Blacksheep! Blacksheep! Part 25

The first night they slept in a barn, without leave, begged a breakfast and walked until Archie cried for mercy.

"What's a blistered foot more or less!" cried the Governor, producing an ointment which he forthwith applied with tenderest solicitude.

From his ingenuity in foraging and the philosophy with which he accepted the day's vicissitudes, Archie judged that his companion was by no means new to the road. He showed the greatest familiarity with the region they traversed, avoiding farmhouses where no generosity could be expected by the tramping fraternity, leading the way through quiet woods to "swimming holes" where they bathed and solaced their souls. They must not get ahead of their schedule, he explained. When Archie, knowing nothing of schedules, timidly asked questions the Governor, feigning not to hear, would deliver long lectures on Ohio history, praising the pioneers of the commonwealth, and enthusiastically reciting the public services of her statesmen.

At the end of the fourth day as they kicked their heels against the pier of a bridge that spanned the Sandusky, watching the stars slip into their places in the soft tender sky, the Governor's quick ear detected the step of a pedestrian approaching from the west.

"Unless we've missed a turn somewhere, that's Perky. A punctual chap; this is the exact time and place for our meeting and he should bear tidings of interest in our affairs."

The man, who was dressed like a farm laborer, responded carelessly to the Governor's greeting, and swung himself to a seat beside him on the abutment.

"The young brother knows the wisdom of silence," remarked the Governor, laying his hand on Archie's knee. "It's a pleasure to bring you two together. He and I follow the leading of the same star. What news of the lamb in the pasture?"

As though taking time to accommodate himself to the Governor's manner of speech Perky lighted his pipe and flicked the match into the river.

"The little lamb is not happy. The father is expected tonight. I've got orders to chop wood while he's on the reservation."

"The son is not wise to the metal trick and you drop into the background?"

"The true word has been spoken, brother."

"The son has been long upon the road. What caused him to linger?"

"A broken arm, so the old man has it; and repairs have been made in a hospital at Portland by the eastern sea."

The Governor dug his elbow into Archie's ribs. Archie caught a gleam.

Putney Congdon had been in a hospital recovering from the bullet wound received at Bailey Harbor, but was now arriving at his father's Ohio farm, where his child, the lamb referred to, was concealed. Putney was to be kept in ignorance of the lure of the tampered coins that had brought Perky into alliance with his father, and Perky was to interest himself in wood-chopping during the son's visit. In the privacy of the bridge with only an uninterested river for auditor, there seemed to be no reason why these matters should not be discussed openly; but the Governor evidently enjoyed these veiled communications, though it was clear that Perky found difficulty in fas.h.i.+oning the responses.

"Is there work in the fields for willing hands? Shall we find welcome as laborers keen for the harvest?" asked the Governor.

"The slave driver weeps for lack of help and the pay is high. You will be welcome. When the sun makes its shortest shadow tomorrow you will sign papers for the voyage."

This penetrated to Archie's consciousness as a.s.surance that he and the Governor would find employment on Eliphalet's farm, where Edith Congdon was being concealed from her mother, and that the most fortunate time to apply for employment was at noon the next day.

"The lamb must be carried to more northern pastures. We must guard against snares and pitfalls."

"The old ram is keen but only one eye may be used at a knot-hole. He suspects nothing. We have spoken enough?"

"Longer speech would be a weariness; you may leave us."

Perky waited for a motor to clatter over the bridge and with a careless "So long!" walked away whistling.

"A pretty decent chap, that," remarked the Governor, "with a highly developed b.u.mp of discretion. A man I hope to see with his feet on honest earth when I leave the road. There must be no slip, Archie. The responsibilities of the next fortnight are enormous. The happiness of many people depends upon us. We'll stroll back to that big farm we pa.s.sed awhile ago. It's starred in the official guide books of the dusty ramblers and the milk and bread and b.u.t.ter there will be excellent. And the barn is red, Archie! A red barn is the best of all for sleeping purposes. An unpainted barn advertises the unthrift of the owner, and the roof is always leaky. The scent of moldy hay is extremely offensive to me--suggests rheumatism and pneumonia. And a white barn stares at you insolently. Whenever I see a white barn I prepare for bad luck. But a red barn, Archie, warms the c.o.c.kles of your heart. It enfolds you like a canopy of dreams! I wouldn't have the red too glaring;--a certain rustiness of tint is desirable--"

"Here endeth the lecture," Archie interrupted. "I am starving in a land of milk and honey. Do I understand," he asked as they crossed the bridge, "that tomorrow we're going to find jobs on Eliphalet's plantation and kidnap his granddaughter?"

