In a bit of green pasture that rose, gradually narrowing, to the tableland that ended in prairie, and widened out descending to the wet and willowy sands that border the Great River, a broad-shouldered young man was planting an apple tree one sunny spring morning when Tyler was President.The little valley was shut in on the south and east by rocky hills, patched with the immortal green of cedars and gay with clambering columbines.In front was the Mississippi, reposing from its plunge over the rapids, and idling down among the golden sandbars and the low, moist islands, which were looking their loveliest in their new spring dresses of delicate green.

The young man was digging with a certain vicious energy, forcing the spade into the black crumbling loam with a movement full of vigor and malice.  His straight black brows were knitted till they formed one dark line over his deep-set eyes.His beard was not yet old enough to hide the massive outline of his firm, square jaw.In the set teeth, in the clouded face, in the half-articulate exclamations that shot from time to time from the compressed lips, it was easy to see that the thoughts of the young horticulturist were far from his work.

A bright young girl came down the path through the hazel thicket that skirted the hillside, and putting a plump brown hand on the topmost rail of the fence vaulted lightly over, and lit on the soft springy turf with a thud that announced a wholesome and liberal architecture.It is usually expected of poets and lovers that they shall describe the ladies of their love as so airy and delicate in structure that the flowers they tread on are greatly improved in health and spirits by the visitation.But not being a poet or in love, we must admit that there was no resurrection for the larkspurs and pansies upon which the little boots of Miss Susie Barringer landed.  Yet she was not of the coarse peasant type, though her cheeks were so rosy as to cause her great heaviness of heart on Sunday mornings, and her blue lawn dress was as full as it could afford from shoulders to waist.  She was a neat, hearty and very pretty country girl, with a slightly freckled face, and rippled brown hair, and astonished blue eyes, but perfectly self-possessed, and graceful as a young quail.

A young man’s ears are quick to catch the rustling of a woman’s dress.  The flight of this plump bird in its fluttering blue plumage over the rail-fence caused our young man to look up from his spading:the scowl was routed from his brow by a sudden incursion of blushes, and his mouth was attacked by an awkward smile.

The young lady nodded, and was hurrying past.The scowl came back in force, and the smile was repulsed from the bearded mouth with great loss:  “Miss Tudie, are you in a hurry?”

The lady thus addressed turned and said, in a voice that was half pert and half coaxing, “No particular hurry.Al, I’ve told you a dozen times not to call me that redicklis name.”

“Why, Tudie, I hain’t never called you nothing else sence you was a little one so high.You ort to know yer own name, and you give yerself that name when you was a yearling.  Howsom-ever, ef you don’t like it now, sence you’ve been to Jacksonville, I reckon I can call you Miss Susie when I don’t disremember.”

The frank amende seemed to satisfy Miss Susie, for she at once interrupted in the kindest manner:“Never mind, Al Golyer:you can call me what you are a-mind to.”Then, as if conscious of the feminine inconsistency, she changed the subject by asking, “What are you going to do with that great hole? big enough to bury a fellow.”

“I’m going to plant this here seedlin’, that growed up in Colonel Blood’s pastur’, nobody knows how:belike somebody was eatin’ an apple and throwed the core down-like.  I’m going to plant a little orchard here next spring, but the colonel and me, we reckoned this one ’ud be too old by that time for moving, so I thought I’d stick it in now, and see what come out’n it.It’s a powerful thrifty chunk of a saplin’.”

“Yes.I speak for the first peck of apples off’n it.Don’t forget.  Good-morning.”

“Hold on a minute, Miss Susan, twell I git my coat.I’ll walk down a piece with you.I have got something to say to you.”

Miss Susie turned a little red and a little pale.These occasions were not entirely unknown in her short experience of life.When young men in the country in that primitive period had something to say, it was something very serious and earnest.Allen Golyer was a good-looking, stalwart young farmer, well-to-do, honest, able to provide for a family.There was nothing presumptuous in his aspiring to the hand of the prettiest girl on Chaney Creek.In childhood he had trotted her to Banbury Cross and back a hundred times, beguiling the tedium of the journey with kisses and the music of bells.When the little girl was old enough to go to school, the big boy carried her books and gave her the rosiest apple out of his dinner-basket.  He fought all her battles and wrote all her compositions; which latter, by the way, never gained her any great credit.When she was fifteen and he twenty he had his great reward in taking her twice a week during one happy winter to singing-school.This was the bloom of life nothing before or after could compare with it.The blacking of shoes and brushing of stiff, electric, bristling hair, all on end with frost and hope, the struggling into the plate-armor of his starched shirt, the tying of the portentous and uncontrollable cravat before the glass, which was hopelessly dimmed every moment by his eager breath, these trivial and vulgar details were made beautiful and unreal by the magic of youth and love.Then came the walk through the crisp, dry snow to the Widow Barringer’s, the sheepish talk with the old lady while Susie “got on her things,” and the long, enchanting tramp to the “deestrick school-house.”

