's peace till we get the frame of the new
house up. Do hurry the stuff out, Owen." She was
always saying something like that. " I declare, when
I think of Felix and Jessamy coming I can't wait. It
was like him to look Rosy up for me. He was thinking
60
NEW LEAF MILLS
of me when he ought to have been thinking of him-
self, poor boy."
" There is a great deal of Natural Good in Felix,"
Owen allowed.
He started toward the sawmill; and after a moment
of smiling silence Ann ran over to Kosy and the chil-
dren at the foot of the hill. She pretended to catch
up a stick from the ground as she came near, and she
called out : " You good-for-nothing things ! When do
you suppose we'll have dinner? And Kosy the worst
of you ! Come straight along home with you."
The children shrieked joyfully and ran before her.
Eosy stopped for her, panting. " Oh, Mrs. Powell,
it just sets me crazy; it's so nice here. It seems as if
I couldn't bear to go into the house yet. But I reckon
I got to. You don't want a hired girl to stay outdoors
and help your children play." She laughed at her
own joke, and brushed away the dead leaves which the
children had heaped over her dress.
Mrs. Powell took some twigs from the girl's tumbled
hair. " Indeed, indeed, I'd like to play with you all
myself. But I suppose you'd better come and see
where we're going to put you. I don't believe you'll
think it's indoors much. It's a good thing we had
anywhere for you, but I've been at Mr. Powell ever
since we came to put up an outside kitchen for me, and
that's where you're going to live; he only got it done
last week, and there's no stove in it yet. When we get
the stove I reckon you'll have to camp out in the corn-
field."
" Well, I wouldn't like anything better. It seems
like as if it was summer a'ready."
" Yes, it's been so for three or four days now. I
heard a blackbird this morning. But he'll be sorry he
came yet."
61
NEW LEAF MILLS
" Yes, the birds don't know everything about the
seasons. They're just as apt as not to take a warm
spell for summer. Why, it ain't Easter yet."
" Well, the children are beginning to talk about
coloring eggs."
" I'll be bound they are. Mrs. Powell, I speak to
cover the calico eggs. I've got some pieces my cousin
Polly give me that '11 make the nicest pattern for eggs
you ever saw."
" I won't interfere with you," Ann assented. " But
now come and see where you are going to live."
She led Rosy through the cabin and out of the back
door, where Powell had knocked together, as he said,
a rude lean-to of slabs for a summer kitchen, and open-
ing out of this at one side a small room where a cot-bed
was placed under the window.
" Why, it's great, Mrs. Powell," the girl said, taking
note of a washstand and looking-glass, and the pegs to
hang her clothes on. " I just wisht Polly ISTairns could
see it. She hain't got anything half like it on the
canal-boat; she has to sleep right in the very kitchen,
almost on top of the stove."
Ann looked the joyous girl over with a new sense
of her young beauty. " Well, I'll just tell you what,
Rosy; I'll never let you sleep here in the world. It
isn't the place for you. We'll put the boys in here,
and you can have the loft."
" Oh, Mrs. Powell !" the girl lamented. " What did
you get it ready for me for, if you didn't mean to let
me have it?"
Ann faltered as to what she should say. Then she
said : " You don't know what an awful pack some
of them are around here. I always thought of you
as you used to be. But you're — you're grown up,
Rosy."
62
NEW LEAF MILLS
" Well, just as you say, Mrs. Powell," Rosy com-
plied, demurely.
" Rosy," Mrs. Powell said, while she hesitated still,
" have you seen your mother lately ?"
" Not since the place before last. But I knowed
she was on the track of me, and that's why I was so
glad to get here. Why, I just broke down and cried
when your sister-in-law ast if I would like to live with
you. It was at market, and I couldn't hardly wait till
I could get home and tell Mrs. Linsey I was goin' to
leave. She knows about mother, and she was real nice
when she understood."
" I hope Polly is keeping straight."
" Oh yes. It ain't very nice being on the boat with
the men, do you think; but the captain he looks after
her."
" Rosy, it seems dreadful for me to ask you to warn
her against your mother."
" Oh, that's all right, Mrs. Powell. Polly 'd never
tell her where I am."
" I didn't mean that exactly."
" Yes, I understand, Mrs. Powell. But Polly knows
how to take care of herself a good sight better'n I do."
Ann drew a long breath. " Well, now, we must see
about dinner."
She could not refuse the great relief that came into
her heart; the clouds that had filled her home-bound
heaven broke and drifted off to the far horizon of the
outer world, and with the girl, who eagerly took up
the household work, she could not refuse some share in
Powell's enjoyment of a thing that happened a few days
later, though it was a thing that had struck terror to
her heart while it was happening.
Owen had gone to one of the outlying farms to make
favor for some turnips, and she was standing at the
63
NEW LEAF MILLS
cabin door waiting to see him come out of the woods on
the rise of the eastward hill, when the team emerged
at a speed which she had never known in either the
horse or driver before. They came flying over the
intervening distances, and as they seemed to flash by
her she was aware of Powell rocking helpless on the
seat and the reins, which had escaped his hands, drag-
ging on the road under the horse's feet. The horse
whirled round the corner of the cabin dooryard into
the open space before the grist-mill, and there, as in
a mystical vision, she was aware of Overdale at the
head of the horse, as if he had leaped from his place
at the door of the second story, while Powell appeared
softly to bound from the wagon and light on his feet.
The rest of the event was solely of Powell's experience,
for as soon as Ann saw him safe on the ground she
ran into the cabin and sank down sick.
When he came to reassure her, he was laughing, and
he justified his amusement as the effect of Overdale's
characteristic behavior. " When he decided that I
wasn't killed, or even seriously scared, he said, ' Now,
dern you, we're even,' and he gave me the reins and
turned his back on me and went into the mill."
Powell laughed again, shaking his shoulders and
nodding his head up and down as his fashion was, but
Ann would not join him at once. " What did he mean
by that ?" she asked, conditionally.
" Why, you know," Powell explained, struggling
with his delight, " you know he had never felt just
right about my pulling his boy out of the water. I
could see that it was worrying him all along. He felt
that he ought to say something civil about it, but he
didn't know how, and he didn't want to, besides. It
would have been like giving up his grudge against us.
Well, as luck would have it, he thought he had saved
34
NEW LEAF MILLS
my neck, and so we were quits. It's deliciously like
the fellow."
Powell laughed again, but his wife frowned before
she smiled.
" Why do you say he thought he saved you ? He
did save you."
" Oh, there wasn't the least danger ! I was intend-
ing to roll out at the first soft spot I came to."
" You were a long time coming to it, Owen."
" Yes ; I hadn't made up my mind about the softness
even at the last."
He laughed now at his own humorous notion of him-
self; he found that as characteristic as the miller's
behavior; Ann made a despairing click of her tongue
in her perplexity with the man who through their whole
married life had puzzled her by the provisional levity
tempering his final seriousness. At the moment, now,
he turned serious, as much interested in another phi-
losophy of the case which suggested itself as he had
been in its grotesque phase.
" I shouldn't be at all surprised if it worked out
favorably, on the whole. Whether there was any real
danger or not, Overdale believes he's done me a good
turn, and he's relieved of the gratitude toward me
which has been embittering him. At the same time
he has involved himself in the obligation which binds
us in kindness toward those we have benefited. If
he's saved my neck, as you think, he can't help feeling
friendlier toward me from that fact alone."
" Well," Ann said, " let us hope so. You'll want
your dinner now. But let me brush you. You're all
dust."
" And I think I had better wash up a little," Powell
said, going before her into the kitchen, where she fol-
lowed him, plying the whisk-broom on his shoulders.
XI
At their next meeting Overdale did not pass Powell
in surly avoidance so promptly as lie usually did. He
looked at him with a sort of novel interest, as if he
might have seen something in him which had not caught
his eye before. He said nothing, and Powell thought
it best not to renew the offer of his gratitude for the
miller's timely aid; that was what he now called it to
himself. But he halted the man, who, after the first
hesitation, would have slouched by him with the peck
measure of corn under his arm on the way to feed his
pigs. " Mr. Overdale," he said, " I suppose you know
we are going to put in the paper machinery as soon as
we can make the necessary changes. ISTo, wait a mo-
ment," he hurried on at sight of the frown darkening
the miller's white face. " I want to say now what I
have wanted to say from the outset, that in any change
we make we hope to keep you here with us. Pm not
sure that we can't keep something of the flouring ap-
paratus," the notion flashed into Owen's hopeful mind,
" but, whether we can or not, we want you to stay on,
somehow. This is my brother's wish as well — as well
as my-
" You tell your brother," the miller blazed out, " to
go to hell."
" Oh, come, come," Powell reasoned. " Let us con-
sider this matter in its true light. I've wanted to have
an opportunity to talk it over with you ever since I
came here, for I know — "
66
NEW LEAF MILLS
:.
For half a cent," the miller blazed out again, " I'd
knock your head off." But in spite of his furious words
his tone was helplessly provisional.
" After just saving my neck ? You ought to ask
more," Powell said ; and he smiled so kindly that Over-
dale, who glowered still, might well have been moved
by the joke. But he shifted the peck measure to his
left side and pressed close, pushing his floury visage
almost against Powell's face and lifting his fist. The
man who had never been in any danger that he knew
of did not believe that the miller was going to strike
him. " I think," he argued, placidly, " that we can
come to an understanding that will be of mutual ad-
vantage if we once reach it. I am not aware of ever
harboring ill feeling toward you, and if I had I couldn't
do so now. But apparently there is something on your
mind against my brothers and me — me more especially,
as I'm their representative here. Should you mind
frankly saying what it is ?"
"You keep away from me!" Overdale shouted.
" I'll kill you some day."
" I don't believe you will. Perhaps you really
meant to kill me the first night I was here, but you
didn't ; and after what happened yesterday I feel pretty
safe with you; in fact, you've just thrown away a
chance that would have relieved you of responsibility.
When it came to the point, you wouldn't even let the
pony kill me."
" Do you suppose — curse you! — I done it for you?"
"No, you did it for your little boy; I understood
that perfectly, and I accepted it on those terms. But
what I am trying to get at is the thing you have on
your mind against us. If we could sit down some-
where— " Powell looked about him for the log or
fence-rail which commonlv offered itself for the con-
'67
NEW LEAF MILLS
venience of talk at New Leaf Mills, but he found none
near, and he was afraid Overdale would escape him if
they moved from the spot where they were.
" I don't want to set down nowheres," the miller
said, but he did not go. It was as if the gentle phi-
losopher held him by a mesmeric spell.
" Oh, well, we can as easily talk standing," Powell
lightly put the point aside. " I'm not aware of having
offered you any personal offense. Have I ?"
" Who said vou had ?"
" Well, I'm glad you don't think I have. Then the
question is whether we've done you some sort of injury
by buying the mills ?"
" No, you hain't, unless the Larrabees told you I
wanted 'em."
" They never did."
" If I had 'em by the scruff of the neck and could
crack their heads together — "
" Mind, I don't say that we shouldn't have bought
them in any case."
" Then, what the hell—"
" But we never meant to put you out of your place
here. We have intended nothing but good by this whole
neighborhood, and from the fact that we have gladly
kept you on here — "
Overdale snorted disdainfully. " You knowed dern
well you couldn't 'a' got along without me."
" Yes, we knew that. But now you see that when
we could get on without you we still wish you to stay.
We wish you to be one of us, to be in charge of the
paper-mill, if possible, as you have been in charge of
the grist-mill. Now, what is on your mind ?"
The shame for his secret could not show its red
through the flour of the miller's face; but he dropped
his eyes, turning his head first this way and then that.
68
NEW LEAF MILLS
Whatever longing was in his heart to free itself, he
quelled it.
" Mrs. Overdale," Powell continued, " asked my wife
the other day what I had against you. If I can con-
vince vou that I have only the kindest feeling toward
you-"
Overdale gave a formless bark. He showed his under
teeth as a dog does ; he squared his shoulders and
pushed against Powell. " You git out o' my road."
Powell stood aside. " Well, some other time when
you're more in the mood for it. I won't press the
matter now."
He praised himself for his forbearance when he re-
ported the incident to his wife, who could only give a
gasp of relief at the conclusion.
" I watched you talking with him," Ann said. She
was seldom of a satiric mood with the man whose phil-
osophic mind held her respect even when it passed
her patience, but now she added, " Did he seem to like
you better because he had saved your life ?"
" Oh, he didn't save my life." Powell was constant
in his insistence on the point. " But apparently he
doesn't like me any better for his having stopped the
pony. At one moment I certainly thought he was going
to strike me."
" I thought so too," Ann said. " My heart was in
my mouth."
" There wasn't the least danger, however, as it turned
out." Then Powell began to laugh in the way that tried
her so.
" What is it now ?" she required of him.
" Oh, I was thinking of the effect in myself of bear-
ing with his violence. Whatever his feeling toward
me was, I was aware of liking him better because I was
still wishing to do him good in spite of himself. If
69
NEW LEAF MILLS
he had really knocked me over " — Powell pursued his
notion to its climax with joy in its absurdity — " I sup-
pose I should have become his friend for life. There
was no danger of his striking me," he assured Ann
again, " but now I shall have to fall back upon general
principles. I shall have to love Overdale along with
the rest of our neighbors; and certainly a more de-
testable crew never appealed to a man's best feelings.
I shall be glad when we get the paper machinery in
and begin actively doing them good. If we don't do it
soon, I shall feel like packing up and leaving them to
their evils."
" That is the way I have felt all along, Owen," Ann
said, grimly. " But we can't think of that now. If
Felix is coming here to live we must surely stay, no
matter what happens. We must hurry everything for-
ward and have the new house ready for him before
the summer begins. Oh, when I think how the thing
has lagged along, it seems as if I must put it up with
my own hands !"
" Well, I think the neighbors will help with the
frame when they see you lifting those heavy sills, and
Rosy and the children tugging the studs and scantling
to you." He mocked her, but he ended, as always, with
the earnest cheer, which she ended by accepting with
the trust which his hopefulness compelled. " Now
that you've got Rosy you won't even have to call on
the neighbors' wives to cook the dinner for the raising."
70
XII
The Powells had forecast the raising in every detail
months before the day came, and after the masons had
put in the foundation their fancy was busy completing
the structure. It was the custom for the builders of
a new house to ask the whole neighborhood to the rais-
ing. The invitation went out by word, direct or in-
direct, as convenience served. Those who were spoken
to carried the message to those unspoken, and in re-
sponse the farmers came to put the skeleton of the
house together and leave it for the carpenters to line
with sheathing and clothe on with clapboards and
shingles; and the farmers' wives came to help cook
the feast which rewarded the labors of the day. Ann
proudly felt herself equal to deal single-handed with
the quality of the feast, but the quantity, she knew
from the beginning, was beyond her, and there she was
aware she must not fail, under pain of an indefinite
increase of the unpopularity which she knew that she
shared with Powell. With Posy's help no one could
cook a better meal, but three times their joint efficiency
would not suffice for the meal which must be cooked.
She must rely upon the favor of her neighbors, but she
could ask it by implication only in asking them to the
raising.
She and her husband agreed about this necessity,
as they agreed about the necessity of asking the men.
They got on confidently enough in the details till they
NEW LEAF MILLS
came to a point where Powell sometimes seemed to
waver and Ann always stood firm. The point was
whether they should provide the whiskey, which was the
free drink at raisings, or should offer unstinted coffee
of a compensating strength, and of a brew which Ann
was willing publicly to stake her housewifely reputa-
tion on.
" You know, Ann, I have never been a teetotaler,"
he teased.
" When have you ever drunk anything ?"
" That is true ; but I mean a teetotaler on prin-
ciple."
