RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
I HAPPENED to be standing that afternoon under the arch of Billy Hope's Livery Stable on River Street when Leora Kadderly walked from the Bon Marché and lifted her parasol against the drenching sunlight. Parasol in one hand and package in the other, she started north toward Bette Plaine Street, which, in New Hope's social scheme, was the abode of the gentle- born. Just beyond the Bon Marché store Herm von Gayl's double saloon doors opened on the walk, and von Gayl's roof extended over it, and, as she reached this area, I saw her pick up her skirts. I do not know why, but all the women of New Hope did this when they passed von Gayl's; it was originally a gesture of protest, I think, that at last had become a matter of etiquette. Her package slipped from her arm, and then Ben Tarrade, standing there, quickly recovered it for her and took off his hat. I saw her lips move slightly—thanking him, I suppose—and for a moment those two looked at each other, and then she went on; and, as long as she remained in sight, Ben Tarrade's eyes followed, his high body motionless, his blond head motionless.
Of all the incidents of my boyhood, this still remains, after fifty-odd years, the most clearly remembered. When I look back, I can see that this was the beginning; and I can acknowledge now that this was bravery. I was only twelve, yet I recall the touch of a feeling almost sinister in effect, for, young as I was, I knew that Ben Tarrade, a gambler at von Gayl's, had no proper right to speak to Leora Kadderly. Billy Hope, behind me, said—"So."—in a queer way, and I looked around and saw that his eyes were narrow and not pleased.
I think you should know New Hope, Nebraska, on the yellow
river forever eating into its high, sandy shore-line. There are
no towns like that any more, for the time is gone, and the
conjunction of that heavy-grained and rather somber 1880 man with
a stubborn land no longer exists; or perhaps it is that boyhood's
perception of color and smell and sound is gone. Reviewing that
era, I can understand that New Hope's day was at a climax. To
north and to south the railroads were beginning to take away much
of its freighting traffic, and so it was like many another town
along that river, middle-aged after two decades of brief
existence. But of this, then, I knew nothing. To me, it was the
exciting center of the universe, never dull, never the same. The
big riverboats brought their cargoes to the landing, and the
black boys sang as they filed up and down the gangplanks; the
freighters—wheel, swing, and lead teams to each bulky
wagon—moved out of New Hope in solid lines, kicking up the
heavy dust as far as the eye could reach, bound for distant
prairie points. This was only four years after Custer, and that
yonder country was still wild, and beyond the far haze mystery
still lived. By day the earth was copper and brass; by night the
prairie undulated under the moonlight like slow groundswells at
sea, pale and beautiful.
We were a trading town. I did not see it then, since a boy has little esthetic sense, but I can readily believe now a more unlovely place never existed. There were no grass lawns and very few trees, and the wind drove sand up from the south and turned daylight gray and ground the clearness out of window panes and left an ashy sediment on everything. River Street was the artery of town, solidly-built of frame and brick stores and gaunt, three-story warehouses without the faintest grace of ornament. Palmer's tannery lay on the north quarter of town, and, when the wind hauled around, a stench swept over us. Slightly in the south was the brewery, gray tower dominating the sky, where I used to go to see the big wheel turn. There was a residual grace in those people, of that I am sure, for my own home life was gentle and serene; but men had little use for outward decoration. I think the land made them that way.
Of the day I speak, I stayed out too long, and, when I reached
the supper table, I expected a lecture; but my father was playing
the host, which meant that his customary reserve was put aside
for an attitude half courtly, half genial. People in those days
took their manners much more seriously, wearing them
ceremoniously for the occasion much as we now wear our clothes.
Leora Kadderly was there, and Jim Shugrue; and I knew immediately
why. A boy's perceptions are much keener than elders realize, and
in that day we youngsters had half the gossip of the town at our
fingertips. So I was quite aware that all New Hope was trying to
marry Leora Kadderly to Jim Shugrue, and that Mother was carrying
on the game of matchmaking.