There is not a country-bred man or woman now living but will tell you that life can offer nothing comparable with the innocent zest of that old style of courting that was done at singing-school in the starlight and candlelight of the first half of our century.There are few hearts so withered and old but they beat quicker sometimes when they hear, in old-fashioned churches, the wailing, sobbing or exulting strains of “Bradstreet” or “China” or “Coronation;” and the mind floats down on the current of these old melodies to that fresh young day of hopes and illusions of voices that were sweet, no matter how false they sang of nights that were rosy with dreams, no matter what Fahrenheit said of girls that blushed without cause, and of lovers who talked for hours about everything but love.

I know I shall excite the scorn of all the ingenuous youth of my time when I say that there was nothing that our superior civilization would call love making in those long walks through the winter nights.The heart of Allen Golyer swelled under his satin waistcoat with love and joy and devotion as he walked over the crunching roads with his pretty enslaver.But he talked of apples and pigs and the heathen and the teacher’s wig, and sometimes ventured an illusion to other people’s flirtations in a jocose and distant way; but as to the state of his own heart, his lips were sealed.It would move a blase smile on the downy lips of juvenile Lovelaces, who count their conquests by their cotillons, and think nothing of making a declaration in an avant-deux, to be told of young people spending several evenings of each week in the year together, and speaking no word of love until they were ready to name their wedding-day.  Yet such was the sober habit of the place and time.

So there was no troth plighted between Allen and Susie, though the youth loved the maiden with all the energy of his fresh, unused nature, and she knew it very well.He never dreamed of marrying any other woman than Susie Barringer, and she sometimes tried a new pen by writing and carefully erasing the initials S.M.G., which, as she was christened Susan Minerva, may be taken as showing the direction of her thoughts.

If Allen Golyer had been less bashful or more enterprising, this history would never have been written; for Susie would probably have said Yes for want of anything better to say, and when she went to visit her aunt Abigail in Jacksonville she would have gone engaged, her finger bound with gold and her maiden meditations fettered by promises.  But she went, as it was, fancy free, and there is no tinder so inflammable as the imagination of a pretty country girl of sixteen.

One day she went out with her easy-going aunt Abigail to buy ribbons, the Chancy Creek invoices not supplying the requirements of Jacksonville society.  As they traversed the court-house square on their way to Deacon Pettybones’ place, Miss Susie’s vagrant glances rested on an iris of ribbons displayed in an opposition window.“Let’s go in here,” she said with the impetuous decision of her age and sex.

“We will go where you like, dear,” said easy-going Aunt Abigail.“It makes no difference.”

Aunt Abigail was wrong.It made the greatest difference to several persons whether Susie Barringer bought her ribbons at Simmons’ or Pettybones’ that day.If she had but known!

But, all unconscious of the Fate that beckoned invisibly on the threshold, Miss Susie tripped into “Simmons’ Emporium” and asked for ribbons.Two young men stood at the long counter.One was Mr. Simmons, proprietor of the emporium, who advanced with his most conscientious smile:“Ribbons, ma’am?Yes, ma’am all sorts, ma’am.  Cherry, ma’am?Certingly, ma’am.  Jest got a splendid lot from St. Louis this morning, ma’am.This way, ma’am.”

The ladies were soon lost in the delight of the eyes.The voice of Mr. Simmons accompanied the feast of color, insinuating but unheeded.

The other young man approached:  “Here is what you want, miss rich and elegant.Just suits your style.Sets off your hair and eyes beautiful.”

The ladies looked up.A more decided voice than Mr. Simmons’; whiter hands than Mr. Simmons’ handled the silken bands; bolder eyes than the weak, pink-bordered orbs of Mr. Simmons looked unabashed admiration into the pretty face of Susie Barringer.

“Look here, Simmons, old boy, introduce a fellow.”

Mr. Simmons meekly obeyed:“Mrs. Barringer, let me interduce you to Mr. Leon of St. Louis, of the house of Draper & Mercer.”

“Bertie Leon, at your service,” said the brisk young fellow, seizing Miss Susie’s hand with energy.His hand was so much softer and whiter than hers that she felt quite hot and angry about it.

When they had made their purchases, Mr. Leon insisted on walking home with them, and was very witty and agreeable all the way.He had all the wit of the newspapers, of the concert-rooms, of the steamboat bars at his fingers’ ends.  In his wandering life he had met all kinds of people:  he had sold ribbons through a dozen States.He never had a moment’s doubt of himself.  He never hesitated to allow himself any indulgence which would not interfere with business.He had one ambition in life to marry Miss Mercer and get a share in the house.Miss Mercer was as ugly as a millionaire’s tombstone.Mr. Bertie Leon who, when his moustache was not dyed nor his hair greased, was really quite a handsome fellow considered that the sacrifice he proposed to make in the interests of trade must be made good to him in some way.So, “by way of getting even,” he made violent love to all the pretty eyes he met in his commercial travels “to have something to think about after he should have found favor in the strabismic optics of Miss Mercer,” he observed, disrespectfully.