" Well, you have never been an Abolitionist, but you
have always been opposed to the extension of slavery,
haven't you?"
" Yes, but I don't see — "
" Yes, Owen, you know yon do. You want to restrict
drunkenness, and though you may not be a teetotaler,
you can't do that unless you stop the drinking."
Powell enjoyed her logic, but he could not forbear
making her observe a break in it. " I am in favor of
confining slavery to the present slave States, or against
carrying it into Territories now free. On the same
principle I ought to let the old topers get as drunk as
they like, while I deny whiskey to those who have
never been drunk. Suppose we let it be known that
there is a jug for those who have the habit of it, and
coffee for those who haven't."
" Now, Owen !" Ann cried, charmed with his joking,
but vexed with him for it.
" Well, let us compromise, then ; no whiskey for any-
body; hard cider for everybody."
" Have you ever been in favor of compromising with
slavery? They can get drunk on hard cider as well as
on whiskev; you know thev can."
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" Well, not so fighting drunk. Unless we let some
of them get peaceable drunk, we won't have a friend in
the neighborhood when the day's over."
" Nonsense ! Elder Griswell never lets them have
anything but molasses water in the harvest field."
" And is the neighborhood full of his friends ?"
Powell saw that he had carried victory beyond its limits.
" Oh, well," he gave way, " have your old coffee then.
But I shall reserve the privilege of getting drunk in
private before I begin the day. What else are you going
to have for the feast ?"
" Never you mind ; I'll see to that. Just keep your
jug to yourself ; that's all I ask."
" I may offer Overdale a swig ?"
" Overdale has a jug of his own."
" I've sometimes suspected as much," Powell said ;
and he went away lifting his shoulders and shaking
with the fun.
He came back to say, seriously : " I think we had
better make a special point of asking Bladen. He is
the decentest man in the neighborhood, and his coming-
would give the occasion dignity in the eyes of the world
here that nothing else would."
" I didn't know that you cared for the world any-
where, Owen."
" ]STo, I don't. But this is a matter in which we
ought to put our best foot forward, and he seems our
best foot."
" Well, make your special point, then."
They had other hopeful talks of it before the day
of the raising, and their children shared the talks with
them. Rosy was like one of the children; she made
no claim, as the others did, for special recognition in
the arrangement of the rooms, but she freely gave her
opinion. She was for conformity to the house-kite
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NEW LEAF MILLS
house, as she called the gambrel-roof pattern which had
been the shape of the house where she first lived out
and which all the best kites were modeled upon. While
the father and mother sat with the plan of the house
on the table before them in the lamplight, and the
children hung upon the backs of their chairs looking
over at it, Rosy went and came in and out of the shed
kitchen humming to herself as she carried her dishes
to the cupboard and stopping to glance down at the
map. She interrupted the humming when she spoke,
and began humming again when she had spoken. She
gave the effect of perfect freedom while preserving an
attitude of non-intervention, of being a friend of the
family, but not a member of it.
Powell noticed how, with her shortness and straight-
ness, she had yet a sort of stiff grace which expressed
an inner rhythm and timed itself to the staccato tune
she was humming. One night as he was winding his
watch he said to his wife, " Rosy seems very happy."
" Yes," Ann consented, " she seems happy," and she
sighed.
" What do you mean by that ?"
" She is very headstrong. She's not a little girl
any more. She has her own ideas; it's hard to move
her ; I have to manage very carefully with her."
" About her work ?"
" About herself. There was never one like her to
work; we are both agreed about the work; she knows
my way, and all she wants is to do it."
"Well, then?"
" She's flattered."
" Well, she ought to be, with the way you pet
her."
" Owen, have you seen that man lately to talk to ?
That Captain Bickler ?"
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" Why, no. Not since he came with the brooch he
thought Rosy had lost in the buggy."
" He never thought she lost it there."
" Then why—" "
" That's what I don't like. If he wanted to see the
child, why didn't he come and ask without making up
that excuse and bringing her a present ?"
" Well, I suppose he's shamefaced if he fancies her.
Do you think he does ?" There was no reason in
Powell's scheme of life why Captain Bickler should
not fancy a girl like Rosy and be shamefaced about
it; that was right and in the nature of things; but
now with his wife's vision he pierced below the sur-
face.
" I've got the brooch now."
" But you told me she gave it back to him."
" Yes, I know."
" Then he's been seeing her."
" Yes, more than I supposed. He's been coming by
here in his electioneering, and he's talked with Rosy
when she was out with the children on the other side
of the hill. He stops to talk with her, and the children
get tired and go off playing. She told me about it,
and gave me the brooch. He made her take it the other
evening when he was passing by and we were out with
the children in the flatboat; we ought to have taken
Rosy. I had to speak very plainly to her, and I'll give
him his brooch the first time I see him."
" Oh, well, I don't know," Owen demurred.
" Why don't you know ? Haven't you always mis-
trusted him ?"
" Yes, but I've had no real grounds."
" Has he got round you by pretending to think as
you do about the State platform ? I heard him flat-
tering you up that day while his eyes followed Rosv
6 75
NEW LEAF MILLS
whenever she came into the room. And his pretending
to be interested in the Doctrines !"
" We have no right to treat him as if he were guilty
till he has done something wrong."
" Well, now he has done something wrong. He has
made Rosy take that brooch in spite of us, Owen. Any
man in the world but you would see that he was com-
ing here just to amuse himself with Rosy, and to get
you to use your political influence to send delegates to
the county convention that will vote for him."
Now Powell thought he had reason to laugh. " My
influence with Bellam ?"
" Your influence with all the decent people in the
neighborhood, and your influence with everybody ex-
cept Overdale and his crew, as soon as it's certain that
the paper machinery is going in. But I don't say that
he's here on your account ; it's on Rosy's. He's taken
with her."
" Why, naturally he admires her."
" Oh !" Ann broke out at the end of her patience.
" Certainly you are the most trying man !"
" What excuse did he make to her when he brought
the brooch ?"
" He didn't make any. He said he wanted her to
have it whether she had lost it or not; he said he
couldn't think of any one else to give it to."
" Did she tell you that ?"
" Yes. And of course it flattered her, poor child."
" Have you got it here ?" Ann took it out of her
pocket. " You have dealt with Rosy," Powell said,
reaching his hand for it. " I will deal with Captain
Bickler."
" I can't trust you. I will do it."
" That wouldn't be dignified, Ann."
" Will you be plain with him ?"
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" I will use fairly clear dictionary English with
him," Powell said, beginning to joke again, now that
he had the brooch in his keeping. He looked down at
it in his palm and turned it over. " It doesn't seem
to be a great many carats fine. But I dare say Rosy
isn't a judge of jewelry. Or Bickler either, for that
matter." Powell hated the duty before him, but it was
his duty, and not Ann's, as she now perceived too.
XIII
Powell was reluctant to think evil of any one, and
his early want of perspective in the world made it
hard for him to imagine a design of wrong from one
social level to another. In the new country to which
his family had first come, from the Old World in his
own generation, he had not seen much of those differ-
ences ; his father had left the Old World in abhorrence
of the conditions which perpetuated social inequality
there, and Powell had been taught by precept, if not
practice, that such conditions were wicked and inhu-
man. His reading as a boy had been largely in the
English poetry, where the life of simple villagers and
rustics was celebrated as the ideal, and the cruelty of
the Great was ascribed to the unjust structure of so-
ciety. After his reading began to be so exclusively in
the Doctrines, the questions of mundane difference sank
more and more out of sight; they would settle them-
selves as man's conduct grew more in accord with the
Interior Sense of the Word.
Powell left his wife at the cabin busy with some
work which she undertook after calling : " Rosy ! Oh,
Rosy ! I wonder where that girl is /" and then setting
about it alone, with the comforting conclusion, " Off
with the children somewhere, I suppose." She was
inclined to be the less severe with Rosy because of the
severity she had been obliged to use with her about the
brooch, and she was glad to find her a child still with
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NEW LEAF MILLS
the other children; she did not want her to feel her-
self grown up.
" I will look for them on my way to Bladen's,"
Powell promised. " I want to see if he has any winter
apples left."
" I wish we could get some dried peaches to make
pies for the raising," his wife said, casually, at part-
ing; the raising had taken the first place among her
cares already.
He walked southward by the road that curved round
the hill and continued on to Spring Grove after it left
the hill behind. But it was at the bottom of the hill
that by a sudden turn he chanced upon Captain Bickler
sitting his horse at the roadside next the river and look-
ing up the shore over a growth of tall pawpaw bushes
which covered it there. He was handsomely dressed
in his one fine broadcloth suit, and he had an effect
of military gallantry, with his slender, graceful figure
showing itself above his horse's neck as he stood up in
his stirrups.
" Any pheasants over there ?" Powell called to him
for salutation.
" How do you do, Mr. Powell ?" the young man
called back, as he dropped into his saddle ; and he rode
forward and leaned over to give Powell his hand.
" Why, no. I don't know what it was exactly," he
added. " I was just going up to your place. I think
I've got some news that will please you. The Capital
City Whig says — I've got yesterday's paper — that there
will be no doubt of that anti-fugitive slave law plank
going into the platform at the State convention. I've
thought so all along myself. I want you to remember
that, Mr. Powell."
Powell smiled ; he saw no reason why he should not
give himself that pleasure and still do his duty in be-
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NEW LEAF MILLS
half of his wife. He took the paper from Bickler, who
was holding his thumb at a certain place in it, and
read it with satisfaction in its fact and in his own
respite. " Yes, the Whig has always been on the right
side. I didn't know you had," he said, giving the paper
back with a sharper glance up at Bickler.
" Oh yes, I have," the young man answered. " It
won't do to go too fast if you want to keep your in-
fluence in a community like this. It's all well enough
for you, Mr. Powell ; you've got a different sort of hold,
but I have to feel my way. That's why I wouldn't like
to say just where I stand at present to everybody ; but
you'll find me in the right place when the time
comes. All well at home? It does me good every
time I see Mrs. Powell. She's about the nicest lady
I know."
" Thank you, we are all very well," Powell answered,
provisionally.
Bickler continued, with increasing smoothness:
" That's a great book you lent me. I want to keep
it a while longer and go through it carefully. It's
a wonder how he maps the other world out. Makes
this world seem all at sixes and sevens."
Bickler laughed ingratiatingly; and Powell asked,
" Do you mean that he makes too much of a map of
the other world ? That has been objected by some."
" I don't know if I should say that, exactly," Bickler
answered. " But that idea of the spiritual world being
all in the shape of a Grand Man, with the different
spirits in the different parts according to their being
good or bad — well, some might say that was funny."
" I see nothing funny in it," Powell began, resent-
fully ; and Bickler made haste to save himself.
" Oh, I don't mean funny in the ridiculous sense. I
mean strange and — and new; that's all."
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" I think I can make it appear to you in its true
light," Powell said, putting his hand on the neck of
Bickler's horse and caressing it with a mounting kind-
ness for Bickler himself. " We are so used to thinking
of Heaven as in the sky over our heads and Hell as a
pit under our feet that it is hard for us to conceive of
them otherwise; but a very little reflection will con-
vince you that the topography — if I may so express it —
of the spiritual world is much more reasonably repre-
sented by our human figure, which was made in the
likeness of the Divine."
From time to time the young man said, " Yes, yes,"
and, " To be sure," and, " I reckon you're right." The
horse stamped in the soft road, and sent gentle shivers
over its silken surface, and tossed its fine head up and
down, jingling its bit.
Powell at last took his hand away, saying, " You
cannot go amiss if you look at it in the light of the
Science of Correspondences."
Bickler assented with a sigh : " I'll keep that in
mind. It's a mighty new idea. But now about the
two delegates from this township to the county con-
vention. Can I count on your support if I arrange to
have you sent as one of them ?"
" Yes, certainly," Powell assented, with the cordiality
due a man who had shown such an intelligent interest
in the matters he had laid before Bickler. " But I
ought to say that I don't think there is the least prob-
ability of my being sent. It may be different after we
get the paper machinery in and the neighbors see that
we mean to be as good as our word, but at present I
realize that I am anything but popular in the neighbor-
hood."
Bickler laughed the notion away. " Why, Mr.
Powell, there's never been a man here more respected.
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NEW LEAF MILLS
You'll see, when the people turn out to your raising.
When is the raising to be ?"
" Just as soon as we can bring matters to a head
with the carpenters, and my brother Felix can arrange
to be with us. He's winding up his business as fast
as he can, and I am in hopes that my other brothers
can join us soon. By the way, there's a point on which
I should like to consult you ; my wife and I have dif-
fered about it somewhat. But I have detained you long
enough already."
" Well, I am in something of a hurry, that's a fact,"
the young man said. " But any time I can be of service
to you — "
He indicated with a large flourish that he was at
Powell's disposition. " For the time being, as between
Mrs. Powell and you, we'll leave it that I'm on Mrs.
Powell's side." He laughed at his joke, and it was
something that Powell could not refuse to enjoy.
" Oh, I believe I'm on her side too," he said ; and
now the young man laughed again, and shook his rein,
and his horse ambled awav.
At Mrs. Powell's coming into the talk, something
came into her husband's mind, but too warily for him
to seize it. When Bickler was almost out of sight, and
quite beyond earshot, he realized that he had not given
him back the brooch.
He followed vaguely homeward in the same direction,
wondering what he should say to his wife. When he
came in sight of her standing at the cabin door, she
called to him, " Did you ask the Bladens about the
dried peaches ?"
" I declare," he said, stopping short with the relief
a man finds in balancing one trouble against another,
" I forgot all about the Bladens. I'll go right back — "
" No, no," she said, coming out to him. " I've en-
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NEW LEAF MILLS
gaged some from Hurvey ; he just went by. But where
in the world have you been all this time ?"
Then Powell had to confess what he felt to be the
greater guilt of his other forgetfulness. When they
had talked it over, Ann said, disappointedly, " Oh,
well, you can do it the next time you meet him. I do
hope that no harm will come from the delay."
" Oh, there isn't the least danger," Owen answered,
light-hearted at escaping so easily.
" Better let me have the brooch. I'll remember to
give it to Captain Bickler," his wife suggested.
" No, Ann. It's for me to do it. And I shall cer-
tainly not forget another time."
XIV
The children came home together, and directly after-
ward Rosy appeared alone.
"Why, Rosy," Mrs. Powell called out to her, "I
thought you and the children went off together."
The eldest of the little girls answered for her. " So
we did, mother, but Rosy wanted to go and see what
was in the pawpaws by the river-bank, and we were
afraid. We thought Rosy had got lost."
Rosy laughed. " I came up over the hill. I'll get
you the water."
She went toward Mrs. Powell, who still had the tea-
kettle in her hand on the way to the well. There was
something evasive in her looks, which arrested Ann in
a sort of distraction. " Well, you may, Rosy. I'm
about beat out with this hot weather. I don't feel as
if I could go near that stove. ISTow you set the table,
children," she commanded her little ones.
" Oh, mother, we hate to go in yet," they pleaded,
through the eldest girl. " Can't we have supper over
by the new house ?" The other children stood with
their hands ready to clap and their feet to jump into
the air at her consent.
The younger boys counted with the little girls in the
family. Richard almost counted with his father and
mother ; he shared his mother's cares ; his next brother,
who somewhat darkled after him, had an ideal of devo-
tion to her which he realized in many reveries. The
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NEW LEAF MILLS
eldest of the girls was like Richard; she had been a
third hand for her mother about the house, but now
that Eosy had come she became one of the little girls
again. She played with them in the tall rows of rust-
ling corn stretching far away in the eighty-acre field
behind the cabin; she helped them build little cabins
of twigs over the wild flowers ; they all painted gloves
on their hands with mulberry juice. Richard loved
adventure ; he wished to go to California and dig gold ;
his brother liked dreaming of himself in stately and
splendid characters and situations, but he hated the
trouble of any active undertaking; once when he went
to visit his uncle in Tuskingum and see the boys he
used to know he was deathly homesick. But the
brothers were as good friends as elder and younger
brothers usually are.