We always had wine at the table. My father raised his glass and proposed the toast. I recall it distinctly. I can even bring back the cheerful, humorous tone he used. He said: "To a certain happy event, which I hope will not long be delayed."
My mother showed a little confusion. She said to Father—"Why, Tod, that's too bold of you."—but I could see that actually she was a little pleased it had been put in the open. They sipped at the wine, pale and sparkling in the cut goblets that were heirlooms of the Tennessee Bowies, Mother's side. Then Jim Shugrue spoke. "If it does not soon happen," he said, "it will not be because I haven't asked," and he looked at Leora Kadderly. I had always liked him, perhaps because he owned so many of those heavy prairie freighters, and perhaps also because he looked a great deal like my father, who had a bold, broad face and a fine, cavalry-style mustache. Now that I recall it, many men looked like my father. In the 1880's the pattern seemed to be pretty uniform, mustache or beard on a sun-baked skin, a touch of severity about the eyes, and a slow way of talking. I can think of but one man in New Hope of that day who was clean-shaven. This was the gambler, Ben Tarrade.
I think I remember a touch of embarrassment about the table then; for it was always considered indelicate to discuss personal affairs publicly. But of them all, Leora Kadderly seemed least touched. She was looking at me, and she was smiling.
It seems rather merciless that the years should be this way: that they should drop dimming curtains behind us as the time goes on until in the end all that we know and loved remains only faintly—a fragment of a voice, a smile, a touch still felt—leaving everything else obscured and half forgotten. I do not think she was beautiful as we understand the word. But there was a power in her, a hunger that shone out through dark eyes and made every feature vividly expressive. It is as strong to me now as it was then; and so it must have been very real. There was laughter in her and gaiety, but it was subdued; it was something hard pressed by all that New Hope stood for. Little enough gaiety lived in that town, and, when I come to search my youth again, I remember but one other person whose smile held that same lurking recklessness, and again this was Ben Tarrade, the gambler. She was twenty-five, and a widow, and she lived alone; and so because in that land at that time an eligible woman was regarded as something useful and productive going to waste, New Hope laid its almost mandatory will upon her. This is what I know now.
My father said, more soberly: "I hear, Leora, that Ben Tarrade picked up a package for you today."
"I hadn't heard that," Jim Shugrue said, and his face sharpened.
My mother was rather angry. "The man should know his place."
"I thought it an act of ordinary kindness," said Leora Kadderly.
"It will be talked about," my mother went on.
But Leora Kadderly only smiled, and I can still feel the wistfulness of it. They were all looking at her; and now I know that she was quite alone at that moment. "What harm can be in it?" she asked, with a softness I clearly recall.
They went on talking. Presently I was excused and went to the porch, and later my father and Jim Shugrue came out to smoke. Westward, beyond the end of River Street, the fires of the freighters' camps colored the sky, and the moon swam like a caravel on the low horizon. It was very still, and the smell of sage and dust and tar lay strong in the night. The shadows softened everything, even the talk of the two men.
"She needs a man to see that these things don't repeat themselves," said my father.
Jim Shugrue was a fair man. "I've always liked him for what he was, Tod. I have always found him square for a gambler."
"That will do, as between men. But he must know the line with womenfolk. If he steps over it, he shall be horsewhipped."
Their talk went on, very even, very sure; and in a little while I slipped away, crossed a vacant block westward, and came upon the margin of corral and barn and open space where were outfitted the freighters and freighting teams. I meant to cut past this to gain the quarter of town in which my particular band of boyhood friends usually foregathered; but, as I ran between corrals, I arrived at a wide circle of men, standing about a fire, and across and about this area two teamsters were wickedly fighting. I could see them very plainly—two huge, gaunt men bare to the waist, all muscles coiling and swelling in that crimson light, blood dripping down their bare chests; and I could hear the dull sound of their fists, the crush of bone into flesh. It was not the first fight I had seen, but all this red savagery chilled me; and, when I looked around the circle of bystanders and discovered the lust shining in those eyes, and the lips drawn back over heavy, yellow teeth, it was like coming upon a circle of wolves, and I pivoted and ran home.
