The Soldier of the Valley Part 13

"'You should see Edith Parker, Mark. She is so different from the girls of Black Log. Her father is head book-keeper in the store, and he has been very good to me. Last week he took me home to dinner with him. He has a nice house in Brooklyn. His wife is dead, and he has just his daughter. We have no women in Black Log that compare to her.

She is tall and slender and has fair hair and blue eyes.'"

"I hate fair-haired women," broke in Mary with some asperity. "They are so vain."

"I agree with you," said I. "That is invariably the case, and dark hair is so much more beautiful; but we must make allowance for Tim.

Let us see--'fair hair and blue eyes and the sweetest face'--I do believe that brother of mine is out of his head to write such stuff."

"He certainly is," said Mary, very quietly.

"Poor Tim! But go on."

"'We played cards together for a while, till old Mr. Parker went asleep in his chair, and then Edith and I had a chance to talk. You know, Mark, I've always been a bit afraid of women, and awkward and ill at ease around them. But Edith is different from the girls of Black Log.

We were friends in a minute. You don't know what it is to talk to these girls who have been everywhere, and seen everything, and know everything. They are so much above you, they inspire you. For a girl like that no sacrifice a man can make is too great. To win a girl like that a man must do something and be something. Now up in Black Log----'"

"Yes, up in Black Log the women are different," said Mary in a quiet voice. "They have to work in Black Log, and it's the men they work for. If they sat on thrones and talked wisdom and looked beautiful, the kitchen-fires would die out and the children go naked."

"Tim doesn't say anything disparaging to the people of our valley," I protested. "He says, 'in Black Log the girls don't understand how to dress. They deck themselves out in gaudy finery. Now Edith wears the simplest things. You never notice her gown. You only see her figure and her face.'"

"Do I deck myself out in gaudy finery, Mark?" Mary's appeal was direct and simple.

A shake of the head was my only answer. I wanted to tell her that Tim was blind. I wanted to tell her the boy was a fool; that Edith, the tall, thin, pale creature, was not to be compared to one woman in our valley; that I know who that woman was; that I loved her. I would have told her this. With a sudden impulse I leaned toward her. As suddenly I fell back. My crutches had clattered to the floor!

A battered veteran! A pensioner! A back-woods pedagogue! That I was.

That I must be to the end. My place was in the school-house. My place was on the store bench, set away there with a lot of other broken antiquities. That I should ask a woman to link her life with mine, was absurd. A fair s.h.i.+p on a fair sea soon parts company with a derelict--unless it tows it. A score of times I had fought this out, and as often I had found but one course and had set myself to follow it, but there was that in Mary's quiet eyes that shook my resolution.

There was an appeal there, and trust.

"I am glad, anyway, I am not so much above you, Mark," she said, now laughing.

I gathered up my crutches and the letter. I gathered up my wits again.

"There's where I feel like Tim, indeed," I said.

"I don't think I should like this lofty Edith," the girl exclaimed.

"What a pompous word it is--Edith! Tim is ambitious. I suppose he rolls that name over and over in his mind."

It seemed that Mary was unnecessarily sharp toward a young woman she had never seen and of whom she had as yet heard nothing but good.

While for myself I felt a certain resentment at Tim for his praise of this girl and the condescending references to my misfortune in never having seen her like, I had for him a certain keen sympathy and hope for his success. I had a certain sympathy for Edith, too, for a man in love, if unrestrained in his praise, will make a plain, sensible, motherly girl look like a frivolous fool. Perhaps in this case Edith was the victim. I suggested this to Mary, and she laughed softly.

"Perhaps so," she said. "But I must admit it irritates me to see our Tim lose his head over a stranger. I can only picture her as he does--a superior being, who lives in Brooklyn, whose name is Edith, and who wears her hair in a small knot on top of her head. Can you conceive her smile, Mark, if she saw us now--if this fine Brooklyn girl with her city ways dropped down here in Black Log?"

"That's all in Tim's letter," I cried. "Listen. 'She asked all about my home and you. I told her of the place and of all the people, of Mary and Captain. Last night I took over that picture of you in your uniform, and I won't tell you all the nice things she said about you, and----'"

"She's a flatterer," cried Mary.

"I am beginning to love her myself," said I. "But listen to Tim. 'She told me she hoped to see Black Log some day, and to meet the soldier of the valley. I said that I hoped she would, too, but I didn't tell her that a hundred times a day, as I worked over the books in the office, I vowed that soon I'd take her there myself.'"

"As Mrs. Tim," Mary added, for I was folding up the letter.

"As Mrs. Tim, evidently," said I. "Poor old Tim! It's a very bad case."

"Poor old Tim!" said Mary.

She took up her needles and her work, and fell to knitting.

"I suppose they must be very rich--the Parkers, I mean." This was offered as a wedge to break the silence, for the needles were going very rapidly now, and the st.i.tches seemed to call for the closest watching.

"Yes," said Mary.

I lighted my pipe again.

"What a grand man Tim will be when he comes back home." I suggested this after a long silence. "He'll look fine in his city clothes, for somehow those city men do dress differently from us country chaps. Now just picture Tim in a--in a----"

Mary was humming softly to herself.

XI

The county paper always comes on Thursday. This was Thursday. Elmer Spiker sat behind the stove, in a secluded corner, the light of the lamp on the counter falling over his left shoulder on the leading column of locals. Elmer was reading. There was a store rule forbidding him to read aloud, which caused him much hards.h.i.+p, for as he worked his way slowly down the column, his right eye and left ear kept twitching and twitching as though trying to keep time with his lips.

Josiah Nummler's long pole rested on the counter at his side, and his great red hands were spread out to drink in the heat from the glowing bowl of the stove.

"It's a-blowin' up most a-mighty, ain't it?" he said, cheerfully. "Any news, Elmer?"

"Oh now, go home," grunted Mr. Spiker, rolling his pipe around so the burning tobacco scattered over his knees. "See what you've done!" he snapped angrily, brus.h.i.+ng away the sparks.

"I didn't notice you was in the middle of a word, Elmer, really I didn't," pleaded old Mr. Nummler.

"I wasn't in the middle of a word," retorted Elmer, as he drove his little finger into his pipe in an effort to save some of the tobacco.

"I was just beginnin' a new piece. Things is gittin' so there ain't a place left in this town for a man to read in peace and comfort. Here I am, tryin' to post up on the local doin's, on polytics and religion, and ringin' in my ears all the time is 'lickin' the teacher, lickin'

the teacher, lickin' the teacher.' S'pose every man here did lick the teacher in his time--what of it, I says, what of it?"

"Yes, what of it?" said I, closing the door with a bang.

I was plodding home from Mary's. She had hummed me out at last, and I had tucked Tim's letter in my pocket and hobbled back to the village.

The light in the store had drawn me aside and I stopped a moment just to look in. The store is always a fascinating place. There is always something doing there, and I opened the door a crack to hear what was under discussion. Catching the same refrain that troubled Elmer Spiker, I entered.

"What of it?" I demanded, facing the company. "I don't believe there is a man here who ever thrashed the teacher."

Theophilus Jones raised himself from the counter on which he was leaning, and waved a lighted candle above his head.

"Here comes the teacher--make way for the teacher!"

Josiah Nummler pounded the floor with his long pole.

"See the conquerin' hero comes," he cried. "A place for him--a place for him!" And with the point of his stick he drove the six men on the bench so close together as to give me an excellent seat.