The island was the mystery and the desire of all the
children; the boys had their Indian fights there, and
they could go for a drink of well-water, when they
were heated in battle, to Bellam's cabin; Mrs. Bellam
drew the water with a bucket at the end of a long pole,
and gave it to them in a gourd dipper. Richard was
the friend and companion of Bellam in the sawmill ; he
helped him there; and Bellam helped the boys build
the tent-shaped hut of boards their father planned for
kiln-drying the flooring for the new house; sometimes
he sat up with Richard at night, and when the boy fell
asleep Bellam shifted the boards and kept the fire
going good and hot in the big oblong stove which they
used for seasoning the lumber.
He liked to talk about the raising, and was as eager
for it as the Powells themselves. He told just what
he should do, and bespoke certain duties and privi-
leges. Among the men in the neighborhood he most
truly valued Powell and honored him; he said, when-
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NEW LEAF MILLS
ever he could get any one to look at his thumb, that he
reckoned if it had not been for Mr. Powell he would
not have had any thumb by that time. He was welcome
to Mrs. Powell in the cabin ; when it came once to her
offering him her cane-seat rocking-chair he said, " If
I had a cheer like this, I'd stay at home all Sunday
and rock."
A few weeks before the time fixed for the raising in
August, what people called the flux broke out, and
many were sick. One of the Bellam children was taken,
and then another, till all were taken. Lizzie Bladen
and Richard helped their father and mother nurse them,
sitting up through the night in the hot little single
room of the cabin, and all but one of the children died
in turn. Richard watched with the dead, a thing his
brother could not have done to save himself alive;
and Lizzie Bladen shared his watch, and walked home
with him in the dim dawns across the island and
through the sawmill.
It came Bellam's own turn, and he was very sick for
a week ; then he seemed to be getting well ; but in the
early morning when his wife and Richard were lift-
ing him to make him more comfortable on his pillow
he fell back and died. Mrs. Bellam said : " Now he'll
be so disapp'inted about the raisin'. Be 'lowed all
along to do the most of it hisself, by his tell." That
night Richard could not keep himself from telling his
brother about it, and how solemn it seemed coming home
with Lizzie Bladen. If it had not been for her not being
afraid he said he could not have stood it. His brother
listened with his tongue cleaving to the roof of his
mouth, and silent in the horror of an experience which
his fancy made tenfold his own. He knew that twenty
Lizzie Bladens with twenty times her courage would
not have helped him stand such a thing as seeing a man
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NEW LEAF MILLS
die. His brother slept, but the vision of what his
brother had seen filled the dark of the cabin loft for
the boy.
Bellam was buried beside the new graves of his
children in the neglected place on the hill which Powell
had not yet got the stuff out for fencing, in his pre-
occupation with the material for the new house. The
minister at Spring Grove was sick, and could not come ;
Powell felt it would be a sacrilege to let Elder Griswell
perform the service at the grave ; he took the duty upon
himself, and he had a peculiar joy in using the New
Church Book of Worship. He always said that one
ought not to proselyte, but in the remarks he made he
contrived to bring in a good deal of the Doctrines, and
apparently no one felt the worse for them, if they were
none the wiser. The chance use of a passage from
Revelation suggested the peculiar applicability of the
Science of Correspondences to the mysteries of that
book, and Powell branched off at some length on the in-
terpretation of the words he had quoted. He recognized
with humorous consciousness that his excursion had the
more interest with his hearers because it involved an
exposition of the spiritual sense of the word horse ; but
afterward he blamed himself for yielding to his op-
portunity, and he could not make Ann say she had
liked it. At the close he announced that out of respect
for the dead the raising, which would be a kind of
frolic, was postponed for the present. He spoke of
the great interest which Bellam had taken in the build-
ing of the new house, and how touching it had been
for him to know this. Mrs. Bellam shed tears, and
whispered to the neighbor at her elbow : " Just what
I tole Richard. He'll be so disapp'inted, s'd I."
The whole countryside came to Bellam's funeral,
which was the climax of the general affliction; with
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NEW LEAF MILLS
his death the epidemic began to abate, and with some
cool days toward the end of August it disappeared.
Overdale did not come to the funeral, but he showed his
white mask at the mill door as the procession passed,
and then went in and shut off the water, so that the
mill was silent at the time of the burial. When the
people came away, the mill was running again, and,
some of them thought, furiously. They said in the low
tones to which the recent solemnity had reduced their
utterance that they reckoned Overdale had been at his
jug again; they moralized the fact as a great pity for
so smart a man as he was when sober.
Captain Bickler arrived too late for the funeral; he
had been electioneering in another part of the county;
and he told Powell he was truly sorry, for he would
have liked to address the friends. It was an occasion
which he might have hoped to improve politically, per-
haps, but Powell was himself so moved by the whole
affair that he could not make the ironical comment
which tempted him. The sight of Bickler reminded
him of the brooch which he had not yet returned to
him; he felt in his waistcoat pocket for it, and he was
rather glad to find that he had left it in his week-day
clothes; it would have been no more the occasion for
its return than for the irony which he forebore.
Though he had postponed the raising out of respect
for Bellam, he had done so with a reluctance which Ann
more than half shared with him. Felix and Jessamy
had arranged to come out to the raising on the date
fixed, and now Ann was afraid that they might not be
able to come. But there was no help for it, and Powell
held so strongly to their coming, if they possibly could,
that he almost convinced Ann they would be sure to
come.
XV
In her borrowed trust Ann gave herself so entirely
to the cares and labors which now fell to her that the
days went by without her duly noticing the absence
of any further word from Jessamy. When the time
came for the raising, on a bright Saturday of Septem-
ber, she was so much more distracted that she accepted
without the bitter regret which it would have brought
to her in a freer mind the fact that Jessamy and Felix
were really not coming. They sent out with their let-
ter a basket of baker's cakes, such as only the town
could supply, with oranges up from Kew Orleans, and
a bag of coffee to indemnify Ann for the coffee she
must not stint for the raising. Jessamy wrote that
Felix was not quite well enough to come, but she would
write soon again; and in the excitement of applying
their gifts to the feast, and the confusion of the time,
Ann did not remember to grieve enough for him till the
whole affair was over. She had made coffee by gallons ;
and there were crisp crusted chicken pies, wide and
deep, which she baked in the brick out-oven in her milk-
pans, and served smoking-hot with plates of cold ham
and cold tongue, and platters of hot shortened bis-
cuit, and bread and butter; it was the time for new
apples, and dishes of apple-sauce alternated with the
plates and platters.
The table was contrived of boards stretched on the
carpenters' trestles, and the cold things were placed
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NEW LEAF MILLS
on it early in the day and covered with mosquito-netting
against the flies, after due debate with Rosy and the
little girls, indulged in minor details hut overruled in
the great essentials. Some of the farm wives had come
to help, and Lizzie Bladen came with her father. He
lent all the consequence to the affair that Powell had
hoped, and here and there he helped a little. Lizzie
helped a great deal, in spite of the flourishing politeness
of Captain Bidder. He had come earlier than he had
come to Bellam's funeral, and his courtly zeal in sec-
onding the girl at every movement made her part of
the joke which he became with the other men waiting
to be served. The jokers spared her as much as they
could, but they were not skilful ; Bickler made believe
to like it, and encouraged it for himself in defending
her from it. Ann saw his neglect of Rosy, to whom
he scarcely spoke, and her heart burned, though she
could not have wanted him to notice Rosy; she saw
with helpless compassion the pain of the young girl he
was making conspicuous.
In all twenty six or seven farmers, counting their
big boys, came to put up the frame which the car-
penters had got ready. The smooth hewn sills, mortised
for the studs, 'lay beside the stone foundation. When
the sills had been placed and the studs and joists fitted
into the mortises, the plates to bear the second story
were raised with the heaviest lifting of the day, and a
second row of joists and studs fitted into them. Then
the timbers to support the roof were fitted on the stud-
ding, and the rafters raised in rows the whole length
of the house on either side and pinned together at the
comb of the roof.
The work went on in the rivalry of separate gangs,
with captains for each. At raisings where whiskey
was furnished, the work was delayed by fights over
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disputed points between the chosen or self -chosen cham-
pions. Even now without whiskey it was slow work
getting the frame of the house together, and the hill
on the southwest of it was casting long afternoon
shadows over the grassy space in front of the frame
before the last pin was driven into the posts. On this
grassy space Ann had put her tables, and now in the
pleasant shadow she invited her steaming guests to sit
down. The jollity of the day mounted to a climax;
jokes that went round for the second or third season
were hailed with the same hospitality as the sarcasms
and railleries that remembered the events of the work or
greeted the feats of the workers at the feast. The
men were in their shirt-sleeves and bare heads; the
women who passed behind them and filled their cups
and heaped their plates were demurely clad in their
second best and hid their smiles in the depth of their
sunbonnets.
The victuals were all praised, but Ann was praised
most for her coffee and for holding out against whiskey.
The men joked Powell for the weakening that some
of them said he showed, when he asked them to the
raising and acknowledged that there would be nothing
stronger than coffee to drink. They roared at that, and
then one of them called to him, " Owen, what did you
say was the correspondence of a hoss?" and the rest
waited for their pleasure in the gibe.
" Oh, you've got hold of the wrong word, Mr. Blake-
ley," Powell answered, with smooth formality. " What
you want to know is the correspondence of a donkey."
The retort was on the local level; but it took time
for it to reach home. Ann disliked it, and dreaded
the effect. Then the man rose jovially in the shout
that went up, and stumbled over to Powell's place, and
put his arm round his shoulders and began to explain
7 91
NEW LEAF MILLS
and apologize. The men all became better friends with
Powell, and one after another they complimented him
for his part in the raising, for his knowledge and his
practical skill. Their praises brought him to his feet,
and in a speech which made Ann ashamed and then
proud as it went on he told how in his early backwoods
days he had been captain at log-cabin raisings. He
was beginning to own with modest pride, and Ann was
beginning to fear for him again, that for notching a
log to receive the next when it was in position, he had
not his superior, if his equal, when he was stopped by
one of his guests with a joyous shout.
" Hello, hello, hello !" Every one turned with him
toward the frame of the new house. The upright sup-
porting the peak of the nearest gable had broken from
the pin that held it and now swung dangling.
Through the general laugh broke cries of " Why
didn't you drive in that pin, Owen V and " I thought
you was a better hand than that," and " Oh, well, it
ain't a log cabin, anyway," and " I reckon Owen was
too excited to hit that last pin on the head."
Powell stood fixed and silent, smiling shamefacedly,
till one of the men said : " Well, I'd like to go up and
fix that pin, just to show Owen how he used to do it.
But I couldn't do it on no coffee. Hain't you got a
jug of corn juice around somewheres, Mrs. Powell ?"
Powell called out: " ISTobody must think of touching
it. Keep on at what you're doing, friends, and I'll
see to that piece of studding in good time."
He was going to enlarge upon the incident and draw
a moral from it for himself and others, but another
noisy outbreak stopped him.
" Well, here comes Jake, and I reckon he's going
to take a hand; he's had some corn juice of his own."
Why, he's got it with him !"
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NEW LEAF MILLS
Powell saw Overdale reeling across the road from the
side door of the mill and floundering toward the new
house; he had a black jug in his hand; he shouted,
" I'll show you how to fix that ; I've got the thing to
do it with."
His voice was not drunk, though his gait was, but
he corrected that, holding himself strongly erect as some
of the men started toward him. " Better nobody touch
me if he don't want his head cracked," and then he
staggered on again, but securely enough.
Powell came politely forward. " If Mr. Overdale
wants to strike a blow on my new house, and mend
my unworkman-like job, he'll want a tool."
He held out the mallet he had used in failing to
drive the pin home, and the miller took it, glancing
back and forth from Powell to the mallet.
Then he flung it from him with a roar : " Didn't I
say I got the thing to do it with ? What the hell — "
He got to the ladder which had been left standing
against the house, and began to climb it. " Any one
touch this ladder!" he threatened the half-dozen who
rushed to stop him.
" Owen !" Ann appealed, in her terror.
" I'm going to, my dear," Powell said, as if there
had been a full explanation. He put his neighbors
aside with authority, and took hold of the ladder. " Get
down, you tipsy fool ! Do you think I'm going to have
your blood on my house ?" He shook the ladder and
looked up at Overdale, lifting a hand to pull him down.
Instead of stooping over to strike him with the jug,
as every one expected, in terror or amusement, Over-
dale gave a crazy laugh, and clambered out of reach.
He swung himself upward with one hand, holding to
his jug with the other, and when he reached the roof-
plate he twisted himself in and out through the rafters
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NEW LEAF MILLS
till he reached the gable where the stud was dangling
loose. He gathered it in and fixed it in its place, and
then drew back to hammer the pin home with the jug.
" I'll show you what whiskey can do."
The joking applause which would have hailed a safer
feat failed on the open lips of the gazers below. Once,
twice, three times the miller drove at the pin, shatter-
ing the jug and spilling the whiskey in the air. He
drew back for a blow with what was left of the jagged
neck and shoulders of the jug, but he missed his mark
and lunged forward into the air. He turned and
sprawled with a bat-like spread in his fall and struck
in a heap at the base of the house on a loose mass of
shingles lying there.
XVI
In the last hour which, close upon midnight, ended
the day, Ann said to her husband, as she had said more
than once before, " I certainly thought he would kill
you, Owen, when you shook the ladder under him."
" Oh, there wasn't the least danger ! But he may
thank his stars that he didn't kill himself, in his fall.
If it hadn't been for those shingles I had left there to
season he wouldn't have got off with a few broken ribs
and a dislocated shoulder." Powell was tempted to
say " shoulder or two " for the joke, but Ann did not
look as if she could bear even so good a joke, and he
stopped short of it.
" I suppose we'll hear from Felix to-morrow. I'm
glad, now, he and Jessamy didn't come. It would have
tried Felix. But still I'm anxious. I hope he isn't
worse."
" Oh, you may be sure of that," Powell answered.
" Dear, dear !" Ann said. " I don't see how he can
live on that hot feather-bed in that choking little room,
swarming with mosquitoes." She meant Over dale, now,
in a natural reversion from Felix, and Powell under-
stood.
" Oh, he's used to it, and it's an improvement on the
buffalo robe in the mill. I'm sorry for Dick sitting up
with him in that atmosphere. But he probably doesn't
mind it."
" Yes, poor Richard ! Everything comes on the
child."
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" Well, he's got that other child to help him bear
it. Why her father chooses to live here, with such a
girl as that ! He is really a gentleman in his breeding.
He wasn't much use at the hard work of raising, but
his being there kept the others in check, and certainly
lent all dignity to the occasion I could have wished.
He quite conceived of that when I asked him."
" It was fortunate, after all, that Captain Bickler
was there," Ann said, reluctantly. " If it hadn't been
for him, I don't know how we could have got the doctor
so soon."
" If it hadn't been for Bickler's horse we couldn't,"
Powell consented, " by at least fifteen minutes. How-
ever, it enabled Bickler to make a display of public
spirit, and it was a good stroke of electioneering.
Though, as for the matter of that, I had got Overdale
into very fair shape before the doctor came."
" Yes," Ann assented, to his satisfaction. " Well, if
it will only make them all like us a little better !"