Casting up accounts now, all the isolated pieces of this
affair return in proper sequence; the years have given them
meaning, and a clear light surrounds everything. It was the
following Sunday that I turned the saddle shop corner at St.
Vrain Street, on my way to Sunday school, and found Ben Tarrade
standing idly by the shop wall. I do not know why I stopped, but
I did—feeling half guilty and half charmed. I think the
whole secret of Ben Tarrade lay in his eyes. He was a tall man,
and he wore his black, broadcloth suit and stiff, white shirt
with a certain easy flair, with a gentleman's indifference. His
hands, I recall, were white and supple of finger; and underneath
the black, loose-brimmed hat, edged by yellow hair, were features
that at once gave you the impression of being responsive without
the need of much facial play. But I think it was his eyes that
smilingly encouraged you, and haunted you a little with what was
behind them. He was, I know now, a very lonely man outside the
circle of the genteel, yet aloof from the class that played at
his table in von Gayl's. There was, I can understand, a need in
him New Hope could not satisfy.
He spoke to me, and I remember being flattered by the equality of his manner. "Tod," he said, "you're looking rather sad for such a fine morning."
"I am going to church," I told him.
"Yes," he said, "I know." And his smile was very strong. "I remember being just as sad on Sunday mornings when I went to church. Older people forget how boys feel. But it's all right. Church is part of growing up, Tod. And the sun will still be shining when you get out."
I do not recall answering him. I stood a little in awe of this man. He was a gambler, someone I had been taught to distrust and abhor, and this he must have known as he stood there talking to me. Again it comes to me that this story lay in his eyes, in the gentleness of his tone. He said: "Like to fish, Tod?"
"Yes."
"I'll have to ask your dad if you can go up the river with me. Some mighty big cats in the upper channel. Well, you better not be late."
I went on, feeling a little guilty and a little honored. My crowd of boys slowly gathered, and we all went in to Sunday school, and after that joined our elders in the main church service.
Even now I can feel the dullness of those New Hope Sundays.
Everything in that town closed, and everything became still and
repressed. That day the elders put on their dark clothes and
seemed stiff in them; and there was then a somberness and a
quietness, and I can remember being a little shocked when one man
laughed aloud on the church steps. We were a literal people with
a literal religion. This was the Sabbath; this day we glimpsed
the vengeful fires of hell, and in our pew, between my parents,
that long hour of service stretched out with a dread monotony.
Ours was a strict town in church matters, and it was a high honor
to be an elder; and those people of our own class who missed the
services were made to feel the evilness of their delinquency. The
social hand pressed down.
I do not wish to cast any shadow upon the sincere devotion of those people; but it seems to me now there was in New Hope's Sunday a faint touch of the sadistic. For six days we lived in a raw world, a world of bald, Elizabethan frankness and frequent brutality on the part of the lower strata handling the heavy goods flowing from steamboat to prairie freighter. Above this were the men, such as my father, who made up the gentle class that governed the town with a certain dignified inflexibility. Yet gentility was a precarious thing, surrounded by heat and heavy dust and dusty evil, and so on the seventh day we went to church in a mood of self-flagellation and looked somberly into the pit. It was the land that made us so, I think, the land and the centuries of strict religion behind.
After church, Mother and Leora Kadderly went home while
Father, as was his custom, walked with me toward the river; and I
can remember the quietness of his manner as he spoke of the
future. In front of the hotel we met Ben Tarrade. Father stopped,
and it rather surprised me to hear a measure of affability in his
voice.
"Ben," he said, "I heard you had high play at the table last night."
"A loser always magnifies his losses," said Ben Tarrade.
My father chuckled at that; there was always a sly vein of humor behind his reserve. "Mark Peachey would... that's true."
"Your boy," said Ben Tarrade, "ought to go fishing up the channel with me someday. You've got a fine boy."