Simple Susie, who had seen nothing of young men besides the awkward and blushing clodhoppers of Chaney Creek, was somewhat dazzled by the free-and-easy speech and manner of the hard-cheeked bagman.  Yet there was something in his airy talk and point-blank compliments that aroused a faint feeling of resentment which she could scarcely account for.Aunt Abigail was delighted with him, and when he bowed his adieux at the gate in the most recent Planters’-House style, she cordially invited him to call “to drop in any time:he must be lonesome so far from home.”

He said he wouldn’t neglect such a chance, with another Planters’-House bow.

“What a nice young man!” said Aunt Abigail.

“Awful conceited and not overly polite,” said Susie as she took off her bonnet and went into a revel of bows and trimmings.

The oftener Albert Leon came to Mrs. Barringer’s bowery cottage, the more the old lady was pleased with him and the more the young one criticised him, until it was plain to be seen that Aunt Abigail was growing tired of him and pretty Susan dangerously interested.But just at this point his inexorable carpet-bag dragged him off to a neighboring town, and Susie soon afterward went back to Chaney Creek.

Her Jacksonville hat and ribbons made her what her pretty eyes never could have done the belle of the neighborhood.Non cuivis contingit adire Lutetiam, but to a village where no one has been at Paris the county-town is a shrine of fashion.  Allen Golyer felt a vague sense of distrust chilling his heart as he saw Mr. Simmons’ ribbons decking the pretty head in the village choir the Sunday after her return, and, spurred on by a nascent jealousy of the unknown, resolved to learn his fate without loss of time.But the little lady received him with such cool and unconcerned friendliness, talked so much and so fast about her visit, that the honest fellow was quite bewildered, and had to go home to think the matter over, and cudgel his dull wits to divine whether she was pleasanter than ever, or had drifted altogether out of his reach.

Allen Golyer was, after all, a man of nerve and decision.He wasted only a day or two in doubts and fears, and one Sunday afternoon, with a beating but resolute heart, he left his Sunday-school class to walk down to Crystal Glen and solve his questions and learn his doom.When he came in sight of the widow’s modest house, he saw a buggy hitched by the gate.

“Dow Padgett’s chestnut sorrel, by jing!What is Dow after out here?”

It is natural, if not logical, that young men should regard the visits of all other persons of their age and sex in certain quarters as a serious impropriety.

But it was not his friend and crony Dow Padgett, the liveryman, who came out of the widow’s door, leading by the hand the blushing and bridling Susie.It was a startling apparition of the Southwestern dandy of the period light hair drenched with bear’s oil, blue eyes and jet-black moustache, an enormous paste brooch in his bosom, a waistcoat and trowsers that shrieked in discordant tones, and very small and elegant varnished boots.The gamblers and bagmen of the Mississippi River are the best-shod men in the world.

Golyer’s heart sank within him as this splendid being shone upon him.But with his rustic directness he walked to meet the laughing couple at the gate, and said, “Tudie, I come to see you.Shall I go in and talk to your mother twell you come back?”

“No, that won’t pay,” promptly replied the brisk stranger.“We will be gone the heft of the afternoon, I reckon.  This hoss is awful slow,” he added with a wink of preternatural mystery to Miss Susie.

“Mr. Golyer,” said the young lady, “let me interduce you to my friend, Mr. Leon.”

Golyer put out his hand mechanically, after the cordial fashion of the West.But Leon nodded and said, “I hope to see you again.”  He lifted Miss Susie into the buggy, sprang lightly in, and went off with laughter and the cracking of his whip after Dow Padgett’s chestnut sorrel.

The young farmer walked home desolate, comparing in his simple mind his own plain exterior with his rival’s gorgeous toilet, his awkward address with the other’s easy audacity, till his heart was full to the brim with that infernal compound of love and hate which is called jealousy, from which pray Heaven to guard you.

It was the next morning that Miss Susie vaulted over the fence where Allen Golyer was digging the hole for Colonel Blood’s apple tree.

“Something middlin’ particular,” continued Golyer, resolutely.

“There is no use leaving your work,” said Miss Barringer pluckily.“I will stay and listen.”

Poor Allen began as badly as possible:  “Who was that feller with you yesterday?”

“Thank you, Mr. Golyer my friends ain’t fellers!What’s that to you, who he was?”

“Susie Barringer, we have been keeping company now a matter of a year.I have loved you well and true:I would have give my life to save you any little care or trouble.  I never dreamed of nobody but you not that I was half good enough for you, but because I did not know any better man around here.Ef it ain’t too late, Susie, I ask you to be my wife.I will love you and care for you, good and true.”

Before this solemn little speech was finished, Susie was crying and biting her bonnet-strings in a most undignified manner.“Hush, Al Golyer!” she burst out.“You mustn’t talk so.You are too good for me.I am kind of promised to that fellow.I ’most wish I had never seen him.”

Allen sprang to her and took her in his strong arms:she struggled free from him.  In a moment the vibration which his passionate speech had produced in her passed away.She dried her eyes and said firmly enough, “It’s no use, Al:we wouldn’t be happy together.  Good-bye!I shouldn’t wonder if I went away from Chaney Creek before long.”