" I'm afraid it won't make Overdale. But as for
the others, they will like us better because they've done
us a good turn, and because you gave them, such a good
supper."
Powell wound his watch for the night; but it was
long before Ann slept, and she was up earlier than
usual to have Dick's breakfast for him as soon as he
came home. He came at sunrise, and reported the
miller restless through the night; he testified to the
faithfulness of his own vigil by falling asleep in his
chair. His mother had to wake him for his coffee.
"Poor boy!" she said; and then she asked, "Why
didn't you bring Lizzie with you ?"
" I didn't like to ask her, mother," the boy explained.
" Mrs. Overdale got her something. I'm going back,
now, to let her off."
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NEW LEAF MILLS
It appeared that Richard was to relieve yet another
watcher, in the miller's wife herself. It seemed as if
he had scarcely gone out of the front door when she
came through the corn-field to the back, with the sun
at her shoulders, throwing her long shadow on the floor.
Ann looked up from the table where she was pour-
ing herself a cup of coffee.
"He in?" the woman asked; and Ann understood
that she was asking if Mr. Powell was at home.
" Why, he's still sleeping," Ann said. " Won't you
come in and sit down — and have a cup of coffee ?"
The woman made no answer, but remained in the
doorway. " 'Pears like as if lie wanted to see him"
" Well, I will send him as soon as he's had his break-
fast. How did Mr. Overdale get through the night ?"
The miller's wife remained irresponsive. " And you
say he hain't got nawthin' ag'in' him ?"
" Why, certainly not. What do you mean by asking
that again, Mrs. Overdale? What could my husband
have against yours ?"
" 'Pears like as if he thought he had."
" Very well, then ; he had better tell Mr. Powell what
it is when he comes."
"He won't have to tell I been here?" the woman
asked.
" Not unless you want him to."
The miller's wife made no more answer to this than
to the other questions. After a moment of hesitation
she went away as silently as she came.
Ann let Owen sleep on like a child from his fatigue,
and she kept the other children from waking him by
sending them to play in the new house.
By the time he had breakfasted and was looking for
his hat to go over to the miller's a friendly voice called
to him from the front of the cabin. It was the doctor,
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NEW LEAF MILLS
who had his joke in saluting him as Dr. Powell, and
said he had just come from the miller's.
" And how did you find him ?" Powell asked.
The doctor twisted himself between his saddle-bass
and looked round. " It seems queer not to have either
of your mills going."
" Yes, we're left in pretty bad shape, and the silence
sounds rather solemn. By the way, it does sound?"
" So it does, so it does !"
" But that wasn't what you wanted to talk about ?"
" Well, not before company," the doctor said, with
a laugh. He lowered his voice. " There's something
I don't understand about Overdale. He's in no danger
from his broken bones. But there's something on his
mind, and it seems to have been there a good while,
and it seems to be about you — "
" Would you mind my wife's hearing ?" Powell
asked.
" Why, if it won't worry Mrs. Powell."
" The things that worry my wife are the things she
doesn't hear," Powell said, and the two men had their
laugh ; and then he called into the cabin, " Ann !" She
came to the door. " The doctor wants to talk to us
about Overdale."
" Will he die ?" Ann gasped.
" No, I don't think he will," the doctor said, " un-
less Owen here " — Ann did not mind the doctor's call-
ing her husband by his first name — " wants to do his
worst by him."
" What do you mean, doctor ?" But Ann partly
knew, though not clearly.
" I can't say, exactly. But there's something on his
mind, about the sale of the mills to your family. It
isn't anything reasonable ; it's something he's ashamed
of while he's afraid of it. He seems to think Owen
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NEW LEAF MILLS
knows, but he won't tell it himself. It's some sort of
hallucination. I can't get it out of him; but unless
somebody does — and I believe Owen can — at any rate,
it seems to be connected with him and his brothers — "
" I just knew it !" Ann broke in. That's what that
poor thing's been groping after." She told the doctor
of the question the miller's wife had only just now
been with her to repeat from their first meeting. " She
said he seemed to want to see Owen, and if you think — "
" I think Owen had better see him, then."
Ann hesitated. " I don't want him to take any risks
with the crazy wretch."
" Oh, there isn't the least danger," Powell put in,
eagerly. " Where is my hat ? I'll go at once."
" I've got half a mind to go with you," she said.
" If that wretch should have his shotgun — "
The doctor laughed. " He hasn't got his shotgun
in bed with him, Mrs. Powell."
" Well, then go at once, Owen. But don't be a
minute longer than you can help."
" I'll be back directly, my dear," and with the doc-
tor's riding off Powell was half-way to the miller's
house.
It was sultry with the heat which in the Middle
West comes with September when the summer ought
to be gone. A swarm of flies buzzed up from the bed
and out of the room where the miller lay when Owen
entered from the kitchen, where Mrs. Overdale met him.
He sat down where he could look the bruised and broken
man in the face.
"Now, what is it you've got on your mind, Over-
dale?" he demanded, severely. The fact, whatever it
was, would interest him the more if it were something
of mystical portent, but if it were merely resentment
it would still interest him. " You have something on
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NEW LEAF MILLS
your mind concerning me, and for your own sake " —
Powell was not indifferent for himself, but he repeated
— " for your own sake, I want to know what it is."
The miller seemed clear enough to this appeal.
" You reckon I'm a-goin' to tell you ?" he returned,
sulkily.
" Not necessarily. But I'm going to find out. When
did you begin to harbor this grudge against my brothers
and me ? Was it because we bought the mills away
from you ?"
" What if it was ?"
" Then that's when it began. But we kept you on,
and I have assured you that we wished to keep you,
somehow, after we had put in the paper machinery.
Then it wasn't on business grounds that you hated us ?"
" Who ever said I hated you ?" the miller demanded.
" I didn't know what other name to give your be-
havior. You must have had some strong objection, at
any rate. Did you think we meant you some sort of
harm ?"
" I don't know what you meant, or what you done, or
whether you done it. But there it was."
" What was ?"
" You think I'll tell ? It can kill me, but I'll keep it
to myself."
Powell glimpsed a darkling something which fasci-
nated him. He took a longer turn about. " I know,"
he said, almost tenderly, " that we often attach con-
sequences to things which happen far beyond their
reasonable effect, I remember when I was a boy that
I would be throwing a stone at a tree or a post, and I
would say to myself, ' Now if I hit it I shall live out
the year, and if I don't — ' "
The miller lifted himself on his elbow; then he
dropped back with a curse of pain; he would not let
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NEW LEAF MILLS
it be a groan. " What do you mean by living out the
year ?"
" Simply what I say. WThat could I mean ?"
The miller lay silent. Then he turned his bandaged
head on the pillow and said, as if he had been tacitly
working to that conclusion, " I'll be derned if I'll tell
you."
Powell sat patiently confident of some other con-
clusion, and after a minute Overdale turned his face
toward him again. " There's always got to be two to a
bargain. If it was a spell that you devils laid on me,
to git me out of the way, you must 'a' knowed what
it was before you agreed to pay the price, and all your
pretendin' to want me to stay couldn't fool me. Your
sayin' that about a year's time, just now, shows you
always had it on your mind. But I'll fool you yit. I'll
live the year out, in spite of you."
It seemed to Powell that another and clearer glimpse
of the miller's trouble was offering itself; he thought
he could best promote the revelation by postponing it,
and he rose to go, but more than half feigning to go.
" Very well, Overdale, when you feel ready to tell me
what you mean I'll try to help you; but as it is you
won't let me. I must leave you now ; this excitement is
bad for you — "
" No, you don't ! !NTo, you don't!" The miller shook
his fist and tried to writhe up from his bed. " You
know as well as I do that when you took the mills you'd
fixed it so I wouldn't live more'n a year after you
bought 'em."
Now it was all plain before Powell. He was in the
presence of the anguish of a foreboding; he had once
known the terror and the stress of it in his hypo-
chondriacal youth; he had seen his own brother again
and again in its shadow; and his heart was glad that
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NEW LEAF MILLS
he could lift the incubus from the wretched soul which
he seemed to see writhing before him. But he must
treat the pseudo-foreknowledge reverently, though he
could have laughed it away.
" Why, Overdale, you've lived the time out already.
We bought the mills in August last year — two months
before you knew about it."
" What I" the miller shouted. In spite of his bruises
and bandages, he raised himself on his sound arm and
stared at Powell, as if to. take in with his eyes what his
ears had known. Then he dropped back and lay still.
XVII
" I certainly thought he was dead," Powell said,
telling it all in detail to his wife when he came home
and found her on the point of following him to the
miller's house. " It was not so long, though, before
we brought him to. Or, rather, I did." He corrected
himself, not to refuse the credit justly his due. " The
woman was not much help, though she knew that tea
would have more effect with him than whiskey ; be more
of a contrast," and Powell did not deny himself the
comfort of a laugh. Then he mused the case in a
silence which Ann interrupted.
" And what did he say when he came to ?"
"Why, practically nothing. He wanted to get up
and go over to the mill. The whole affair was as simple
as having a tooth pulled. You nurse your terror of the
pain to come in infinitely greater pain, and when the
dentist jerks the tooth out and the whole thing is over
you're simply ashamed of yourself, and you don't want
to say anything about it. Not but what there are real
presentiments; but for the most part they are lying
intimations from the devils who delight in tormenting
people in this world when they escape from the hells."
Ann was not satisfied with" the Doctrinal philosophy
of the case. She could not help thinking of the miller's
misery during the year past, but she put it out of her
mind with a personal consideration. " Well, I hope he
will behave himself now and treat you decently.
103
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NEW LEAF MILLS
«
I don't count on it," Powell said. " His behavior
is from the character that he's been building up all
his life. To change now would be like saving his soul
by a death-bed repentance. He will be more likely
to show that he doesn't owe me anything by behaving
worse than ever." The notion moved Powell to his
usual laughter, but he checked himself at the continued
gravity of his wife's face. " Well, what is it now,
Ann?"
" Nothing. I thought if I once had Overdale off my
mind I shouldn't care for anything. But I do. There's
some trouble with Posy. She's been crying."
Powell was guiltily sensible of the brooch in his
waistcoat pocket; the crazy question whether it could
be that which was making Posy cry went through him,
and he thought his wife might be going to speak of it ;
but she said:
" You noticed that fellow scarcely looked at her yes-
terday, and didn't speak to her at all. He's trying to
break off."
" Well, isn't that what you wanted him to do ?"
" Yes, but when it comes to it, and I see her taking
on so ! Oh, I wish the child had never set eyes on him !
Of course he never did care for her, and now that he
thinks he's going to be elected he doesn't want even to
speak to her. And I know she's got her heart set on
him."
" But do you know that, Ann ?"
" What else would she be crying about ?"
" You might ask her. But seriously, I don't think
there's the least danger of trouble for her."
" Oh, you never think there's the least danger of any-
thing, Owen !"
" Well, but how often has she met him ? It couldn't
go on without our knowing. He's been all over the
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NEW LEAF MILLS
county drumming up delegates. I haven't seen him
here once in a week, and then he hasn't been near us."
" No, not us j but Rosy has met him. I know she has.
She goes out with the children, but they get separated,
and she comes home alone. Not always, but often
enough to make me anxious. Time and again I've been
on the point of asking her, but I didn't like to; Rosy
is proud. She does her work, and she might say that
was enough without answering questions. She's queer ;
sometimes I think she's sly."
" Oh no, Ann ! She mav be secret, but she isn't
sly."
" No, I mean secret ; she's keeping something to her-
self, and it troubles me. Well, I'm going to watch
her. Here comes poor Bellam's boy. He said he was
going to Spring Grove, and I told him to ask if there
were any letters for us."
A barefooted boy on a barebacked horse, the last left
of Bellam's children and possessions, rode up to the
cabin door, where the Powells were talking. " Here's
y'ur letter fur yuh," he said to Ann, taking it out of
his open shirt-front and holding it toward her.
" Oh, thank you, Jimmy. Wait and I'll get you a
slice of cake." Jimmy waited; then he thumped his
heels into the horse's ribs, and rode away with his
m'outh instantly full. " It's from Jessamy," Ann said,
opening her letter. " I expected she would write after
not coming. I wish they could see how well the new
house looks." She delayed herself with a glance at the
frame of her future home before she began to read.
After the first look she said, " Whv it's dated from the
City and — " She crushed the sheet together and gave
it to Powell. " Felix has had another hemorrhage, and
they're on the way to New Orleans! You read it,
dear!" she said, with the hem of her apron to her eyes.
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" Well, well," Powell complied. " There's nothing
to be alarmed about. We'll see what Jessamy says. If
they're going South it's the best thing, and we'll be all
the better prepared for them in the spring." Then he
read on to himself, as people begin doing when they are
asked to read for others.
" Owen !" his wife sharply recalled him.
" Oh ! Oh yes ! Why, she just says that he's had a
little attack, and they're very properly going South
for the winter; and — there isn't the least danger — "
" Read what she says out loud," Ann bade him,
severely, and then he did so. But it came to no more
in substance than the facts they both knew already.
Jessamy sent her love and her husband's to all. She
said the doctor thought he ought to get away before
the first chilly weather, and she was going to bring him
back strong and well ; and they were coming straight
to the mills. If there was not room enough for them
in the new house, Felix and she would live in the cabin
till they could build for themselves; he was crazy for
the place now, and Owen must hurry and get out the
stuff. She wrote bravely, even gaily, and " You see,"
Powell ended for her, " there isn't any cause for anx-
iety."
Ann took the letter he held illustratively toward her,
and, the sadder for his cheer, folded it carefully for
another reading and went into the cabin.
Rosy was coming in at the back door from the shed
outside, panting as if she had been running, and Ann
thought she looked pale. " Where have you been,
Rosy ? Where are the children ?"
" I do' know where the childern are," the girl an-
swered, sullenly. " I been up over the hill, if you want
to know."
" You mustn't be saucy, Rosy," Ann said ; and she
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NEW LEAF MILLS
added, as if it were the reason why, " We've had had
news about Mr. Powell's brother."
" Oh, have you, Mrs. Powell ?" the girl broke in, with
instant contrition. " I'd just lay down my life for
him. Has he had another bleeding?"
" Yes. And they're on their way South for the
winter."
"Oh, Mrs. Powell! But that '11 do him good,
won't it?"
" The doctor thinks so ; I hope so. And, Rosy, child,
I'm troubled for you, too. I'm sorry for you. I saw
what happened yesterday, but you won't believe I'm
sorry for you when I say I was glad of it."
" Yes, I will, Mrs. Powell ! But I'm all right now,
and you don't need to worry a bit about me. I reckon
he's got as good as he give."
8
XVIII
That morning, while the doctor was talking with the
Powells at the cabin door about Overdale, Rosy had
gone with the children to look the new house over and
help rejoice at moving into it, which they thought could
not be more than a week or two now. She left them
there and kept on up over the hill. " I'll be back
directly," she called down to them.
At the bottom of the hill on the other side a horse
was grazing among the pawpaw bushes, with his bridle-
rein hanging loosely behind his ears and dropping
round his mouth. She pretended not to see the horse,
so that she need not turn back ; but a fire of conscious-
ness blazed over her face.
Bickler spoke from the grass, where he was sitting
near the horse's head. " Hello, Rosy !"
She did not answer.
" You don't seem to hear very well this morning,
Rosy."
Now she answered, " You didn't seem to see very
well yesterday, Captain Bickler."
" Well, no, that's a fact," he said, easily. " That's
what I thought I'd explain if you happened to be com-
ing over the hill this morning."