"Why now," said my father, "perhaps we can arrange it."
We went on, and I tried to reconcile this meeting with all the things Father had previously told me. What he next said did not help—then. "You are growing up," he told me. "Some things you should know, Tod. A gentleman must understand all classes of people. It is the most valuable asset you will ever have. There's Ben Tarrade, a man with a fine classical education, from a first family in Kentucky. There he is, playing cards for a living, when he might have been a gentleman. It is very sad, Tod. Be generous in your judgment of the Tarrades of this world, but never grow sentimental over them."
I think now he was trying to tell me that there were many shades between the primary colors of black and white; I think he was. But the strongest impression I have now of my father is of a simplicity in ethics since quite vanished from life. The relations of man and man were in one compartment, the relations of man and woman were in another; and nowhere did they join. We went on to the river and turned into the brewery, and my father filled two glasses from the beer tap—one of which he gave me.
"I think it is time you knew the taste of this," he said.
I drank very little of it, for it was rather bitter, and I could not help feeling embarrassed in front of him. He said then: "A gentleman does all things in moderation. I hope you remember that." We turned home, and along the way he spoke of the early trappers and buffalo hunters whose names many of our streets bore. Sometimes I think my father vaguely felt that the generations were changing, and that I was growing away, and that he wanted me to know him before it was too late. Along the street, a great many men hailed Father, calling him by his first name, and he always replied in kind. Looking back I can see how intense was our lip service to the democratic ideal, and how untrue it was. For though he was "Tod" to the lowest teamster, familiarity ended here, and seldom was his quiet dignity penetrated. He knew his place; the teamsters knew their places.
Dinner was waiting at home, and we sat down. But my mother
stared sharply at me and came to my place and bent over. And I
shall never forget how instant was her suppressed anger. She
turned on Father as if he were a stranger, and her voice shook a
little.
"Are there not enough temptations in this town, Tod, without inviting him to share them?"
"He is growing up, Mother."
"I want no more of that nonsense," she retorted, and sat abruptly down in her chair. Leora Kadderly looked at Father, who seemed rather flushed and uneasy, and she said to Mother: "What harm is in a sip of beer?"
"Speak of the devil," said my mother.
I cannot forget Leora Kadderly's quiet answer, for I believe now it expressed all that she was. "The devil," she said, "is a monster only humans could think up."
My father said—"The discussion had better be deferred." and I know they were all looking at me. But I doubt if I should have paid them much attention just then, for my small world had been unsteadied again. I think it was this night I discovered that my father's will was not absolute in our house, that behind the softness and deference my mother showed to him was a fiery will. The adjustments of boyhood are complex.
They took up another line of talk, but someone was at the door, and my father rose and went to it; and looking that way I saw Ben Tarrade standing there, yellow head bare. This, too, was astonishing. He had a long, paper box in his arm. "I should like to see Miss Kadderly for a moment," he told Father.
My father's voice was oddly unlike the one he had used on Ben Tarrade earlier. It was extremely formal, touched with coldness. "I doubt..." he began.
Leora Kadderly got up quickly and went over, and Father turned on his heels, his face very dark. I wish now I had turned to see what expression my mother wore; it must have been one of utter shock. Ben Tarrade held out the box, and Leora took it. He said: "I had hoped to find you here, with company, so that it would not appear I had intruded upon you alone. You were very kind on the street the other day."
That was all. He went away, and Leora Kadderly came back and took the top from the box, and we all saw a spray of roses nested in fern. My father was silent, but Mother drew in her breath. She said: "This is... it's unthinkable. Leora, you should have thrown them in his face!"
Leora had lifted the flowers, and I saw on her features that strange, saddened glow I did not then understand. "I was merely polite, and he thought it was kindness," she said to us. "Omaha... he must have sent all the way there for them."
My father's answer was like the slamming of a door. "He has stepped over the line."