She walked rapidly down to the river-road.  Allen stood fixed and motionless, gazing at the light, graceful form until the blue dress vanished behind the hill, and leaned long on his spade, unconscious of the lapse of time.

When Susan reached her home she found Leon at the gate.

“Ah, my little rosebud!  I came near missing you.I am going to Keokuk this morning, to be gone a few days.I stopped here a minute to give you something to keep for me till I come back.”

“What is it?”

He took her chubby cheeks between his hands and laid on her cherry-ripe lips a keepsake which he never reclaimed.

She stood watching him from the gate until, as a clump of willows snatched him from her, she thought, “He will go right by where Al is at work.It would be jest like him to jump over the fence and have a talk with him.I’d like to hear it.”

An hour or so later, as she sat and sewed in the airy little entry, a shadow fell upon her work, and as she looked up her startled eyes met the piercing glance of her discarded lover.A momentary ripple of remorse passed over her cheerful heart as she saw Allen’s pale and agitated face.  He was paler than she had ever seen him, with that ghastly pallor of weather-beaten faces.His black hair, wet with perspiration, clung clammily to his temples.He looked beaten, discouraged, utterly fatigued with the conflict of emotion.But one who looked closely in his eyes would have seen a curious stealthy, half-shaded light in them, as of one who, though working against hope, was still not without resolute will.

Dame Barringer, who had seen him coming up the walk, bustled in:“Good-morning, Allen.How beat out you do look!Now, I like a stiddy young man, but don’t you think you run this thing of workin’ into the ground?”

“Wail, maybe so,” said Golyer with a weary smile “leastways I’ve been a-running this spade into the ground all the morning, and ”

“You want buttermilk that’s your idée:ain’t it, now?”

“Well, Mizzes Barringer, I reckon you know my failin’s.”

The good woman trotted off to the dairy, and Susie sewed demurely, waiting with some trepidation for what was to come next.

“Susie Barringer,” said a low, husky voice which she could scarcely recognize as Golyer’s, “I’ve come to ask pardon not for nothing I’ve done, for I never did and never could do you wrong but for what I thought for a while arter you left me this morning.It’s all over now, but I tell you the Bad Man had his claws into my heart for a spell.Now it’s all over, and I wish you well.I wish your husband well.If ever you git into any trouble where I can help, send for me:it’s my right.  It’s the last favor I ask of you.”

Susceptible Susie cried a little again.  Allen, watching her with his ambushed eyes, said, “Don’t take it to heart, Tudie.Perhaps there is better days in store for me yet.”

This did not appear to comfort Miss Barringer in the least.She was greatly grieved when she thought she had broken a young man’s heart:she was still more dismal at the slightest intimation that she had not.If any explanation of this paradox is required, I would observe, quoting a phrase much in vogue among the witty writers of the present age, that Miss Susie Barringer was “a very female woman.”

So pretty Susan’s rising sob subsided into a coquettish pout by the time her mother came in with the foaming pitcher of subacidulous nectar, and plied young Golyer with brimming beakers of it with all the beneficent delight of a Lady Bountiful.

“There, Mizzes Barringer! there’s about as much as I can tote.Temperance in all things.”

“Very well, then, you work less and play more.We never get a sight of you lately.  Come in neighborly and play checkers with Tudie.”

It was the darling wish of Mother Barringer’s heart to see her daughter married and settled with “a stiddy young man that you knowed all about, and his folks before him.”  She had observed with great disquietude the brilliant avatar of Mr. Bertie Leon and the evident pride of her daughter in the bright-plumaged captive she had brought to Chaney Creek, the spoil of her maiden snare.  “I don’t more’n half like that little feller.” (It is a Western habit to call a well-dressed man a “little feller.”The epithet would light on Hercules Farnese if he should go to Illinois dressed as a Cocodes.) “No honest folks wears beard onto their upper lips.I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t a gamboller.”

Allen Golyer, apparently unconscious in his fatigue of the cap which Dame Barringer was vicariously setting for him, walked away with his spade on his shoulder, and the good woman went systematically to work in making Susie miserable by sharp little country criticisms of her heart’s idol.

Day after day wore on, and, to Dame Barringer’s delight and Susie’s dismay, Mr. Leon did not come.

“He is such a businessman,” thought trusting Susan, “he can’t get away from Keokuk.But he’ll be sure to write.”  So Susie put on her sun-bonnet and hurried up to the post-office:“Any letters for me, Mr. Whaler?” The artful and indefinite plural was not disguise enough for Miss Susie, so she added, “I was expecting a letter from my aunt.”

“No letters here from your aunt, nor your uncle, nor none of the tribe,” said old Whaler, who had gone over with Tyler to keep his place, and so had no further use for good manners.