"Much as I hate to antic.i.p.ate, Archie, it's not only little Edith we're going to kidnap! We're going to steal the old man too!"

III

"I never saw a tramp yet that was worth his breakfast," snarled Grubbs, the foreman of Eliphalet Congdon's farm. "But don't you b.u.ms think y'

can loaf round here. It's goin' t' be work from now right through till the wheat's cut. Jail birds, both on y', I bet. Well, there ain't nothin' round here to steal. Y' can both sleep in the hands' house back yonder and hop to meals when the bell rings. There's some old hats in the barn; shed them pies y' got on yer heads and try t' look like honest men anyhow."

They partook of the generous midday meal provided in a big screened porch adjoining the kitchen. Half a dozen other laborers, regularly attached to Eliphalet's section of rich land, eyed the newcomers with the disdain born of their long tenure. Perky was a capital actor; no one would have imagined that he had ever seen either of the new hands before. In the near-by fields the wheat s.h.i.+mmered goldenly in the sun, quivering into the perfection that would bring it under the knife a few days later. Help was scarce and the scorn of the foreman was a.s.sumed. He had every intention of clinging to the latest comers, inexperienced vagabonds though they might prove, until the pressing need was pa.s.sed.

The Governor was set to work with two other men ripping out an old rail fence and replacing it with wire. Archie's task was the rather more disagreeable one of trundling gravel in a wheelbarrow and distributing it in holes staked for his guidance in the road that ran from the highway gate to the barn. The holes were small; it seemed to Archie absurd to spend time filling such small cavities; and a wheelbarrow filled with gravel is heavy. The foreman explained the job and departed, reappearing from time to time for the pleasure of criticizing Archie's work. When Archie suggested that there would be an economy of time in loading the gravel into a wagon and effecting the distribution by that means the foreman stared at him open-mouthed for a moment, then burst into ironical laughter.

"Give _you_ a team to handle--you!"

The thought of trusting Archie with a team when teams were needed for much more important matters struck the cynical foreman as a gross impiety. The humor of the thing was too tremendous to be enjoyed alone; he yelled to a man who was driving by in a motor truck filled with milk cans to stop and hear the joke. Archie's soul burned within him. That a man of education who belonged to the best clubs on the continent should be proclaimed a fool by a hatchet-faced farmer in overalls, before a fat person on a milk truck was the most crus.h.i.+ng of all humiliations. The foreman jumped on the truck and rode away, and Archie bent his back to the barrow, resolving that never again would he complain of b.u.mps in a road now that he knew the heart-breaking and back-breaking labor of road-mending.

On the whole he did a good job; it was remarkable how interested one could become in so contemptible a task. He tamped the gravel into the holes with the loving care of a dentist filling a tooth, and struck work with reluctance when the bell sounded for supper.

The Governor was already on terms of comrades.h.i.+p with his fellow toilers, and as they splashed in the basins set out on a long plank near the kitchen, his quips kept them laughing. Two college boys had just arrived to aid in the harvesting. Farmers are not much given to humor and the young fellows were clearly pleased to find a jester on the premises. At the supper table the Governor gave his conversational powers free rein. This was the only life; he had rested all winter so that he might enjoy farm life the more. He subjected the collegians to a rigid examination in Latin, quizzed them in physics and promised the whole company a course of lectures on astronomy.