"What line?" Leora Kadderly asked, and as I review that scene I call up the picture of a dark and full-bosomed girl with aroused eyes. "You people are so kind and honest, and so cruel. Why is it you look at life as though it were indecent, and hate people who laugh? Must we all be miserable to be godly? Must we always turn from what little pleasure there is because it is unseemly? Must we all be plain and never wear bright clothes, and throw stones at a man like Ben Tarrade because he is the only one in New Hope to know that a woman loves flowers?"
My mother said to me—"Tod, leave the room."—and I went out and sat on the porch, hearing the three voices rise and fall behind me. Presently Jim Shugrue arrived, and the voices turned decorous again, and later Shugrue and my father came to the porch and sat there smoking, neither saying much. Both were greatly disturbed. Around five o'clock Jim Shugrue took Leora home; she was, I remember, carrying Ben Tarrade's flowers in one arm.
What happened thereafter happened swiftly, as was the way in
our town. We were a people, I now realize, severely conditioned
by the land. All nature was restless and extreme and quick
changing. The mild seasons were so brief as to leave us with but
a faint memory of mildness; for the rest it was heat and wind and
sandstorm and great snows; it was drought or swollen river. This
was the mood of the land, and this was the mood of its
inhabitants, and nothing is fresher in my mind now than the
bitter quarrels that at times broke through the courtesy affected
by my elders. How soft and even were my father's words; but this
was a deliberate manner adopted by him, as by the rest of the
gentility, to avoid the clash of violent tempers. It was never
wise in that town to stand in front of a man's will unless you
were prepared to meet the farthest consequences.
It was within the week of Ben Tarrade's coming to our place, I remember, that I saw him turn out of River Street into Belle Plaine and lift his hat to Leora Kadderly passing by; and then, fascinated by a scene that I knew meant trouble, I watched them stroll on together. Old Colonel Lindsay at that moment stepped from von Gayl's, and he stopped, put back his head, and looked at the pair a long while. Afterward he wheeled about and walked, as though in a hurry, toward Messenger's General Store. My father came along presently, and we strolled home.
That same night, in the long, still period between sunset and full dark, I went out south of town to a pile of tar barrels that was the rendezvous of my crowd, and Nick Fallon told us the rest of the story. Nick was somewhat older than the other boys and had the gray knowledge of the world at his command. I think now his parents spoke too freely in front of him. We fired up a tar barrel and sat around it, and that image is indelibly stamped in my mind—of a great rush of blood-crimson light against the black mystery of the prairie.
"Ben Tarrade," Nick Fallon said, "came into Billy Hope's to get a saddle horse, and Billy Hope told him he'd get horsewhipped if he didn't stay away from Leora Kadderly. Tarrade just laughed at him. There's goin' to be hell to pay."
These were words, I suppose, Nick Fallon had picked up from his father. But Nick spoke them with a certain dramatic originality, and we all sat within the saturnine glow of the tar barrel and brooded over them. Boys are an odd compound of the purely primitive emotions; and I recall the mixture of fear and expectancy that shot through me. A little later we all left the tar barrel and walked to the courthouse park where the carpenters had just finished building the scaffold for a teamster by the name of Jeff Dann who was to be hung the following day because of a killing. It is another scene fresh and unblurred out of boyhood—the high platform, the heavy pole rising upward, the arm that was to hold the rope extending starkly into space. It stood there gaunt and grisly in the graying twilight, exuding a fresh-pine odor, the new timbers glowing faintly through this dusk like the pallid shining of a skeleton's weathered bones.
When I think of New Hope, Nebraska, in 1880, I am rather sure
that only the boys of that town saw the delight of the world. We
were a race apart; we were pure hedonists. The bitterness of the
land was not for us, or the conformist ethics that—as I now
understand—laid its iron obligations upon the elders. To us
the outward manifestations of New Hope were eternally surprising.
Life was rough and uneven but never dull. All colors were vivid,
and all the contrasts of that land were fresh shocks, each shock
leaving a deep impression. This scaffold in the twilight was only
a dramatic event in a long chain of dramatic events, the very
sight of which harrowed us morbidly and left us with permanent
scars on the memory. Yet, being savages, we lived for this, and
so we stood there a while and then drifted home.