" I reckon I don't want any explaining from you,"
she returned. " I reckon a hired girl knows when she's
a hired girl. And if I'd knowed you was here I
wouldn't 'a' happened to be comin' over the hill, as
vou say."
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" Well, maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't."
He laughed teasingly up into her face. " But I'm glad
you have come. I didn't see any one that looked like
a hired girl yesterday; I saw a lady helping Mrs.
Powell that I thought was too far above me to
speak to."
" Did you ?" Eosy retorted, scornfully. " You spoke
to her good and plenty all the same."
" Oh, you mean that pale, little washed-out snip of a
child ? I mean the lady with the yellow hair, and the
big blue eyes, and the cheeks as red as the roses she's
named after. You ain't mad, are you, Rosy ?"
" Yes, I am mad ; and you mustn't think you can
come it over me any longer, Captain Bickler. I reckon
I can see through you well enough." Rosy ended in-
effectually, and she knew it as well as the man, who
laughed again.
" I didn't know you were going anywhere, Rosy.
If I had a chin like that — I wish you could just see it
from here !"
" You quit your foolin', Captain Bickler, and let
me past or I'll — "
" I didn't know you were going anywhere, Rosy.
But don't hurry. I want to argue it out with you.
What did you want me to do yesterday? Get up be-
fore 'em all and say, ' Ladies and gentlemen, I wish
to announce the engagement of Miss Rose Hefmyer and
Captain Harrison Bickler ' ? The fellows wouldn't
have done another stroke of work on Mrs. Powell's
chicken pie, and old Overdale wouldn't have had a
chance to fall off the top of the new house. I met
Doc Jenner, here, just now; he thinks Overdale didn't
fracture enough ribs to hurt. But what I mean to say
is this, Rosy. It won't do for me to be courting you
till I'm in a position to marry you."
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NEW LEAF MILLS
il
Who as't you to marry me?" she demanded,
fiercely.
" Well, not you. And I'm not going to let you.
When it comes to marrying I want to do the asking
myself. But now I'm all tied up with this electioneer-
ing. If it was known I was running after a girl when
I ought to be running for an office I wouldn't get the
office, I'm afraid."
" You wouldn't get the girl, neither, if I had any
say !"
" Well, all right, Rosy, all right. We'll see about
that afterwards. You mustn't think I don't care for
you if I don't show it everywhere. It's the whole world
to me to meet you this way, every once in a while, and
have a little friendly chat. I'll tell you what, Rosy.
If I'm elected, and I don't see but what I will be the
way things are going now, I'll want some old friend to
call on evenings after the legislature adjourns. I'll
want somebody to take to the theater, and then go round
and have an oyster stew."
Rosy stood looking at him where he sat with his face
lifted toward her, but she said nothing, while he chewed
on a blade of grass which he plucked up from between
his feet.
" I know a lady up there who wants a girl. You
don't lay out to pass the winter here in the new house,"
and Bickler laughed at the phrase which had become
mockingly current in the neighborhood from the Pow-
ells' use of it. " You would suit my friend first rate ;
kind of a parlor girl, with nothing to do but dust and
keep the place in order, and all her evenings out. I'll
write and tell her I've found just the girl for her — "
a
Mrs. Powell," Rosy broke off at this point in tell-
ing Ann, " you'll think I done a poorty awful thing."
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" Why, what did you do, Rosy V Ann asked, fear-
fully.
" I just run right up to him and slapped him in the
face good and hard so't he most keeled over, and then
I run home as fast as I could foot it." Ann did not
ask why she had done this; she did not need Rosy's
explanation : " A poor girl finds out a good many things,
especially if she's got worse than no mother; she ain't
like a girl that's been raised in a decent family; and
when she ain't much more than a child she under-
stands— understands — what the oldest woman in the
world ortn't to — "
Rosy's hardness had given way now, and she was
fetching her breath in dry sobs.
" Oh, poor thing !" Ann tried to comfort her, but
she would not hear further.
" I wouldn't 'a' minded his not noticin' me yester-
day; and I wouldn't 'a' cared for his not likin' me the
way he'd like some one that wasn't a hired girl ; but for
him to sejjest or even to hint — Oh, do you think I
done right, Mrs. Powell ?"
" 'Deed and 'deed I think you did just exactly right,
Rosy," Ann could not help saying, though she felt that
she ought to add : " I suppose Mr. Powell would say
that you ought to bear anything rather than give a
blow. But a good smack in the face is the only way
with such a man if he meant what you think he did — "
" Oh, do vou reckon he couldn't 'a' meant it, Mrs.
Powell ? Say it if you do ! I'd give the world to be-
lieve he didn't! I'd just lay down and let him walk
over me. I can't help it, Mrs. Powell — I think he's
splendid and the handsomest and smartest man in the
world, and I'd give my life if he didn't mean it."
She was crying her heart out in tears now, and Ann
was puzzled between her pitv for the girl and her hope
ill
NEW LEAF MILLS
that she had not been mistaken. That would be the
quickest and easiest way out. " I will speak to Mr.
Powell and—"
" If you do I'll kill myself!" Rosy jumped up from
where she sat bowed over, with her apron at her eyes.
Ann took her in her arms. " Well, well, I won't,
then. But now you go up to your bed and lie down
awhile. I'll get the dinner; and don't you come till
I call you. I want to think about it."
When the dinner was out of the way Ann followed
her husband over to the new house, where he stopped
to speak with the carpenters, and they climbed part
way up the hill to see how the frame looked from there.
Then she told him what Rosy had told her; she knew
that Rosy would expect her to break her promise.
Instead of blaming Rosy for her violence Powell
said, " He ought to be cowhided !" and instantly Ann,
terror-stricken to silence, saw him cowhiding Bickler.
But after the silence Powell began to retreat from his
impetuous outburst. " Of course, he could say he
didn't mean anything of the kind."
" I was almost wishing he did mean it. It would
put an end to the thing with Rosy. It's the plague
of my life."
" Well, well," Powell resumed. " We mustn't mis-
judge him." With that brooch in his pocket, which he
had never yet found the chance of making Bickler take
back, he was aware of wishing to give him more than
the benefit of the doubt. " Very likely he does know
a woman there who wants a girl; it may be nothing
more than that, and I see no reason why he shouldn't
wish to marry Rosy."
" Yes, you do, my dear," Ann said. " She's more
than his equal in character and heart and good sense,
but she hasn't any education, and she never could get
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NEW LEAF MILLS
any; she doesn't see the use of it. She's a wild thing
in all that, and she always will be. He'll want some-
body that will do him credit with her manners if he
gets on; and he will get on; he's the kind; and poor
Rosy has no more manners than I don't know what."
" Very well. Then I must keep an eye on him. I'm
glad it's come to this. Perhaps he'll be so angry that
he won't come near her again."
" Trust him for that ! And I'm afraid Rosy knew
that when she struck him that way she lost the battle."
" Do you think so, Ann ? Xow I see it in quite an-
other light. I believe she's finished with him, and he
understands it. You must keep her up to that idea,
Ann; and I will keep a sharp lookout for him." This
was the translation of Powell's purpose to take the first
opportunity for returning the brooch, and for speaking
his mind freely to Bickler and appealing to his better
nature. He did not see why he should not deal frankly
with the fellow, and pending the cowhiding which
Bickler possibly deserved put the case before him and
shame him into letting the child alone or into marrying
her. Upon reflection he did not see why marrying her
should not be the more probable outcome. " As for his
ultimately giving any trouble," he said aloud, " I don't
believe there's any danger of it."
XIX
The habit of drink, which had fouled the blood in
Overdale, retarded his recovery. He had naturally
what his neighbors called powerful healing flesh, such
as would have responded with prompt self-cure to any
hurt, but, as it was, his bruises and broken bones healed
so slowly that it was well into October before he was
out-of-doors. Even then he did not get back to his work
in the mill. A temporary miller, as Powell carefully
explained to him, supplied his place; an amiable and
voluble Pennsylvania German, whom Ann had to give
his meals, though he slept on the buffalo robes in Over-
dale's den. He was acceptable to the younger boys
because he let them play in the wheat-bins, where they
buried each other in the grain and stuffed their gar-
ments out with it to unseemly corpulence. He allowed
Kichard to run the mill and dress the burrs; but at
table he was dreadful to them all from his habit of
helping himself to the butter with his knife after first
sucking it clean. He was gentle with their father, and
even respectful, so that Ann almost liked him.
Powell hurried the work forward on the new House
with a constancy which the carpenters scarcely expected
of him, and which he could himself scarcely have
counted on. In the weeks that had passed the roof
was shingled and the walls were weather-boarded, so
that the black walnut gave its mellow color convincingly
to the eye, and almost persuaded the neighborhood that
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NEW LEAF MILLS
its natural surface was as handsome as the white paint
or the red brick of other houses. The sash was glazed
and put in and the doors hung, and then the rooms
were divided off and lathed for the plastering; but at
this point Ann's patience gave out, and she decided to
leave the cabin and move into the house without further
waiting. It seemed to her that if she were once in it
the work could be pushed forward much more rapidly ;
even if it were not plastered till the spring came with
its drying winds, they would suffer less discomfort from
the cold than if they weathered the winter through in
the old cabin.
When they were settled in it Powell found a beauty
in the conditions which almost tempted him to delay.
The rooms up stairs and down, with their neat lathing,
were like a succession of latticed bowers which, he said,
might be covered with vines; he made believe for the
children that plants could be set in the ground beside
the chimney and trained over the partitions and ceil-
ings. There was an open hearth in each room; in the
first cool evenings fires were kindled on them, and the
soft play of the flames through the lathing was so much
prettier than any foliage he could think of that he said
there was no hurry to cover it even with vines. The
children fell in with his humor, and if Ann held aloof
it was without reproach, but not without anxiety. She
was anxious about Felix, and the more so because she
could not make Powell share her troubled mind. Let-
ters came from Jessamy, not very often, but regularly
enough, reporting at first that the warm climate was
doing Felix all the good that they had expected ; then
she did not write so confidently, but only said that he
was getting on and was waiting eagerly for the spring,
so that he could go !North and could come to them at
the mills. As the weeks went bv she merely told what
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NEW LEAF MILLS
they were doing; and Owen insisted that this no news
was good news. He read hopeful auguries into Jes-
samy's omissions, and Ann felt herself almost culpable
in failing to share his confidence.
" The dear knows," she said, after one of these let-
ters came, " I'd like to believe it, Owen. And I will
believe it if you say so. You ought to know best. But
if Jessamy feels the way you say — Well, it is a good
thing, her sending those messages from him, about
hurrying up the work on the house ; and I hope you'll
mind them, Owen. Don't wait till spring before you
plaster. We could get on very well ourselves, but an
unplastered house will be no place for a sick person."
" Felix won't be sick when he gets here in April ;
and the more fresh air he can get the better."
" We can let in enough air through the windows.
I want the whole house finished before he sets foot in
it, and I'm afraid if you feel that way about it you'll
let the plastering lag along and it won't be done before
summer."
" Oh, you needn't be afraid of that," Powell said ;
and then, " Ann," he continued, " do you know whether
Rosy has seen anything of Bickler lately ?"
" Why, no. What makes you think she has ?"
Owen had not much reason, if any, to think she
had, and he had brought the matter in partly to divert
Ann from her anxieties about Felix; but he made the
most of a fact in the matter.
" I met him yesterday when I was in Spring Grove,
and I took occasion to speak plainly to him about Bosy."
Owen did not say that the occasion which he took was
the long-delayed return of the brooch. He had so
often forgotten to give it back that he acquired the
greater merit with himself for remembering it in pass-
ing Bickler's office and going in expressly to restore
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NEW LEAF MILLS
the gift. Bidder made no pretense of not knowing
why; he said very seriously he was glad Owen had
brought it, for he was afraid there was some misunder-
standing on Eosy's part. He looked on her as a child,
but he saw how his giving her such a present might
appear to Mrs. Powell, and he wanted Owen to tell
Mrs. Powell so. Without telling her so now Owen said,
with the assumed shrewdness of not crediting Bickler
with too much goodness, " I think he wishes particular-
ly to stand well with us at present, for the election is
going to be very close, and he has an exaggerated notion
of my influence in this neighborhood."
" If he has any notion of it at all, Owen, it's ex-
aggerated. Now that poor Bellam is gone, I don't
believe you could influence a single vote," Ann said.
Owen laughed. " Why, I don't know but Overdale
is working round to my way of thinking in some
things."
" Well, if Bickler will only let that poor child alone,
I don't care why he does it. Did you get any letters ?"
" I declare, I quite forgot. There's a letter for you
from Jessamy. I just glanced into it ; she seems to be
writing in high spirits for some reason."
" It's because there's such a decided turn for the
better with Felix," Ann said, running her eye down
the page. " He's better than he's been yet, and they're
both so full of hope." She kept on reading. " Yes,
there isn't one unfavorable symptom, and she's just as
confident now as he has always been. What a load it
takes off my heart ! Now we must begin really to get
ready for them. If only you won't let the plastering
lag along !"
" Oh, you may rest assured I won't do that." Powell
felt so sure of himself that for some days he allowed
his interest in the political situation to occupy him, and
117
NEW LEAF MILLS
did not agree with the plasterers to come until the day
before the first Tuesday in October. " Well, to-morrow
will tell the tale for Master Bidder," he said, as if that
could possibly interest Ann.
That night he got his harp out, for the first time in
the new house, and tuned it. He believed that he really
played " Kosin the Bow " on it, and the children recog-
nized the song when he sang it. Ann went cheerfully
to bed after sitting up rather late, in talk of Felix
and Jessamy coming early in the spring. The chil-
dren's spirits had been damped a little by hearing that
the mill would not make ruled writing-paper at first,
but only yellow wrapping-paper; their father assured
them that the wrapping-paper would be such as could
be used for kites. He pretended to chase them up-
stairs to bed, and they had fun calling down through
the latticework of the walls to Rosy, where she was
washing the belated supper dishes in the kitchen.
Rosy slept in a little room lathed off from the kitchen
on an entry leading to the back door ; and the room of
the Powells was on the same floor beside the front hall.
Sometime after midnight Ann woke from a dream of
Felix, and he seemed to be dying. Jessamy was cry-
ing over him, and a strange voice sounded through the
room which in her breaking dream Ann thought was
the voice of death. She started fully awake, and sat
up in her bed to listen, while Powell slept on.
The crying continued ; now Ann knew that it was
Rosy crying in the kitchen, and the voice continued,
low, coarse, and wheedling. It coaxed Rosy, and an-
swered what seemed her bursts of protest.
The girl stopped her sobbing and wailed out : " Oh,
mother, mother, mother ! He'd never marry me in the
world !"
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NEW LEAF MILLS
The voice did not reply at once, then it said low,
coarse, and wheedling, tmt clear, " Well, honey ?"
A cry of grief came from the girl, and there was a
rush as of steps and a sonnd as of a door flung open.
Ann jumped from her bed and ran to the kitchen.
Beside the table, dim in the light of the dying fire of
the stove-front, the shapeless bulk of a woman rose at
Ann's coming and stood holding a bundle as of clothes.
Ann understood.
" You worthless, good - for - nothing, drunken old
thing !" she shuddered at the apparition. " Go out
of my house this minute !"
The woman did not speak, but stumbled through the
door that Rosy had left open into the night. The dark
gave no answer back to Ann as she called, at first
softly and then loudly and imploringly, " Rosy, Rosy !
Rosy, child !"
XX
The candle which Ann lighted showed Rosy's sun-
bonnet hanging on its nail beside the door, and she
went again and again to the outer steps and held the
candle at her forehead and peered into the warm, wind-
less dark. The rays which streamed to the border of
the woods on the hill slope showed nothing, and Ann
waited more and more hopelessly for the girl's return.