Perky strolled away in one direction; the Governor in another and Archie, left to his own devices, fumed at this desertion. The two would meet somewhere and plan the next strategic move, Archie surmised, and he was irritated to find himself denied a place in their councils. He refused an invitation to sit in at a poker game that was being organized in the farm hands' house and wandered idly about the premises. The residence was a two-story farmhouse, with a broad veranda evidently quite recently added. As Archie pa.s.sed the windows he noted that the rooms were handsomely furnished. This was not an establishment where the employees were admitted to social intercourse with the family of the owner. As Archie stole by, the voices from the veranda sounded remote as from another world. An aristocrat by birth and training, he found here a concrete lesson in democracy that disturbed him. The world was not all club corners and week-end parties. For a few hours at least he was earning his bread by the sweat of his face--a marvelous experience--and feeling very lonesome indeed at the end of his day's labor.

"I don't want to stay with papa; I want to see mama!"

A child's voice plaintively uttering this as he slunk round the house reminded him of the real nature of his sojourn on Eliphalet Congdon's acres.

"Papa's sick; you must be nice to your papa. You must help him to get well, and then you can see your mama!"

Through the parlor windows he saw the stolen Edith rebelliously confronting the tall woman who had been a party to the kidnaping in Central Park.

Eliphalet Congdon entered the room clutching a newspaper and Archie heard him exclaim angrily:

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Edith. Your papa's just come and is sick and tired and your fretting's keeping him awake. Take her upstairs, Sarah, and put her to bed."

As he surveyed the upper windows he caught a glimpse of a woman in a trained nurse's uniform. Putney Congdon was established on the farm and though it was nearly three weeks since the fateful night at Bailey Harbor, he was still feeling the effects of his injury. Afraid of being caught loitering Archie hurried down to the meadow that stretched away from the house and stumbled into a flock of sheep.

He left the sheep, rather envying their placid existence, and was on his way to the laborers' shack when the Governor stepped into his path.

"Mooning? Perky and I have been smoking our pipes off yonder in the woods. He's as sore as a boil because Putney's blown in and he's got to make a feint at honest labor. Perky has a very delicate touch with the tools of his trade and he'd just got his laboratory fixed up in the garret where he's been doctoring gold pieces to beat the band. He says old Eliphalet is more and more delighted with his work. The more he's delighted the better the sport for us."

"I don't see where the sport comes in!" said Archie testily, pausing at the fence of the chicken yard. "It's a long way to that camp in Michigan where we've got to take the child; and you needn't think it's going to be so easy. The old man will be hot after us. Putney's still got a nurse looking after him, but if he's traveled this far he's not going to let go of the little girl without a fight. You've got to take this thing seriously; a mistake will be fatal and after all I've gone through I don't just relish making a mess of it."

"Make a wis.h.!.+" cried the Governor. "There goes a star sliding merrily toward the Pacific."

But a shower of meteors would not have stopped Archie's questions as to the manner in which Edith Congdon was to be s.n.a.t.c.hed from her grandfather's farm in Ohio and transferred to the inland seas. He resented his exclusion from the conference with Perky and said so.

"My dear boy, suspense is good for the soul; I'm merely cultivating in you the joy of surprise. The discipline of waiting will sharpen your wits, which is important, as I mean to honor you with considerable responsibility and leave you here when I depart, which will be tonight as dewy eve spreads her sparkling robe--"

"Leave me here! My G.o.d, man, I'm not going to be stranded in this wilderness! You've lost your senses if you think you can shake me now and leave me to get pinched and do time for your foolishness!"

"Patience, little brother, and not quite so vociferous! You have a good natural voice with strong carrying powers but it shows a sad lack of cultivation. This much will I impart: tomorrow morning Perky will whisper to Eliphalet that the Government is wise to the gold piece trick and that they are watched. The old boy will be scared to death--his son on the place and all that sort of thing, besides the chance of facing a hard-hearted Federal judge for tampering with the Republic's coin. Perky will throw a scare into him that will stand him on his head and then he'll advise him to beat it and the old chap will throw his arms around Perky's neck and beg for protection. And Perky, with a reputation for never deserting a pal, will seize him firmly by the hand and away they'll go."

"_Where_ will they go?" Archie demanded tartly.