The next day at noon, my father told me to stay at the house
until after supper, and the direct glance accompanying the order
stilled whatever protest I had. The hanging was at four o'clock,
and I realize now it had been arranged as a public event, and
that the hour was for the convenience of the roundabout ranchers
who had to drive to town. In that public square the teamster,
Dann, was to be hung before all eyes; he was to be the flaming
cross of an outraged justice.
Law still is harsh, but it no longer possesses the extreme vengefulness of the years of my youth. There was something brutal in those kind, earnest people, and now that I recall all the brown and heavy faces, the unsmiling faces, the sad faces, I see the quality of spiritual somberness in each one. Sometimes I think it came from looking too long on the Original Sin of the race, from seeing so realistically the hell fire reserved for the condemned. The heavy hand of public opinion bore down on my elders unsparingly, and although we had a sort of individualism that is nowhere seen today—like that of Colonel Lindsay who always carried a sword cane, like George Faul who drank himself senseless each Saturday night and had one of von Gayl's men tie him into his home-going rig—we had very little of that true individualism that lies in the mind. You could not be a dissenter in New Hope; you could not violate New Hope's main body of morals and survive. If you did not conform, wrath descended upon you unmercifully in a dozen ways, from social ostracism to tar and feathers.
I remember that at four o'clock I stood in the parlor and held my breath, to discover how a hanging man must feel; and I noticed that my mother looked long and wistfully out of a window. I did not know what she was thinking; nor do I now. Her affection surrounded me for as long as I can remember, strong and changeless, but I have often felt inexpressibly sad in realizing I never knew her at all. Out across the many years I see only the seldom smile of a woman with her hair done straight back from a white forehead.
My father came home rather late for dinner, and, although his
quietness was as usual, his features were sharp, and he ate
little; and, when he said grace, he was unusually solemn. After
we ate, he went into the kitchen, and I heard him speak to Mother
in a guarded voice. Presently he left.
I soon followed, turning off River toward the courthouse square. Ten wild horses could not have dragged me away from the spot, yet I felt a strange dread; and, when I came upon the square, I brushed my eyes rapidly across the scaffold and looked away. Nothing happening then, I looked again. They had cut the dead man down, and the rest of the rope hung straight and motionless from the top bar; the trap door on the platform was dropped open. I do not know how long I stood there in a twilight that grew deeper and deeper while my mind gave the dead man life, put him on the platform, dropped him through the trap, and killed him again. I suppose I built up that scene a dozen times and would have done it as many more had not Nick Fallon come up on the run. His eyes were wide open and very bright.
He said, not stopping: "If you want to see something, go out to the tar barrels."
It was full dark when I passed across the square—touching the scaffold structure out of boyish bravado—and hurried down Cotter's Alley. Beyond it, I saw a tar barrel blazing. There was a small crowd around it and a buckboard standing there with one gray horse in the shafts, that I instantly recognized as belonging to Ben Tarrade. I knew then; and that gave circumspection to my approach, for I realized a boy had no place here. But I went on until I was within the tinged shadows, on the edge of the circle of men, and remained there without being seen. In the center's circle stood Ben Tarrade, and I did not realize for a moment that he had been tied to the buckboard's tail gate. He was bare to the waist and he held himself straight, but his yellow head was bent over, away from us. Billy Hope was beside him, holding a bullwhacker's whip cut in half. I could see the flushed blood in Billy Hope's face. I could see the marble-like set to his lips.
He said: "Give your sort of men an inch and you take a mile. You been warned, which you laughed at. Now, by God, you'll catch on."