“I think old Tommy Whaler is an impudent old wretch,” said Susie that evening, “and I won’t go near his old post-office again.”But Susie forgot her threat of vengeance the next day, and she went again, lured by family affection, to inquire for that letter which Aunt Abbie must have written.The third time she went, rummy old Whaler roared very improperly, “Bother your aunt!You’ve got a beau somewheres that’s what’s the matter.”

Poor Susan was so dazzled by this flash of clairvoyance that she hurried from that dreadful post-office, scarcely hearing the terrible words that the old gin-pig hurled after her:“And he’s forgot you! that’s what’s the matter.”

Susie Barringer walked home along the river-road, revolving many things in her mind.  She went to her room and locked her door by sticking a pen-knife over the latch, and sat down to have a good cry.Her faculties being thus cleared for action, she thought seriously for an hour.If you can remember when you were a school-girl, you know a great deal of solid thinking can be done in an hour.But we can tell you in a moment what it footed up.You can walk through the Louvre in a minute, but you cannot see it in a week.

Susan Barringer (sola, loquitur):  “Three weeks yesterday.Yes, I s’pose it’s so.What a little fool I was!  He goes everywheres says the same things to everybody, like he was selling ribbons.Mean little scamp!Mother seen through him in a minute.  I’m mighty glad I didn’t tell her nothing about it.” [Fie, Susie! your principles are worse than your grammar.] “He’ll marry some rich girl I don’t envy her, but I hate her and I am as good as she is.  Maybe he will come back no, and I hope he won’t; and I wish I was dead!” (Pocket handkerchief.)

Yet in the midst of her grief there was one comforting thought nobody knew of it.She had no confidante she had not even opened her heart to her mother:these Western maidens have a fine gift of reticence.  A few of her countryside friends and rivals had seen with envy and admiration the pretty couple on the day of Leon’s arrival.But all their poisonous little compliments and questions had never elicited from the prudent Susie more than the safe statement that the handsome stranger was a friend of Aunt Abbie’s, whom she had met at Jacksonville.They could not laugh at her:they could not sneer at gay deceivers and lovelorn damsels when she went to the sewing-circle.  The bitterness of her tears was greatly sweetened by the consideration that in any case no one could pity her.She took such consolation from this thought that she faced her mother unflinchingly at tea, and baffled the maternal inquest on her “redness of eyes” by the school-girl’s invaluable and ever-ready headache.

It was positively not until a week later, when she met Allen Golyer at choir-meeting, that she remembered that this man knew the secret of her baffled hopes.She blushed scarlet as he approached her:“Have you got company home, Miss Susie?”

“Yes that is, Sally Withers and me came together, and ”

“No, that’s hardly fair to Tom Fleming:three ain’t the pleasantest company.I will go home with you.”

Susie took the strong arm that was held out to her, and leaned upon it with a mingled feeling of confidence and dread as they walked home through the balmy night under the clear, starry heaven of the early spring.The air was full of the quickening breath of May.

Susie Barringer waited in vain for some signal of battle from Allen Golyer.He talked more than usual, but in a grave, quiet, protecting style, very different from his former manner of worshiping bashfulness.His tone had in it an air of fatherly caressing which was inexpressibly soothing to his pretty companion, tired and lonely with her silent struggle of the past month.When they came to her gate and he said good-night, she held his hand a moment with a tremulous grasp, and spoke impulsively:  “Al, I once told you something I never told anybody else.I’ll tell you something else now, because I believe I can trust you.”

“Be sure of that, Susie Barringer.”

“Well, Al, my engagement is broken off.”

“I am sorry for you, Susie, if you set much store by him.”

Miss Susie answered with great and unnecessary impetuosity, “I don’t, and I am glad of it!” and then ran into the house and to bed, her cheeks all aflame at the thought of her indiscretion, and yet with a certain comfort in having a friend from whom she had no secrets.

I protest there was no thought of coquetry in the declaration which Susan Barringer blurted out to her old lover under the sympathetic starlight of the May heaven.But Allen Golyer would have been a dull boy not to have taken heart and hope from it.He became, as of old, a frequent and welcome visitor at Crystal Glen.Before long the game of chequers with Susie became so enthralling a passion that it was only adjourned from one evening to another.Allen’s white shirts grew fringy at the edges with fatigue-duty, and his large hands were furry at the fingers with much soap.Susie’s affectionate heart, which had been swayed a moment from its orbit by the irresistible attraction of Bertie Leon’s diamond breastpin and city swagger, swung back to its ancient course under the mild influence of time and the weather and opportunity.So that Dame Barringer was not in the least surprised, on entering her little parlor one soft afternoon in that very May, to see the two young people economically occupying one chair, and Susie shouting the useless appeal, “Mother, make him behave!”

“I never interfere in young folks’ matters, especially when they’re going all right,” said the motherly old soul, kissing “her son Allen” and trotting away to dry her happy tears.