Neither her figure stealing back barefooted nor her
mother's bulk lurking in the shadows defined itself in
the vague shapes which Ann conjured out of the trees
and bushes. At last she went and wakened Powell,
and they watched together till the daylight dimmed the
candle-light.
Then she set about getting breakfast at the fire which
they had kept going in the stove; the children woke,
and the miller crossed from the mill, and the life of
the household, broken in its course, began to make its
way again over the interruption. It seemed every mo-
ment as if the girl must come back ; all things were still
so perfectly part of her presence that her absence was
more and more incredible. Powell went away to vote
at Spring Grove, and that was a relief to Ann, as if
while he was gone Rosy would have more courage to
return; she could not explain to the younger children;
to Richard she could be clearer, and that was a comfort ;
and she could make him tell the others that Rosy had
gone off in the night, but she expected her any time;
the Dreamer knew of something tragical without the
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NEW LEAF MILLS
telling. Now and then Ann drowsed and had swift,
long dreams which she woke from to the fancied sound
of Rosy's singing and her steps on the kitchen floor, or
her calling to the chickens at the back porch.
Powell came home in the late afternoon, and she had
to bear his disappointment that Rosy should be still
away. He reported a very light vote at the polls ; what
really interested Ann at all was the fact that Bickler
was running behind the ticket. The next morning news
came by the first passer at the mill that the rest of the
Whig ticket had been elected, but Bickler had been
defeated. The rumor of Rosy's absence had gone
through the neighborhood the day before, though Ann
had tried to keep it quiet. The miller must have told
it, for she saw some of the farmers who had stopped
at the mill on their way from the polls looking harder
at the house than usual as they drove by. She did not
care to blame the miller for it, and when some of the
farm wives came the next morning to verify the rumor
she confirmed it. She did not try to explain the fact,
but her heart stood still when the first of her visitors
offered to bet that Captain Bickler could tell where
Rosy was.
The fear which she thought had been kept to Powell
and herself she found was the common suspicion; the
women who now talked of it to her were bitter against
Bickler; they said he ought to be cowhided, that Mr.
Powell ought to cowhide the truth out of him; there
was blame for Rosy too on their tongues, but nothing
like their blame for Bickler. His defeat at the polls
was a judgment on him, but they did not believe that
was the end of it. Ann alone seemed to know of the
mother's presence, with its sinister implications, and
she could at least keep that to herself.
The neighborhood talk grew as each day went by;
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NEW LEAF MILLS
it spread to the children, and at the log schoolhouse
two miles away the little Powells were asked if Rosy
had come back or if they had heard from her. Ann
silenced her own belief, but she could not silence the
belief of others. It began to be said that Rosy had
drowned herself, and it began to be said that Owen
Powell ought to have the dam and the head-race
dragged. The general gossip knit Rosy's name closer
and closer with Bickler's, and from the depths of Ann's
remembrance of the girl's cry and the mother's answer
by night there was proof which even the optimism of
Powell could not always resist. She urged no duty in
the matter upon him; she could trust him for his duty
as he saw it; but they were both in doubt of what his
duty would be.
If it was to summon Bickler and demand the truth
of him, Powell was saved that extreme of action, so
alien to his temperament, by Bickler's coming to him
unsummoned after the third day had gone by. He
seemed to have timed his coming to the hour when the
children were away playing on the other side of the
hill, and he rode up to the back door of the new house
and called softly to Ann in the kitchen. " Mrs. Powell,
Mrs. Powell !"
Ann looked out, dumb with abhorrence and then with
pity of the man. His face was as if drenched from
tears, and as she stared at him they began to stream
afresh. He choked down the sobs to say, " I want to
speak to you and Mr. Powell."
" I'll tell my husband," Ann said, with more severity
than she felt ; and she called Owen from the front room,
where he was arranging the volumes of the Heavenly
Arcana and some Collateral Works on a shelf with some
other books; he had not thought Pope's Homer and
Byron's poems unfit for their companv.
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" Well, well 1" he answered so dreamily that she
doubted if he realized who it was wanted to speak to
him. He came to the back door in his shirt-sleeves
and stood in the soft October air, silent and waiting for
Bickler to speak.
Bickler had dismounted and dropped the bridle on
his horse's neck; it was cropping the grass at his feet.
" You know why I've come, Mr. Powell. Have you
found out where she's gone yet ?"
" I didn't know but vou might tell us, Captain
Bickler."
" Mr. Powell, you're a good man, about the best man
I ever saw, and I want you to believe me just as if I
was saying it before the Judgment Seat. I don't know
any more than you do where Rosy Hefmyer is. I
fooled with her, and I can't say I didn't mean her any
harm, but for all the harm I ever did her she was like
the babe unborn. I knew her mother was hunting for
her, and I told her where Rosy was."
At the confession of this atrocity Powell's heart,
which had begun to soften in pity of the wretched
man, hardened again. " Bickler," he said, dropping
any formal address, " it isn't merely the wrong we do
that we're guilty of — "
" I know it, I know it !" the miserable man wailed
out. " Don't I know it, don't I think it, don't I feel
it night and day, every minute, every second ?"
The Doctrinal truth was precious to Powell, and he
felt bound to retract what he had just said. He recog-
nized that it was a Puritanic contravention of the New
Church precept teaching that there are degrees in sin,
that all sinning is not of one quantity of wickedness.
" I don't mean," he said, " that you are as guiltless of
what you meant as if you had not meant it; in the
nature of things vou must now suffer the same as if
9 !23
NEW LEAF MILLS
you had done it, and I couldn't lessen your suffering if
I wished."
" I don't want you to, Mr. Powell ; and if you don't
believe what I tell you I want you to take this and lay
it onto me for all you're worth."
He held out the cowhide which he carried for his
whip. Powell remembered how for far less he had said
that Biekler ought to be cowhided ; with the culprit
before him it was a different thing. " Throw it away !"
he said with loathing, as if the cowhide were a snake.
" You won't have your punishment at my hands, if
you've counted on that. We think Rosy may be dead.
She ran away, we don't know where, in the dark; she
probably didn't know, either; the poor wild thing may
have fallen into the river, or the head-race, and been
drowned. We are going to drag them, and if you choose
to come and help — "
Ann had been listening within, and now she came to
the door. " What are you thinking of, Owen ? He
shall not come ! I wouldn't let him help find that dead
child to save his own life."
She went further than she meant, and she was not
proof against the man's prayer. " Oh, do let me come,
Mrs. Powell ! I won't make any trouble. I don't be-
lieve she's drowned, but if she is it's for me more than
anybody else to find her. I wouldn't ask it to save my
own life. What do I care for my life now? I'm done
for. I can't hold up my head in this neighborhood
again. All I want now is to show people how I feel
about it."
" Yes, to show people, that's what you want," she
said, with a cruelty which caused the relenting Owen
to murmur, " Ann !" " Well, you won't come with my
leave," she ended, lamely.
" No, I don't ask any one's leave," Biekler said, with
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NEW LEAF MILLS
fallen head. " All I want is just to come." He pleaded
with pitiful repetition; Ann went indoors again; and
at last Owen, worn out by his reasons and entreaties,
said:
" If we hear nothing of her, we are going to drag
the dam to-morrow morning." Then he turned away
too, without other forms of parting, and Bickler thanked
him haggardly and mounted his horse and rode off.
The neighbors came early with a seine. It was a
long net with wide meshes, which they used for the
larger fish whenever Powell invited them to the frolic
of dragging the dam. " I reckon that '11 hold her,"
one of them said, as he tested the strength of the twine
with a pull.
They had shut the head-gates of the race, which they
were to drain later if necessary, and now they set
about dragging the waters of the dam in two parties,
one in the flatboat which Powell kept there and one
in the skiff which they had carried up from the river
below. Bickler had promised to be there among the
first, but Powell thought it quite like the man that he
was not to be seen. He himself directed the course of
the flatboat, close to the shore, and at a point where
some bushes overhung it Bickler parted them and
jumped aboard. ~No one spoke to him, but at his ap-
pearance there was a sensation in the men poling the
heavy boat, as Powell bade them, in the low tones to
which they dropped their voices with his. Bickler took
his place at the bow and stooped over the still water
with eyes that seemed to pierce its depths.
There was no wind, and the slow ripple of the flat-
boat as it advanced scarcely broke the oily surface.
Prom time to time a red or yellow leaf dropped from
an overhanging tree and made a faint circle in it. At
the seine's length away to the larboard the skiff kept
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NEW LEAF MILLS
even with the flatboat. When something caught the
net below the waters, which had been lowered by open-
ing the sluice in the dam, one of the men would say,
" What's that ?" Then the course of the boats would be
arrested till the net was carefully lifted and a decay-
ing branch or sodden log released from it and thrown
ashore. At such times Bickler would shrink back from
where he knelt, or hold himself unmoved, with hands
clenching the gunwale. When fish were brought up
they were thrown back, not without mute appeals from
the men which Powell denied, or protests from the
boys on either shore who followed the course of the
boats and saw the bass and mudcats and pickerel waste-
fully returned to their haunts among the roots holding
the projecting banks together, or in the mats of withered
iris along the shore.
The search went on for hours until the whole of the
dam was dragged ; then there had begun to be murmurs
of impatience among the crews which Powell could not
check. In fact, the event had been losing reality for
him, and he was glad to be able to say at last : " Well,
we might as well stop. There's no use. ISTow we will
try the head-race." With the authority which would
not have been conceded to him at other times he led
the crowd of men, with its border of dogs and boys,
down the banks of the race to the flood-gates below
the sluice of the sawmill. In his progress he was aware
of Bickler keeping close at his side, as if in terror of
himself, and as the waters began their sheeted spurt
from the opening valves of the gates he felt the man
at his elbow.
Powell himself believed that the girl's body, if she
were drowned, might more probably be found in the
race, which could, at any rate, be effectually searched ;
he seemed to draw breath in the wretch beside him
126
NEW LEAF MILLS
and to watch with his vision for what the waters should
reveal. He wanted to say to Bickler, whose gasping
peculiarly molested him, to go away, but in pity he
could not, and he was sensible of their calming their
respiration together as the spurt from the gates grew
weaker and lower without discovering what they mutu-
ally dreaded. With a sort of nether sense he perceived
that Overdale had added himself to the crowd, and
with bandaged head and one arm still in a sling was
now appearing for the first time out-of-doors. No one
noticed him, as if in the greater interest no one felt any
strangeness in his presence.
At last the race was drained and the gates set wide.
There was nothing but a heap of fish flapping and
floundering in the scattered puddles left by the waste.
" Oh, blessed be God Almighty !" Powell heard
Bickler groan out at his shoulder and then give a
screech of terror and make a choking sound.
" Don't you be too sure o' God Almighty !" Overdale
was shouting, and Powell saw him with his sound arm
outstretched, as if he had leaped the pool that parted
them; his hand was at Bickler's throat, pushing him
backward and making his head shake from side to side.
" If Owen Powell, here, '11 say the word I'll shake the
life out of you !"
" What do you mean ?" Powell shouted. " Let the
man alone ! Don't any one touch him !" He turned to
the others, for they seemed to be preparing for a rush
upon Bickler. "He's coming with me! Till there's
something proved against him he's as innocent as any
of you."
Some such disappointment as dumbly shows in a
dog's eyes when he is made to release his prey, and
something of a man's amaze at an unimaginable dif-
ference of opinion, was visible in Overdale ; but he did
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NEW LEAF MILLS
as he was bid, and stood a little off so that Powell could
put himself before Bickler and take, much against the
grain, the wretch's elbow in his hand and lead him
away toward the new house. He turned and called
back' to the crowd : " There's no reason why you
shouldn't have the fish now " ; and this, if anything of
the kind were needed, operated a diversion, and Bickler
continued safe in his keeping.
XXI
a
Yes, Ann," Powell said that night, after the chil-
dren had gone to sleep, " you gave him shelter, I don't
deny, but can you say you gave him welcome ?"
" I had no welcome to give him, and I don't pretend
that I had. All that I wanted after he got into the
house was to get him safely out of it. I hate the sight
of him, and I shouldn't have been sorry if the crowd
had seen him going."
" Oh yes, you would, Ann. But the fish looked after
that. If it hadn't been for the fish, I doubt if vour
vigilance would have been enough to smuggle him
through the back door and start him off to Spring Grove.
But seriously, my dear, I think Bickler has behaved
very well, considering the mischief he has made with-
out meaning the whole of it. He certainly seems truly
repentant."
" I don't care for his repentance. All the repenting
in the world won't bring poor Rosy back," Ann said,
with passionate pity for the girl.
" Well, perhaps she will come back of herself,"
Powell hopefully suggested.
" ISTo, she never will come back. I just know her
dreadful old mother has got her somewhere, and that's
the end of Rosy."
In the morning it seemed as if Rosy might have
stolen back. Her sunbonnet hung on its nail behind
the kitchen door, and her shabby little shoes, side-
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NEW LEAF MILLS
worn at the heels, stood on the floor beneath it ; but the
day went by, and the days after that, and no Rosy re-
turned to wear the bonnet and the shoes. Her poor
best dress clung to the wall beside her bed in that
mocking facsimile of the wearer which clothes have the
trick of, and in her bureau drawer, among her ribbons
and collars, Ann found the brooch which Bickler had
given her.
" He must have made her take it again," Ann said
to her husband. " There is no telling how often the
miserable scamp saw her or how he kept her from let-
ting us know. We shall never have the truth from
him."
It was Powell's belief, as the days and weeks went
by, that they not only had the truth, but more than the
truth from Bickler. He came almost daily, or, rather,
nightly, to confess the wrong he had done and to repeat
his repentance with some increasing form of self-
accusal. He owned that he had made the girl take
back the brooch and keep it a secret from Mrs. Powell,
and he exaggerated his guilt in the matter in order to
extract the comfort from Powell which Powell more
and more unwillingly ministered. He began escaping
Bickler and leaving him to Ann, who healed his wounds
by unsparing cautery rather than such medicament as
Powell's philosophic compassion supplied. The two,
as they sat together in the kitchen, still haunted by the
vanished presence of the girl, heard Powell tuning his
harp, or striking it untuned, in the remotest front of the
house, and singing to it some of the Scotch songs so alien
to its Welsh nature. It tired Ann, too, having the man
dwell upon his vain despair, his vain hope of finding
Rosy ; yet if he left these a moment with some hapless
remark upon the minstrelsy she brought him pitilessly
back and suffered on with him.
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NEW LEAF MILLS
He still wore the fashionable clothes in which she
had first seen him, for he had no others ; but he seemed
to have shrunk in them, and they hung about him in
the neglect which they shared with his unshaven beard
and unoiled hair. The splendor of his electioneering
days was far from him; he remained visibly in the
shame of his defeat at the polls. He rode up to the
back of the house, and entered at the kitchen door with
boots spattered from the mud of the country road. " I
always think," he would say, " that I'm going to find
her here when you open the door. I reckon you haven't
heard anything yet ?"
" ]STot yet, Bickler," Powell would answer, kindly,
" but I don't give up the hope of doing so," and then
the wretched man would begin with the tale of his
suffering and with his self -accusal mixed with self-pity.
" I don't seem to care for eating any more, and I
wake half a dozen times in the night. I always dream
that she has come back, and as I get along nearer to
your house I bet myself she won't be here. God's my
judge, how glad I'd be to lose once."
Powell could not forbear a smile. " Well, perhaps
you will yet."
" Mighty little chance, I reckon. ISTow, Mr. Powell,
I'd like to go the case all over ; go through it like as if
it was in court."
" Well, Bickler, you've done that already, you know."
