The Lost Wagon Part 7

She said uncertainly, "It's very late for new crops."

He forced what he hoped was a careless laugh, and wished he hadn't done so because she knew it was forced. Joe berated himself silently. Above all he wanted to soothe, to spare her, and there was no way. Their crops, their livelihood, was gone. It was more than a serious situation.

It was a desperate one and she knew it as well as he did, but he tried.

"Now just don't you fret. Everything's all right."

She said, "Don't tell me that, Joe."

Though it was morning, with the day scarcely started, she turned tiredly to the stove. Joe sat down to await the meal she would give him. This was summer. Their ham, bacon, sausage, and other smoked meats, had long since been exhausted. Not until the advancing season brought weather cold enough to keep meat would they have any except the wild things they shot. Expertly, Emma mixed milk with eggs and scrambled them in a skillet. She laid slices of homemade bread on the stove until they toasted, and lathered the toast thickly with home-churned b.u.t.ter.

Flushed with sleep, Barbara emerged from the room where she slept with her sister and went outside to the well. When she came back, freshly washed, she had seen the havoc wrought by the cows. She looked at her mother's face, and at her father's, and was tactfully silent. She was young and healthy, and, in spite of the disaster, she looked radiant, and for some reason that he could not explain, Joe felt better.

Elemental himself, he thought of elemental things. Though he could not have explained it, part of the awe Barbara inspired in him sprang from the fact that she was a lovely young woman in whom, symbolically, all the hope of the future lay. Certainly, without her, there could be no future. Joe started eating the heaping plate of scrambled eggs and toast that Emma gave him, and he was half through his meal when there was a timid knock at the door.

Joe said, "Come in."

The door opened and Pete Domley stood framed within it. Somehow he seemed to have shrunk to half his small stature, as though he were a dwarf that had come begging. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, and blue bags were pendant beneath them. Through the open door, Joe caught a glimpse of the white horse Pete had ridden here. For a second Joe's anger flared anew; if Pete had watched his cattle the crops would not be ruined. Pity for this small man who was usually as aggressive as a bantam rooster, but who now was so abject, stole Joe's anger. He said,

"Have some breakfast, Pete."

Pete came through the door, a slow and tired man. He said, "Lance Trevelyan told me last night they'd gone, Joe. They left their pasture on Twoaday Crick and just went. You can't always figure what critters will do."

Joe said, "I know."

"I thought sure," Pete said, "that they'd head for the high pastures above Twoaday. I looked there until almost sun-up."

"So?"

"So I'll pay you, Joe. You or Elias Dorrance, whichever way you want it."

Joe repeated, "Have some breakfast, Pete."

Pete sat down and Emma served him. Joe ate without speaking, and he watched Pete devour his breakfast listlessly. Beef in St. Louis brought fantastic prices, and probably in eastern cities it brought prices even more fabulous. Joe didn't know. He did know that the man who raised that beef on the hoof, and who was the primary provider of the markets, didn't get the most money. Pete, with seven young ones of his own, worked hard. Often he worked much for very little return.

Besides, Pete had ridden all night to find his missing cattle. Finally realizing the truth, he must have looked for them at other farms before he came to see Joe. No man could possibly ask more than that from any other man, and who knew what a fool steer would decide to do? The most a person looking for cattle in the black of night could do was guess, and if the guess went wrong, what then? Pete Domley hadn't eaten or trampled Joe's oats, corn, and vegetables. Pete's cattle had. There was, Joe felt, no more sense in crucifying Pete than there had been in nailing Christ to the Cross. Pete finished his breakfast, and after a moment's silence he said,

"Who'll I pay, Joe? You or Elias?"

"Neither, Pete."

Pete said stubbornly, "What's right is right."

"Look, you buy me some more seed and let it go at that."

Pete opened surprised eyes. "You going to plant again?"

"What else?"

"Well--You know where I live and the money will be there when you go to plant."

Pete mounted his tired horse and rode homeward. Moodily, with mingled pity and sadness, Joe watched him go. Pete wasn't really to blame. But he felt that he was. He had, however unwittingly, dealt mortal injury to his very good friend and that thought would forever haunt him.