I am almost ashamed to say how soon they were married so soon that when Miss Susan went with her mother to Keokuk to buy a wedding-garment, she half expected to find, in every shop she entered, the elegant figure of Mr. Leon leaning over the counter.  But the dress was bought and made, and worn at wedding and in-fair and in a round of family visits among the Barringer and Golyer kin, and carefully laid away in lavender when the pair came back from their modest holiday and settled down to real life on Allen’s prosperous farm; and no word of Bertie Leon ever came to Mrs. Golyer to trouble her joy.  In her calm and busy life the very name faded from her tranquil mind.These wholesome country hearts do not bleed long.In that wide-awake country eyes are too useful to be wasted in weeping.My dear Lothario Urban us, those peaches are very sound and delicious, but they will not keep for ever.  If you do not secure them to-day, they will go to some one else, and in no case, as the Autocrat hath said with authority, can you stand there “mellering ’em with your thumb.”

There was no happier home in the county, and few finer farms.The good sense and industry of Golyer and the practical helpfulness of his wife found their full exercise in the care of his spreading fields and growing orchards.The Warsaw merchants fought for his wheat, and his apples were known in St. Louis.Mrs. Golyer, with that spice of romance which is hidden away in every woman’s heart, had taken a special fancy to the seedling apple tree at whose planting she had so intimately assisted.  Allen shared in this, as in all her whims, and tended and nursed it like a child.In time he gave up the care of his orchard to other hands, but he reserved this seedling for his own especial coddling.He spaded and mulched and pruned it, and guarded it in the winter from rodent rabbits and in summer from terebrant grubs.It was not ungrateful.It grew a noble tree, producing a rich and luscious fruit, with a deep scarlet satin coat, and a flesh tinged as delicately as a pink seashell.The first peck of apples was given to Susie with great ceremony, and the next year the first bushel was carried to Colonel Blood, the Congressman.He was loud in his admiration, as the autumn elections were coming on:“Great Scott, Golyer!I’d rather give my name to a horticultooral triumph like that there than be Senator.”

“You’ve got your wish, then, colonel,” said Golyer.“Me and my wife have called that tree The Blood Seedling sence the day it was transplanted from your pastur’.”

It was the pride and envy of the neighborhood.  Several neighbors asked for scions and grafts, but could do nothing with them.

“Fact is,” said old Silas Withers, “those folks that expects to raise good fruit by begging graffs, and then layin’ abed and readin’ newspapers, will have a good time waitin’.Elbow-grease is the secret of the Blood Seedlin’, ain’t it, Al?”

“Well, I reckon, Squire Withers, a man never gits anything wuth havin’ without a tussle for it; and as to secrets, I don’t believe in them, nohow.”

A square-browed, resolute, silent, middle-aged man, who loved his home better than any amusement, regular at church, at the polls, something richer every Christmas than he had been on the New Year’s preceding a man whom everybody liked and few loved much such had Allen Golyer grown to be.

If I have lingered too long over this colorless and commonplace picture of rural Western life, it is because I have felt an instinctive reluctance to recount the startling and most improbable incident which fell one night upon this quiet neighborhood, like a thunderbolt out of blue sky.The story I must tell will be flatly denied and easily refuted.  It is absurd and fantastic, but, unless human evidence is to go for nothing when it testifies of things unusual, the story is true.

At the head of the rocky hollow through which Chaney Creek ran to the river, lived the family who gave the brook its name.They were among the early pioneers of the county.In the squatty yellow stone house the present Chaney occupied his grandfather had stood a siege from Black Hawk all one summer day and night, until relieved by the garrison of Fort Edward.The family had not grown with the growth of the land.Like many others of the pioneers, they had shown no talent for keeping abreast of the civilization whose guides and skirmishers they had been.In the progress of a half century they had sold, bit by bit, their section of land, which kept intact would have proved a fortune.They lived very quietly, working enough to secure their own pork and hominy, and regarding with a sort of impatient scorn every scheme of public or private enterprise that passed under their eyes.

The elder Chaney had married, some years before, at the Mormon town of Nauvoo, the fair-haired daughter of a Swedish mystic, who had come across the sea beguiled by dreams of a perfect theocracy, and who on arriving at the city of the Latter-Day Saints had died, broken-hearted from his lost illusions.

The only dowry that Seraphita Neilsen brought her husband, besides her delicate beauty and her wide blue eyes, was a full set of Swedenborg’s later writings in English.These became the daily food of the solitary household.Saul Chaney would read the exalted rhapsodies of the Northern seer for hours together, without the first glimmer of their meaning crossing his brain.But there was something in the majesty of their language and the solemn roll of their poetical development that irresistibly impressed and attracted him.Little Gershom, his only child, sitting at his feet, would listen in childish wonder to the strange things his silent, morose and gloomy father found in the well-worn volumes, until his tired eyelids would fall at last over his pale, bulging eyes.