He stepped back, one foot straightening behind the other, and the whip slashed across Ben Tarrade's white back with a sound that twists my nerves now to think of it. I was rooted there in horror. I think Tarrade never moved out of his tracks, though his frame shook at each blow, and the long, red welts began to bleed. Billy Hope hit him a dozen times, cursed, and stopped; he was breathing hard, and the color had gone from his face. Another man stepped out from the circle and said—"That's enough, Billy."—and reached around to untie Tarrade's hands; and it was then that I looked about, the spell broken, and got a good view of those in the circle. I knew them all, yet they were strangers to me—strangers with hot eyes and the hardest lips I have ever seen.
Tarrade turned and held to the buckboard a moment. Billy Hope pointed into the farther darkness of the prairie. "Your trunk is in that buckboard," he said. "We took pains to see you got all your possessions. Now get out of here, and don't ever come back to New Hope."
Tarrade said nothing at all. His cheeks were the shade of ashes, and he moved as though he were dead tired. At the buckboard's front wheel he swung to look at us all; and I can say now, long thinking about it, that he had the best of those men. I do not know why, but he had the best of them, and I think some of them must have known it and felt shamed. After that, he got up to the seat, lifted the reins, and drove away into the dark. This is the last sight I ever had of him, bare torso red-streaked, yet square in the seat. The man nearest me turned, discovered me, and took my arm roughly, but, when he looked closer and saw who I was, he spoke with more consideration.
"You had better not let your father know you came here, Tod."
I ran all the way home and tried to conceal the dumb shaking of my body from my mother. But she saw it and said: "Where have you been?" All I could say was that I had been playing, and went immediately to my room. We always left the door open so that the cross current of night air might carry off the day's heat; and so I heard my father come in. He had not been at the whipping, that I was sure of, but he knew of it.
He said—"Well, he got what he deserved."—and my mother murmured, in a grieving voice, "Oh, Tod." Much as she disliked Ben Tarrade, that thought of punishment hurt her gentle soul. But lying there in the dark, the puzzling contradictions of my father's nature troubled me, and I could not understand. I do not fully understand now. He was always a kindly man and a fair one, and never would he have soiled his hands in such a scene as I saw that evening; yet he approved of what the rougher ones had done.
There was little sleep for me that night. I think I relived those brief moments of the tar barrels a hundred times. In the morning I was physically sick and could not touch my breakfast. Father was at the table; Mother was not. But as we sat there, she came in from the street, apron folded around her hands, as was her custom. Father looked up, and then stood up. He said—"What is it?"—in a concerned voice. Mother was crying, the first time I had ever seen her so.
"Leora left town late last night," Mother said. "She packed her trunk and gave her dog to the Sperrins and left on the Omaha stage. Tod... oh, Tod!"
Father's whole face changed. He shook his head, and kept shaking it. What he said did not then make any sense to me at all. "Not to him, Mother! Surely not to him!"
"We will never see her again," said my mother. And her grief came out and touched me, and I felt very lonely and miserable.
There is little more to say. News came back to New Hope a few
weeks later, telling us that Tarrade had married Leora, and then
as far as the town was concerned they were dead. I do not recall
either name ever being afterward spoken in our house, and a year
later my family moved farther West. Time went by, and that old
incident faded out as all things in time do fade. I never saw
those two again, although one more fact belongs to this
chronicle. In 1905, when I was a man grown, I passed through
Omaha, and stopped off during a twenty-minute wait. Out of
curiosity I looked up a city directory and followed the T column
down, really expecting nothing, for in the West at that time we
were a highly migratory people. But the name was there: Tarrade,
Ben (Leora), grain merchant.
It was a tragedy out of my boyhood; it was to me then like a death. But the other day, reliving that affair, a feeling of unutterable relief went through me, as though I had come to the end of a tragic tale and had found triumph at last springing out of ruin. For as I look back into that far-off time, I see New Hope as it really was: a town of kindly people living in spiritual shadows, afraid of the light of life, cruel to those they could not understand. And for these two, who alone of all New Hope smiled because it was good to smile, the end was a happy one. The savor and richness and melody of the world were with them; and gaiety and understanding were with them—too powerful for New Hope either to comprehend or to subdue.