Joe wandered out to his own ravaged fields, and as soon as he was in them he confirmed what he had known anyway. In the oat patch, a few bruised stalks strove valiantly to raise battered heads toward the sun.

The corn was ruined and the vegetable garden was gone. What remained was not one twentieth of what was needed.

Joe caught the mules and evaded their striking feet and slicing teeth as he fought them into harness. Having run free for four days, the mules were not inclined to work again. But they had to work, for the man who commanded them was stronger than they. They plunged and reared when the harness was buckled about them, and kicked and squealed when they were once fastened to the plow. That was all they could do.

Joe guided the plow down the first long, straight furrow, and even as he did he a.s.sured himself that the second crop of oats would be better than the first for the second would feed on the bodies of the first. Joe reversed his mutinous team to start the second furrow, and when he came to the end it seemed, quite unaccountably, that the day should also be ended. Then he looked at the scarcely risen sun and knew that it had not yet started.

He steered the mules down another furrow, and angered more at himself than at them, jerked hard on the reins. The plow had gone a bit to one side, so that instead of being in rhythm with all the rest, the furrow curved away from them. Joe stopped and pa.s.sed a hand over his sweating forehead. Twenty years or more ago his father had whipped him unmercifully for plowing a crooked furrow. From then until now he had never plowed one.

Joe turned the mules and straightened the furrow so that it matched the rest. From that time on, in order not to repeat the error, he had to watch himself and that made plowing twice the work. With an exhaustion equal to--maybe greater than--last night's, Joe saw the first long shadows of evening.

For the first time, rather than providing a refuge from problems, his house seemed to admit them with him. There was no peace and none of the calm that paid for a day's work. When dinner was over, the almost electric restlessness that tormented him mounted to supercharged heights.

"Do you know what?" he said fiercely, "I wish we could go to a good hoedown tonight! A real rip-snorter with everything in it!"

"Go down to the store and find out when the next one is and where," Emma urged. "I wouldn't mind going to a party myself."

Joe walked down the path toward the store, and in his mind, as he walked, he tried to create some of the camaraderie he would know when he reached it. He could not.

The sky might as well have been nonexistent, and he was scarcely conscious of the cool night air fanning his cheek. _It was not Elias alone. It was not his ruined crops alone. It was more that he couldn't stretch without b.u.mping someone else's ribs._ Unless a person had enough money to start with, or was exceptionally lucky, he was lost here. It was not the way to live and certainly it was not the way for his family to live. Mechanically Joe strode toward the store and he was on the point of entering when a man moved toward him.

"Hi, Joe," Elias Dorrance said.

"Hi."

"I heard," said the other, "that you lost your crops."

Joe waited an interminable moment, until it occurred to him that, by now, everyone must have heard it. Then he said, "That's right."

Elias Dorrance asked, "What will you do now?"

"Plant more crops."

"The frost will get them."

"That's a chance I take."

"I'm sorry," Elias said. "I'm really sorry, and I know you're worried about me. You don't have to worry. You're a good farmer and a man of your word, and you're honest. I'll take another note until next fall."

"On what?" Joe asked.

Elias Dorrance's shrug was half seen in the night. "Your mules, your harness, your wagon, your livestock, your household goods. You can cover it."

For a moment Joe stood blankly, the offer not even registering. Then a slow anger that mounted by leaps and bounds grew within him.

He'd been overwhelmed when Emma gave him the $600 and told him that, at last, he could have his farm. He still could not understand how she had saved such a vast sum; Joe had never earned $600 in any one year. But every penny of it, everything they had, represented the combined sweat and toil, and almost the life's blood, of Emma and himself. Joe thought of Nick Johnson.

He, too, had had a farm financed by Elias and he'd lost a crop. The next year he lost another, and Elias had taken everything except the clothes the Johnsons wore on their backs. Now hopeless and defeated, Nick Johnson was again a hired man and his courage was so broken that he never would be anything else. Joe thought of Emma's cherished household goods, the few things his children owned, of the mules, the cows, everything upon which Elias had no claim. For a moment he had a savage urge to smash his fist into the banker's face, and Elias must have sensed it for he took a backward step. Joe bit his words off and spat them out,