As he grew up his eyes bulged more and more:his head seemed too large for his rickety body.He pored over the marvelous volumes until he knew long passages by heart, and understood less of them than his father which was unnecessary.  He looked a little like his mother, but while she in her youth had something of the faint and flickering beauty of the Boreal Lights, poor Gershom never could have suggested anything more heavenly than a foggy moonlight.When he was fifteen he went to the neighboring town of Warsaw to school.He had rather heavy weather among the well-knit, grubby-knuckled urchins of the town, and would have been thoroughly disheartened but for one happy chance.At the house where he boarded an amusement called the “Sperrit Rappin’s” was much in vogue.A group of young folks, surcharged with all sorts of animal magnetism, with some capacity for belief and much more for fun, used to gather about a light pine table every evening, and put it through a complicated course of mystical gymnastics.It was a very good-tempered table:it would dance, hop or slam at the word of command, or, if the exercises took a more intellectual turn, it would answer any questions addressed to it in a manner not much below the average capacity of its tormentors.

Gershom Chaney took all this in solemn earnest.He was from the first moment deeply impressed.He lay awake whole nights, with his eyes fast closed, in the wildest dreams.His school-hours were passed in trancelike contemplation.  He cared no more for punishment than the fakeer for his self-inflicted tortures.He longed for the coming of the day when he could commune in solitude with the unfleshed and immortal.This was the full flowering of those seeds of fantasy that had fallen into his infant mind as he lay baking his brains by the wide fire in the old stone house at the head of the hollow, while his father read, haltingly, of the wonders of the invisible world.

But, to his great mortification, he saw nothing, heard nothing, experienced nothing but in the company of others.He must brave the ridicule of the profane to taste the raptures which his soul loved.His simple, trusting faith made him inevitably the butt of the mischievous circle.They were not slow in discovering his extreme sensibility to external influences.One muscular, black-haired, heavy-browed youth took especial delight in practicing upon him.The table, under Gershom’s tremulous hands, would skip like a lamb at the command of this Thomas Fay.

One evening, Tom Fay had a great triumph.  They had been trying to get the “medium” for Gershom had reached that dignity to answer sealed questions, and had met with indifferent success.  Fay suddenly approached the table, scribbled a phrase, folded it and tossed it, doubled up, before Gershom; then leaned over the table, staring at his pale, unwholesome face with all the might of his black eyes.

Chaney seized the pencil convulsively and wrote, “Balaam!”

Fay burst into a loud laugh and said, “Read the question?”

It was, “Who rode on your grandfather’s back?”

This is a specimen of the cheap wit and harmless malice by which poor Gershom suffered as long as he stayed at school.He was never offended, but was often sorely perplexed, at the apparent treachery of his unseen counselors.He was dismissed at last from the academy for utter and incorrigible indolence.  He accepted his disgrace as a crown of martyrdom, and went proudly home to his sympathizing parents.

Here, with less criticism and more perfect faith, he renewed the exercise of what he considered his mysterious powers.His fastings and vigils, and want of bodily movement and fresh air, had so injured his health as to make him tenfold more nervous and sensitive than ever.But his faintings and hysterics and epileptic paroxysms were taken more and more as evidences of his lofty mission.  His father and mother regarded him as an oracle, for the simple reason that he always answered just as they expected.A curious or superstitious neighbor was added from time to time to the circle, and their reports heightened the half-uncanny interest with which the Chaney house was regarded.

It was on a moist and steamy evening of spring that Allen Golyer, standing by his gate, saw Saul Chaney slouching along in the twilight, and hailed him:“What news from the sperrits, Saul?”

“Nothing for you, Al Golyer,” said Saul, gloomily.“The god of this world takes care of the like o’ you.”

Golyer smiled, as a prosperous man always does when his poorer neighbors abuse him for his luck, and rejoined:“I ain’t so fortunate as you think for, Saul Chaney.I lost a Barksher pig yesterday:I reckon I must come up and ask Gershom what’s come of it.”

“Come along, if you like.  It’s been a long while sence you’ve crossed my sill.But I’m gitting to be quite the style.Young Lawyer Marshall is a-coming up this evening to see my Gershom.”

Before Mr. Golyer started he filled a basket, “to make himself welcome and pay for the show,” with the reddest and finest fruit of his favorite apple tree.His wife followed him to the gate and kissed him a rather unusual attention among Western farmer-people.  Her face, still rosy and comely, was flushed and smiling:  “Al, do you know what day o’ the year it is?”

“Nineteenth of Aprile?”

“Yes; and twenty years ago to-day you planted the Blood Seedlin’ and I give you the mitten!” She turned and went into the house, laughing comfortably.

Allen walked slowly up the hollow to the Chaney house, and gave the apples to Seraphita and told her their story.A little company was assembled two or three Chaney Creek people, small market-gardeners, with eyes the color of their gooseberries and hands the color of their currants; Mr. Marshall, a briefless young barrister from Warsaw, with a tawny friend, who spoke like a Spaniard.

“Take seats, friends, and form a circle o’ harmony,” said Saul Chaney.  “The me’jum is in fine condition:  he had two fits this arternoon.”

Gershom looked shockingly ill and weak.He reclined in a great hickory arm-chair, with his eyes half open, his lips moving noiselessly.  All the persons present formed a circle and joined hands.

The moment the circle was completed by Saul and Seraphita, who were on either side of their son, touching his hands, an expression of pain and perplexity passed over his pale face, and he began to writhe and mutter.