" But some points have come up in my mind. Still,
I won't to-night. There's one thing, though, I wanted
to speak about. Do you think it would do any good
if I was to go into church, some church, and own up
before everybody just how it was ?"
" I doubt it, Bickler. Doesn't everybody know the
worst already?"
" Ah, they know more than the worst! They don't
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NEW LEAF MILLS
know the best, bad as it is. I believe if it could be
understood once — But what do I care what they
think? It's what / think myself that I care for. Do
you suppose that if I made public confession it would
help me to get the Lord's forgiveness ? I shouldn't care
whether it made them take after me, and tar and feather
me, and ride me out of the county on a rail, if it would
only help me to get a little peace of mind. But nothing
will do it, and that's a sign that the Lord isn't going
to forgive me. Oh my, oh my, oh my!"
They had talked again and again to this point, and
again and again Powell had assured the sinner that
if he owned his sin to himself he had disowned it, and
that this renunciation made before himself and his wife
was morally as effective as if made before the whole
community.
" But what I want is punishment, something to take
it out of me," and it was at this point that the notion
of relaxing him to the secular arm in the person of Mrs.
Powell first occurred to her husband. He did not at
once act upon it, but it finally formed his justification
in summoning Ann to the conference, and when once
the appeal had been made to her as a point for ad-
judication, retiring himself from the case and leaving
it wholly to her.
She found at first a certain satisfaction in bringing
his potential guilt before the wretched man, though in
his collapse she could not always recognize him for the
miscreant she theorized him, but at times felt as if he
were some miserable boy, whose fault had found him
out in worse guilt than it necessarily implied. Prom
the pathos of this she had to recall herself to the ab-
horrence of his betrayal of Rosy to her mother; that
was his greater guilt.
There is one thing vou can do, Mr. Bickler," she
132
a
NEW LEAF MILLS
said at last, " and that is to look up that wicked old
mother of hers."
" What good would that do ?" Bickler gasped, in the
reluctance which he had for putting his remorse to a
practical proof; it was much easier to suffer shame at
the hands of the Powells than take some action that
would entail the public consequences which he had
professed himself so eager to meet.
" It would do the good that nothing else would. It
would be the way of finding Rosy, if she is still alive.
Her mother knows, if anybody. If you can't find her
mother, you can find that cousin of hers that cooks
on the canal-boat. She could tell you where Rosy's
mother is, at any rate. But why do you make me tell
you all this? You are a lawyer and you know how
to act."
Bickler answered, vaguely : " It's like as if I couldn't
move. I can come here and talk with you, because you
know about it, but it doesn't seem as if I could speak to
anybody else."
" Well, then, I can tell you that's very cowardly,
and if you are as sorry as you pretend to be you'll over-
come it and do the only thing that's left for you to do."
" I'm afraid, I'm afraid ; I don't deny it. I can't
bear to speak her name anywhere, or to ask anybody,
for fear I'll find out that she's dead, or worse than
dead."
" Then don't come here any more, Mr. Bickler, for
I won't stand it. You pretend to be sorry and to want
punishment, and you shirk it in the only shape you can
get it." Ann rose. " Now I want you to go and not
come back unless you come to tell me that you've been
to look for Rosy's mother and cousin."
Bickler got up perforce from the chair he was sunk
in, and turned his cap on one hand with the other; he
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NEW LEAF MILLS
now always wore it pulled over his eyes and no longer
jauntily slouched on one ear when he made his appear-
ance at the back door. " Don't you think we had better
talk it over with Mr. Powell ?"
" No, I don't. And if you want to know, Mr. Powell
is sick and tired of your coming here, and he'll never
want to see you again unless you've really got some-
thing to tell."
" That was rather severe, Ann," Powell said when
she repeated the fact to him. He looked down thought-
fully while she stared indignantly at him. " I am sick
and tired of him. I realize that his repentance has
worn out my patience. But it's dreadful, isn't it,
that the remorse of a man should bore his fellow-
creature ?"
Ann was unable to enter into the psychological in-
quiry. " I don't know anything about that, Owen, and
I don't care. It's nearly enough, your taking it that
way, to make me feel that there's a pair of you — that
you're as bad as he is."
Powell laughed now with a humorous sense of her
excess. " Well, I hadn't auy part in driving poor Rosy
away, exactly."
" Perhaps you had. If you'd made him take his
brooch back at once, or let me make him, it might never
have come to his driving her away."
This brought Powell's guilt home to him. " Ann,"
he said, solemnly, " you are right. I am to blame al-
most as much as Bickler himself. But it was mere for-
getfulness — "
" Forgetfulness may be a sin, too."
Powell waived the point at least for the time being.
" And what did he say when you told him I didn't want
to see him or wouldn't ?"
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" He didn't say anything. Just went. What else
could he do ?"
" Nothing, I suppose. But it seems rather hard."
The tears of vexation came into Ann's eyes.
" Owen," she said, " if I didn't know how good you
were, I should say you were the crudest man in the
world. And as it is, I will say you are the most try-
mg.
" Oh, my dear girl, I know I am trying, and I am
sorry for it. You have done just exactly right with the
fellow, and from this out I will take him in hand my-
self. I realize that I have been shirking him, and I
assure you that I have been ashamed of myself for
doing so. I ought to have borne with him to the bitter
end, and the least reparation I can make him is to
stand his remorse from now on."
Bickler did not come the next night or the next, and
then the third night Powell was true to his word and
received him, though in illustration of her own regret
for forcing the distasteful office upon him Ann pres-
ently joined them both. Perhaps a certain impatience
for his report mixed with her compassion.
He showed a haggard face at the door, and asked, dry-
tongued, to be allowed to sit down a moment first. He
sat without offering to speak, and then had to be
prompted by Powell with a " Well ?" as sharp as he
could make it.
" Well " — he took the word huskily on his own lips —
" I didn't see her mother. I found the canal-boat, and
I saw her cousin. Rosy — Rosy has gone off somewhere
with her mother. I've been in Tuskingum the last
three days, and I've searched the place all over — every-
where that I was afraid she would be."
He began to cry piteously, to sob and to moan, and
to rock himself backward and forward in his chair.
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NEW LEAF MILLS
Ann stared at him silently, but the sight wrought
upon Powell so that he made several beginnings of con-
solation. " Oh, well, we mustn't give up all — Cer-
tainly they can be found somewhere or other — There
isn't the least danger but what — "
Ann stopped him with a distracted cry of "Owen!"
XXII
No man lives well into the forties, as Owen Powell
had lived, if he is of Owen Powell's philosophic mind,
without realizing that it is not a misfortune misfortunes
come not single spies. He perceives that he borrows
from one misfortune strength to support another, and
power somehow from their successive help to turn the
day against them all. The trouble lingers near, but
the man is left in possession of the field.
It had often seemed to Powell that his life at New
Leaf Mills had been a series of large and little tragedies
which were none the less tragic because they were also
rather squalidly comic. He had grieved most truly
for the fate of the unhappy girl who was like a child in
his family, and he had fully shared his wife's anger
with the means by which the offense came. His anger
passed as Bidder's remorse persisted, and, though the
remorse bored him more and more, he could not refuse
him the sympathy the man did not merit ; the stress of
its reason remained. The girl was gone in mysterious
silence to a destiny that his wife and he, though it
harrowed them with its dreadful possibility, did not
explicitly forecast, but left in the silence into which
Eosy herself had vanished. Now when a letter came
from his brother James at Middleville definitely re-
nouncing his hope of joining the family community at
the mills, Powell found a sort of relief in thinking of
Eosy and her intangible disaster; and again when the
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NEW LEAF MILLS
new miller said one morning that he had made up his
mind not to stay any longer, and the running of the
mills must fall into the unskilled hands of himself and
Richard, he took comfort from his brother's defection,
and could at least join Ann in refusing to blame Jim
and Sally for not wanting to come to such a hapless
place.
But Ann's real stay in the matter was her faith in
the coming of Felix in the spring. That was to be
atonement for all injuries, compensation for all losses,
and it seemed to her that it was by the direct favor of
Heaven that the day after Jim's letter came there
should be one from Jessamy reporting a great increas-
ing improvement in Felix, so great that she was now
fully sharing his never-failing hopefulness. The letter
had been a week making its slow steamboat journey
up the Mississippi and the Ohio, but Ann was not im-
patient with that. She began reading it aloud, and
then she stopped her reading aloud and partly reported
its tenor to Powell.
" Yes, there isn't one unfavorable thing. He's made
such a wonderful gain in strength. Cough better; he
sleeps better than he ever has. His appetite has in-
creased. He takes walks and doesn't get so tired. They
will be here in April if he keeps on gaining. And
I had such a bad dream again last night about Felix!
I suppose it was that miserable Bickler's talking about
Rosy and thinking she was dead. I hated to tell you
what my dream was this morning, and now I needn't
tell you. Let's go and look at their room. We ought
to get it plastered right away, if we don't the others, so
that it will be good and dry for them."
The Powells were standing on the sawn-off piece of
sill which formed their provisional doorstep, and Ann
had opened and read her letter there. As they turned
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NEW LEAF MILLS
to go in she caught sight over her shoulder of a boy
on a horse splashing through the tail-race and waving
what seemed a letter in his hand toward them.
" Oh, what can it be, Owen V she implored.
Powell went down to the road to meet the boy. " It's
a telegraphic despatch," he called to her; it was too
early in the history of telegraphing to call the thing a
telegram. He fumbled in his pocket for money to pay
the boy, and Ann suffered at the door.
" Oh, open it, open it !" she lamented.
Powell opened it slowly as he came toward her.
Then, standing beside her, with his encouraging smile
still on his face, he read mechanically : " Felix died
last night. Coming north with him. Have written.
Jessamy."
" My dream !" Ann said. " Oh, poor Jessamy !"
And then she looked at her husband's face, and she said,
" Oh, poor Owen !" She knew that he loved Felix, as
in large families the eldest is apt to love the youngest,
with fatherly affection.
She cried. Owen did not cry with tears, but he
whimpered like a child controlling itself.
" He didn't think," Ann said, finding help in the
detail, " when he sent me that bag of coffee that he
was going to die before I used half of it. Where will
she have the funeral? They will bring him to Tusk-
ingum. We must be there to meet Jessamy."
The circumstances of their sorrow softened their sor-
row, and their sorrow softened others toward them a
little. The new miller promised he would stay until
they could get somebody, and Owen left Richard to
look after the younger children while he went with
their mother to the funeral.
Ann told Richard about it when she came back.
All the brothers of Felix had been at the funeral, but
10 139
NEW LEAF MILLS
only one of them had talked as if he would come to
the mills. He was the next to Owen in age, and
was most in sympathy with him religiously. But
he had not been able to wind up his business, as
he said, and he was uncertain whether he could sell
out.
" If he comes here," Richard's mother said to him,
" I suppose we must go, and if he doesn't I don't know
how we are to stay. I don't believe your father could
make enough out of the mills to keep them going;
he's only got along with your poor uncle's help. I'm
sorry for your poor father every way ; I know he likes
this dreadful place, and that it will be a struggle for
him to go out into the world again and find something.
You must help him all you can, Richard."
She took the boy's hand and smoothed it with her
own. " Oh, surely we can get something, mother," he
said, and his adventurous spirit fired at the notion of
getting it by some miraculous chance. " I don't believe
it's too late yet for us to go to California. I could go
ahead."
" You mustn't think of that, Dick, dear. But you
might go down to the City and look round. You have
such good business faculty. I have been thinking about
it already, for we must settle somewhere or have the
prospect of it before the winter. Your father has
friends among the ISTew Church people there, and you
could see them for him."
The two talked the chances over, and took more and
more courage from their talk. Powell was out look-
ing after the pigs and hens ; he had almost a personal
understanding with the pigs in their wildness among
the fallen leaves on the hillside, and with the chickens
in their home-loving tameness about the back yard ; his
familiarity always made it difficult to part with them
140
NEW LEAF MILLS
for the ends that pork and poultry seem appointed to
in the order of Providence ; at such moments he owned
that he was inclined to a vegetable diet. Now he came
in flushed with interest in certain characters among
them, and already so cheered from his contact with
nature that Ann tried to hide her gloom from him ; she
knew he had not really forgotten his brother, and that
he had comforted himself from supernature as well as
nature.
" You'll be wanting supper, Owen," she said, putting
on an apron over her dress, " and I reckon the children
will, too."
" Why, yes, I suppose I will, though I didn't realize
that I was hunerrv. I declare, I never saw such a sun-
set. It blazed through the trees on the western side
of the hill like a fire. Do you know," he added, fallen-
ly, "that I wanted to tell Felix about it. Isn't it
strange? But perhaps he was seeing it too where
he is."
"Ann could not say; she left him sitting before the
hearth in the latticed bower which was to have been
their parlor; and presently the cheerful hiss of frying
made itself heard from the kitchen, where she was busy
over the stove, while the children were setting the
supper-table in the other latticed bower which was to
have been the dining-room.
Eichard had gone to get some apples from the Bladen
orchard, where the Powells were always welcome with-
out special leave. Lizzie Bladen was there picking
mushrooms, and he helped her fill her apron with them
before he filled his own hat and pockets with apples.
They did not talk much; only a few shy words. She
asked him if his father and mother had got back from
the funeral, and she said she would like to see Tusk-
ingum again. Dick was cautious even with her, and he
141
NEW LEAF MILLS
said he believed if they ever left the mills they would
go to the City to live.
She said, " I would like to see the City once, but I
would rather live in Tuskingum."
" That's because we are more used to it, I suppose,"
Richard said. When he remembered on the way home
that he had said we, it seemed as if he had been rather
bold. After supper he told his mother what Lizzie
Bladen had said about Tuskingum, and she answered,
Indeed she would rather live in Tuskingum, too, but
she knew there was no chance for his father there ; and
they spent the evening planning for him in the City,
while Powell was busy looking over his accounts by the
parlor fire. He ended with more courage in the possi-
bilities of the mills than he had when talking it over
with Ann on their way back from the funeral. He
had then taken the burden of her mood, but now he
rose from his dejection. There was no longer any ques-
tion of turning them into paper-mills or carrying out
the scheme of a semi-communal settlement at New Leaf.
That must be all given up, and Powell gave it up not
without a pang then and there, though he must often
recur to it regretfully afterward. What seemed prac-
ticable was some arrangement with Overdale, who could
contribute his experience and look to the joint profits
of the concern for his compensation, while Powell
would supply the capital for carrying it on. He did
not at once determine where the capital was to come
from, but on reflection it appeared to him that his
brother David, whether he did or did not decide to take
hold actively himself, might arrange to let him have
something to keep on with.
The scheme still wore so hopeful an aspect in the
morning that he approached Overdale confidently with
it. He could not help believing that somehow the man's
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NEW LEAF MILLS
nature should have been changed by his experiences,
and, though this was quite as unreasonable, in his j)hi-
losophy, as the saving effect of a death-bed repentance,
he could not persuade himself that Overdale was not
cherishing a secret amity toward him and would not be
glad to show himself a friend if occasion offered, espe-
cially if the occasion embraced an obvious advantage.
But when he opened the matter Overdale bluntly re-
fused, not quite with his old savagery, but still gruffly
and finally. He said that he was going away from
New Leaf as soon as he could get away. He was going
to sell his stock and furniture at vendue, and stay with
his wife's family near Spring Grove for the winter and
then move West in the spring.