“He’s seein’ visions,” said Saul.

“Yes, too many of ’em,” said Gershom, querulously.“A boy in a boat, a man on a shelf, and a man with a spade all at once:too many.Get me a pencil.  One at a time, I tell you one at a time!”

The circle broke up, and a table was brought, with writing materials.Gershom grasped a pencil, and said, with imperious and feverish impatience, “Come on, now, and don’t waste the time of the shining ones.”

An old woman took his right hand.  He wrote with his left very rapidly an instant, and threw her the paper, always with his eyes shut close.

Old Mrs. Scritcher read with difficulty, “A boy in a boat over he goes;” and burst out in a piteous wail, “Oh, my poor little Ephraim!I always knowed it.”

“Silence, woman!” said the relentless medium.

“Mr. Marshall,” said Saul, “would you like a test?”

“No, thank you,” said the young gentleman.“I brought my friend, Mr. Baldassano, who, as a traveler, is interested in these things.”

“Will you take the medium’s hand, Mr. What’s-your-name?”

The young foreigner took the lean and feverish hand of Gershom, and again the pencil flew rapidly over the paper.He pushed the manuscript from him and snatched his hand away from Baldassano.  As the latter looked at what was written, his tawny cheek grew deadly pale.“Dios mio!” he exclaimed to Marshall.“This is written in Castilian!”

The two young men retired to the other end of the room and read by the tallow candle the notes scrawled on the paper.Baldassano translated:  “A man on a shelf table covered with bottles beside him:man’s face yellow as gold:bottles tumble over without being touched.”

“What nonsense is that?” said Marshall.

“My brother died of yellow fever at sea last year.”

Both the young men became suddenly very thoughtful, and observed with great interest the result of Golyer’s “test.”  He sat by Gershom, holding his hand tightly, but gazing absently into the dying blaze of the wide chimney.  He seemed to have forgotten where he was:a train of serious thought appeared to hold him completely under its control.His brows were knit with an expression of severe almost fierce determination.  At one moment his breathing was hard and thick a moment after hurried and broken.

All this while the fingers of Gershom were flying rapidly over the paper, independently of his eyes, which were sometimes closed, and sometimes rolling as if in trouble.

A wind which had been gathering all the evening now came moaning up the hollow, rattling the window-blinds, and twisting into dull complaint the boughs of the leafless trees.Its voice came chill and cheerless into the dusky room, where the fire was now glimmering near its death, and the only sounds were those of Gershom’s rushing pencil, the whispering of Marshall and his friend, and old Mother Scritcher feebly whimpering in her corner.  The scene was sinister.Suddenly, a rushing gust blew the door wide open.

Golyer started to his feet, trembling in every limb, and looking furtively over his shoulder out into the night.Quickly recovering himself, he turned to resume his place.But the moment he dropped Gershom’s hand, the medium had dropped his pencil, and had sunk back in his chair in a deep and deathlike slumber.Golyer seized the sheet of paper, and with the first line that he read a strange and horrible transformation was wrought in the man.  His eyes protruded, his teeth chattered, he passed his hand over his head mechanically, and his hair stood up like the bristles on the back of a swine in rage.His face was blotched white and purple.  He looked piteously about him for a moment, then crumpling the paper in his hand, cried out in a hoarse, choking voice, “Yes, it’s a fact:I done it.  It’s no use denying on’t..Here it is, in black and white.Everybody knows it:  ghosts come spooking around to tattle about it.  What’s the use of lying?I done it.”

He paused, as if struck by a sudden recollection, then burst into tears and shook like a tree in a high wind.In a moment he dropped on his knees, and in that posture crawled over to Marshall:“Here, Mr. Marshall here’s the whole story.For God’s sake, spare my wife and children all you can.Fix my little property all right for ’em, and God bless you for it!” Even while he was speaking, with a quick revulsion of feeling he rose to his feet, with a certain return of his natural dignity, and said, “But they sha’n’t take me!  None of my kin ever died that way:I’ve got too much sand in my gizzard to be took that way.  Good-bye, friends all!”

He walked deliberately out into the wild, windy night.

Marshall glanced hurriedly at the fatal paper in his hand.It was full of that capricious detail with which in reverie we review scenes that are past.But a line here and there clearly enough told the story how he went out to plant the apple tree; how Susie came by and rejected him; how he passed into the power of the devil for the time; how Bertie Leon came by and spoke to him, and patted him on the shoulder, and talked about city life; how he hated him and his pretty face and his good clothes; how they came to words and blows, and he struck him with his spade, and he fell into the trench, and he buried him there at the roots of the tree.

Marshall, following his first impulse, thrust the paper into the dull red coals.It flamed for an instant, and flew with a sound like a sob up the chimney.

They hunted for Golyer all night, but in the morning found him lying as if asleep, with the peace of expiation on his pale face, his pruning-knife in his, heart, and the red current of his life tinging the turf with crimson around the roots of the Blood Seedling.

JOHN HAY.