He did not vouchsafe an explanation or offer an
acknowledgment of Powell's good-will; and Powell, in
philosophizing the fact to Ann, who had tried to dis-
suade him from approaching Overdale with his sug-
gestion, interested himself without rancor in the study
of human nature which the incident afforded. He de-
cided that Overdale kept his moroseness on as a cloak
to hide the shame he felt before him because Powell
knew the cause of his baseless terror in the past. The
fight against this terror had drawn out the man's
strength, and he could have died valiantly fighting,
but his rescue had left him cowed. While the fore-
boding remained his secret he could keep his self-
respect, but when it became known he could not con-
tinue without humiliation in the presence of the man
who shared it. In a sort of way he was perhaps grate-
ful to Powell, and his attack on Bickler might be taken
as an expression of gratitude which otherwise he could
not own. He was like a man who had been dignified
by the vision of a specter and then cast down by finding
it a shadow or a dead tree. Or perhaps it was only the
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NEW LEAF MILLS
man's nature to be surly and to find a supreme satis-
faction in thwarting an expectation of friendliness ; he
was merely fulfilling the design of the Power which
makes ugliness and makes beauty by the same creative
impulse.
Powell allowed this possibility, which Ann, in lan-
guage less psychological, suggested when she said she
was glad that he was to have nothing to do with the
sulky wretch, and hoped that now he would not try to
make anything of him again. She did not otherwise
betray her satisfaction in an event which took from
Powell his last hope of remaining at New Leaf Mills.
She realized too keenly the disappointment which she
could not share, and she tried to make her gradual
preparations for leaving the place as tacit as possible.
Yet of course they could not be carried on, or even
fairly begun, without his knowledge and connivance,
and when she found him going about the wonted routine
as if he were always to go about it she felt the necessity
of coming to open terms. Por a while she watched him
dreamily denying by his actions the situation which
his thoughts must have owned, and then she spoke.
" I know you hate to go, Owen," she said one evening,
when he came in from a walk with the children and
was building a fire on the parlor hearth.
He looked round, with his face still hidden from
her by the blaze behind his head. " To go ?"
" Surely you don't think we can keep on staying
here?"
He sank back upon his heels where he knelt. " No,
certainly not. But I see no occasion for hurry. If
David should decide to come, perhaps we could ar-
range— "
" No, we couldn't, Owen, and you know it well
enough. This house wouldn't be big enough for both
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NEW LEAF MILLS
families — let alone the living from the mills. Oh,
don't you see, my dear, that we have got to go whether
David comes here or not ?"
" Yes," he said, so dispiritedly that she had hardly
the heart to press on, as she knew she must. " I sup-
pose so."
" Don't you 'know so ?"
" I know it, but I don't realize it. I will try to
realize it, my dear," he said.
" You must at once," she persisted. " Richard and
I, here, have been talking it over, and I want you to
let him go down to the City and look round for some-
thing you can get hold of. He has such good business
faculty I know he can find something. We don't see
why you shouldn't get hold of the ISTew Church book-
store— "
" Ann," he said, and he got to his feet as he spoke,
" I thought of that the instant you spoke of the City.
It is strange that the same thing should have been in
both of our minds at once," he said, tasting the mystical
quality of the fact.
" Yes, it is," she owned, glad of his interest, even
though it was so far from a practical interest.
" Perhaps," he said, " it was an influx from the
spiritual world in both our minds. We must act upon
it," he continued, with increasing energy; and that
night he took the matter up with Richard and Ann.
" Yes," he concluded, as he rose to wind the clock,
" the outlook is very hopeful. You could get some-
thing to do, Dick, until I could work you into the
business, or perhaps I should need you from the start;
certainly I should want your help for a while. I have
an idea that a ISTew Church periodical of some sort
could be made to pay." Ann looked a little troubled
at this conjecture, but she would not discourage it.
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" As yet we have nothing west of the Alleghanies in
the way of a periodical. And in that event I should
certainly require your help, Dick. You could solicit
subscriptions and advertising." He planned it vividly
out. Then as he paused, with the shovel in his hand
before covering the fire for the night, he asked, " When
do you think he had better start, Ann ?"
" Why, the sooner the better," she said. " I could
get him ready by to-morrow afternoon, poor boy; he
hasn't so much to take with him. He could walk to
Spring Grove and take the railroad cars for the City
there."
" I don't know about the sinews of war," Powell
mused, feeling in his pocket and finding a silver dollar
there. " I declare, I hadn't realized since I left Tusk-
ingum that we were poor! We shall realize it more
and more, Ann, in the City. We have been rich here,
for we haven't wanted anything; we shall have many
wants there. I suppose a dollar wouldn't go far there
even with Dick ; the hotels are a dollar a day."
" Oh, if you are going to look at it in that light !"
Ann lamented.
" I'm not. Walters has been talking about buying
our pigs. I could send word in the morning, and if
he pays cash in part we can start Dick off like a prince
with five dollars in his pocket."
" And I'm not afraid but what I can get something
to do while I'm looking up the business for you, father,"
Dick said. " If Uncle Ben's boat happens to be in, I
can stay on that till she goes out."
" That is true," Powell admitted. " Well, we will
see what a night brings forth," and now he covered the
fire.
XXIII
The farmer who wanted the pigs had not changed
his mind about them, but he had changed his mind
about the price and about the amount of cash which he
would pay when he came to look them over in the
morning, so that in the afternoon Dick started for the
City with three dollars and seventy-five cents in his
pocket ; it seemed to him a good deal, and he regarded
it as capital which would readily multiply. His heart
was full of the hope of adventure, and he walked along
with his brother, the Dreamer, toward Spring Grove.
His brother thought it would be fine to tell about the
adventures which Dick thought it would be fine to have ;
and that was the great difference between them. They
were sorry to part, but the younger would not have
gone with Dick if he could. When they came to the
point where they had agreed that he was to turn
back neither of them had any thought of his going
farther. They kissed each other in the fashion of their
childhood, and then Dick kept on, and his brother stood
a moment watching him in the pale afternoon light of
the early November day and wondering how it would
feel to be going off in the night to a place where he
knew no one. He dreamed instantly an awful dream
of himself in the supposed case, but he did not notice
that Dick had no overcoat and no precaution against a
change of weather except the comforter he wore string-
ing from his shoulders. He, no more than his father,
knew that they were poor, and Dick did not mean to
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NEW LEAF MILLS
be poor for more than a day or two, if there was any
faith in adventure. He carried a little linen bag
which his mother had made and put in it a shirt and
two pairs of home-knit socks for his sole baggage.
After he rounded the southern slope of the hill, which
hid the new house from sight, he came to the Bladens'
house, with the orchard next the road. Dick thought
he would get over the fence and pick up an apple or
two. When he put his hands on the top rail to spring
over, he saw Lizzie Bladen under the best tree. She
came toward the fence with one of the apples in her
hand ; and he thought her coloring was like the apple
she held out to him — the ivory, almost sallow, white
of the bellnower, brightened by her gentle dark eyes.
" Don't you want it ?"
He took it absently. " I'm going to the City," he
explained, as if his equipment needed explanation first
of all.
" I heard so," the girl answered, looking down at
the foot she was pushing against a tuft of grass.
Then neither of them spoke until Dick said at last,
" Thank you for the apple, Lizzie."
" You're entirely welcome. Would you like more ?"
" No, this will be plenty." Somehow it seemed now
as if more apples would spoil her gift. " Well, I must
be going, Lizzie."
" Good-bv, Dick."
" Good-by."
Neither could say more ; and it was the last time they
saw each other.
For the rest of the family the days began to go with
a sort of eager swiftness. The children were on fire
with wild notions of the City ; but the father went about
the usual work of the place, overseeing the sawmill
chieflv and keeping a slighter supervision of the grist-
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NEW LEAF MILLS
miller, who would have resented more and was, as he
sometimes reminded Powell, just staying on to ac-
commodate.
That week Overdale had his vendue, and auctioned
off his pigs and poultry, and the larger household stuff
which he did not care to take away. It was a stirring
event for the neighborhood, and culminated in the de-
parture of the miller and his family the next day for
Spring Grove on the new wagon which he had bought
to move West in. The children were scattered in dif-
ferent vantages of the bedding, and on the top, in a
sort of triumph, rode the sloom deeply hidden in her
sunbonnet. The miller drove, and Powell thought that
as he passed the new house to cross the tail-race he
might stop to say good-by. But he did not stop, and
Powell did not attempt to stay him. Ann watched his
passing with regret for Powell's letting him. " Don't
you think you'd better go out and speak, Owen ?"
" I've decided not. It's better as it is — it might
afflict him to have me. It's more in his nature so, and
he can manage better."
" You as good as saved his life."
" Oh, there wasn't the least danger of his dying."
In those days Ann relented more and more to the
man whom she saw still so little able to realize their
situation. One morning she found him, after seeking
everywhere else for him, in the empty log cabin, coming
down from the loft as if he had been looking the for-
lorn place over. " Owen," she accused him, " I do
believe you've been seeing if this hovel would do for
us if David comes to live in the new house."
He laughed in a guilty way. " I've been seeing that
it would not do," he ended, with a sigh.
" Oh," she said, " if you could only see that the whole
place won't do, and never would !"
149
NEW LEAF MILLS
" I dare say I shall come to that," he consented,
sadly.
He moped, she felt, as the time went by, and he
was cheerfuler only when some letter, full of hope
without expectation, came from Dick. The boy had got
a temporary place in the JSTew Church book-store; but
the business was not for sale, and he was looking for
something else. The most discouraging of the letters
seemed to cheer Powell most : he was like a condemned
man to whom respite brings the hope of reprieve. That
vexed Ann with him ; but she knew he could not help
it, and her heart ached for him. She had always had
to fortify him for his encounters with the world, and
she understood how in this retreat from it he had felt
a safety and peace that he had never felt in its presence.
With her practical mind she had not been able to enter
into his poetic joy in a return to the simple things dear
to him from his boyhood, but with her heart she could
divine the anticipative homesickness that now possessed
him.
Late one afternoon the Dreamer, who had been
sent to Spring Grove for the mail, came back with a
letter from Dick, which the mother tore open and read
through with a flushing face, and then looked about her
for the father. He was not in the house, and she ran
to the back door and saw him stretched upon the hill
slope above ; there, propped on one elbow, he seemed to
be gazing out over the landscape. She started eagerly
toward him, but her steps grew slower, and she hid the
letter in the pocket of her dress and kept her hand
on it there as if it might escape.
As she came near and nearer the gentle child-hearted
man, whom she knew so brave and wise for all high
occasions, her breast filled with worship and pity of
him, and it seemed to her as if she were going to deal
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NEW LEAF MILLS
him some cruel hurt with the news she had. She
remembered how good and patient he had been through
the trials of their life in the squalor of that place, which
he could have liked no more than she ; how hard he had
worked; how he helped her keep her courage through
their common trials from the rude conditions among the
rude neighbors, in the hope of bettering both. She re-
membered the unselfish purpose which he had infused
into the necessity of their coming, and how he had not
chosen to come, but, being chosen, had sought for beauty
in their squalid lot; how he had never repined at the
worst of it, but with his sweet humor had tried to
laugh the ugliness away. She knew the gifts of heart
and mind which needed only the push of ambition to
make him valued in the world, and she blamed herself
for blaming him that he had taken so modestly the
ignorant ill-will of the clowns and savages about him.
She considered, swiftly, as she slowed her swift pace,
that his solace and reparation were in her and in their
children, and that he had not cared for anything out-
side of his home except for the aspect of those fields
and woods which she abhorred. She perceived as never
before that he loved the countenance of the seasons and
the skies, unvexed by the noise and turmoil of the town
where he had somehow found himself so unfitted for the
struggle in which she believed he might have succeeded.
She was going now to take him from the simple things
of nature so dear to him, and hurry him back into the
town, and plunge him again into the cares and troubles
which might harass him into another failure. She
could not bear it, and she ran toward him with the
renunciation in her will that took her breath and made
her heart beat so that she shook with it as she stood
beside him.
" I was just thinking, Ann," he said, smiling with-
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NEW LEAF MILLS
out waiting for her to speak, " bow beautiful tbis
prospect is. I suppose tbat in the spiritual world there
will be scenery that will far surpass it ; in fact, accord-
ing as our mood is there, we shall create scenes of
heavenly beauty. But — but — this is dear because it is
familiar, because it is like a beloved face, because I
know it — Why, Ann!"
She had sunk down beside him, and she began to cry,
with her face in her hands. He took them down and
wiped away her tears with his handkerchief, as if they
were young people together. " What is the matter,
my poor girl ?"
She turned bravely upon him. " Owen," she de-
manded, " would you like to stay here ? Because if
you would I am ready to stay, and I will never say
another word against the place. I know we could make
the log cabin do."
" Have you had a letter from David % Have they
decided to come ?"
" ISTo, it isn't from him. But whether they come or
not I'm ready to stay. Don't you believe me, Owen ?"
He took the hand she had put on his knee and held
it there in his hand. " I believe you would try, and
that is all that is expected of us. But we can't stay,
Ann. The cabin is hardly fit for cattle, and, besides,
how could I carry on the mills % I have no means, and
I realize that I am unfit to deal with the people about
here. I think they are friendlier than they were, but
they don't understand me, and I don't believe I've ever
understood them."
" They are savages !" Ann passionately broke out.
" Oh no, oh no ; not quite so bad as that, though they
are not very polished. I fancy I can get on better
with people of a somewhat more advanced civilization.
At any rate, I am willing to make the experiment."
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NEW LEAF MILLS
" Do you say that because you know I want it ?"
" I know you want it, but I don't say it for that
reason. I rather want it myself at times. This has
been a beautiful dream — "
" Owen, if ever I said a true word to you in my life
I am saying it now! I want to stay here; I want to
stay here, and not go to the City."
" But you can't stay, Ann ; that dream is passed, and
we can't dream it over again."
" Then, there !" she said, and she pulled Richard's
letter out of her pocket and threw it into his lap.
" Dick has got the business for you. The Wilsons
are willing to give up the store, and they will take your
notes for the stock and good-will; they've just heard
of a chance in Chicago; they say that's quite a grow-
ing place, and there are more ISTew Church people
there. They have been very good to Dick, and they've
asked him to stay with them till we can come down
and take hold; and now we needn't even hurry."
" I think," Powell said, formally, "that it will be
better not to lose any time," and now he lost none in
confirming himself in the things she had said from
Eichard's letter. "It seems a good opportunity, and
we must not let it slip through our fingers by any sort
of delay."
He spent the evening in making a box to hold his
books ; but he decided to leave the harp, trusting it to
the fraternal tenderness of David, in the possibility that
some of David's children might learn to play on it;
his own had not, but Powell was inwardly aware that
he himself had not. Ann and he sat up late talking
the whole affair over, and it appeared to him more and
more probable that something in the nature of a ISTew
Church periodical might succeed in connection with the
book-store.
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NEW LEAF MILLS
When they were settled in the City he was patient
with the reasons which his New Church friends urged
against the scheme. He had known some of them
before, and he found them very agreeable and cultivated
men. They were rather conservative in some things,
but Powell himself, while holding fast to the funda-
mental principles of justice in politics, now confined
his assertion of them to aiding the escape of fugitive
slaves from Kentucky, whom he enjoyed hiding in the
basement of his store, till he could forward them
to some other underground station. He did not re-
linquish the ideal of a true state of things which he
and his brothers had hoped to realize at New Leaf
Mills, but he was inclined to regard the communistic
form as defective. The communities of Robert Owen
had everywhere failed as signally as that of New Leaf
Mills, which indeed could scarcely be said to have
passed the embryonic stage. But he argued, not so
strenuously as he used to argue things, but as formally,
that if some such conception of society could possess the
entire State, a higher type of civilization would un-
doubtedly eventuate.
THE END
PS Howells, William Dean
2025 New Leaf Mills
1913
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