The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage

"You look fine here," he told her, entering, hanging up his hat, and disposing of the bundles he had been carrying.

Callista advanced smiling to him and lifted her face to be kissed. Self-absorbed, wholly pleased with her house and her baby, and her newly discovered gift for work, and for administration, she never noted the quick, wild question of his eyes, which was as swiftly veiled.

"The baby's asleep already," she announced softly. "We got to be right quiet."

Nodding silently. Lance picked up some of the things he had brought, and carried them out to the shed, whence Callista, later, summoned him to supper.

Old Kimbro proved to be right. Lance, having held by his contract till Spring, was able to collect the poor little balance of his wages, and on this they proposed to live while he got the place in the Gap in some shape to support them. Satan was well now, but it fretted Lance unreasonably that he could not buy Cindy back from Flenton Hands.

With characteristic insouciance and unusual energy, he set to work on the gigantic task of subduing his large tract of steep, wild, mountain land. No doubt he worked too hard that summer; people of Lance's temperament are always working too hard – or not working at all. As for Callista, the first eagerness of her mere passion for Lance was satisfied. She was no more the warm, tender, young girl, almost pathetically in love, – even though proud and wilful and somewhat spoiled – but the composed, dignified mother of a son and mistress of a home. She had once been too little of a house-mother for her man, and now she was rather too much.

Yet Lance went no more abroad for consolation. After his settlement with Derf, he had refused to put foot on their place again. This was not the season for hunting. He comforted himself with his banjo, and enjoyed too, in its own measure, the well-kept home, the excellently prepared food, the placid, calm, good-will of his mate.

And the child was Callista over again; big blue eyes, a fuzz of pale gold down, and an air of great wisdom and dignity. As he grew able to sit up alone on the floor and manage his own playthings, one saw laughably enough his mother's slant glance of scorn, that which had been considered her affectation of indifference, reproduced in the baby's manner. Between mother and son, Lance sometimes felt himself reduced to his lowest terms.

Yet they thrived, for the welfare of a primitive; household still depends more upon the woman than on the man. If Lance's restless fancy – that questioning, eager heart of his – lacked something of full satisfaction, his body was well fed, his household comfort was complete, and his material work laid out plainly before him. And Lance could work so well and to such good purpose that at midsummer his clearing had assumed very respectable size, and the small crop he had made was laid by. Even Callista agreed that they might now make the trip Lance had proposed more than a year ago, over to the East Fork of Caney.

That camping trip was well thought of. It instantly reversed the family balance, and sent Lance's end swinging higher. If Callista dominated the house, and her spirit was coming to pervade the farm as well. Lance was supreme in this matter of the gipsying excursion.

"You needn't bother your head about what to pack," he told her. "I reckon I'll know better than you do what we'll need, exceptin' the things for that young man you make so much of."

So Callista concerned herself with the baby's outfit and her own, with assurance that her jars were in order, and that she had enough sugar to put up jam. The other berries could be canned without sugar, and sweetened when they came to use them. A joyous bustle of preparation pervaded the place; that play spirit which was necessary to Lance Cleaverage, and which Callista would quite innocently and unconsciously have crushed out of him if she could, was all alert and dancing at the prospect. He came into his wife's kitchen and packed flour and meal, frying pan and Dutch oven, with various other small matters necessary, observing as the bacon went in,

"We won't need much of that, excepting to fry fish and help out with wild meat. The law's off of pa'tridges in the Valley next month, and it's sure off of 'em up here now."

Callista, sitting on the table, swinging a foot to keep the baby trotted on her knee, looked on smilingly.

"When Blev Straley and his wife camped out and canned blackberries, they hadn't any nag," she commented. "He had to take the things in a wheelbarrow, and it looked like some places he couldn't hardly get acrost; but Miranda said she had the best time she ever had in her life."

Kimbro Cleaverage was teaching school over in the Far Cove. For fifteen years he had taught this little summer school; his pupils now were the children of the first boys and girls who came under his rule. His neighbors held toward the gentle soul a patronizing, almost tolerant attitude. True, he managed the winter school nearer home, having little trouble with the big boys, the bullies, the incorrigibles; while it was well understood that the peaceful, who wanted to learn, could get on powerful fast under his tuition. Yet there were those who deprecated the mildness of his sway, and allowed that he was really better suited to the small children, the anxious-faced little boys, too young yet to follow the plow, the small girls who had just finished dropping corn or "suckering the crop." That these dearly loved the master was held to be an unimportant detail, and his aversion to plying the hickory was always cited in regard to Lance's misdoings.

When his father was away teaching, the management, and all the labor of the wornout little farm fell on Sylvane's young shoulders. Lance had promised his brother the use of Satan for the week when they should be in camp. The boy came over to help them pack.

It was a July morning without flaw, blue and green and golden, and brooded upon by the full-hearted peace of ripe summer. Bedding and kitchen supplies were put in two big bundles arranged pannier fashion on the black horse, and firmly lashed in place by a pair of plow lines.

"Why don't you put it up on his back?" Callista asked them, coming out with her eight month's old baby, all in order for the journey.

"That's to leave place for you to ride part of the time," Lance told her. "It's a right smart ways we're going, and that son of yours is tol'able heavy, and half the time you won't let me tote him."

So they set off, Sylvane walking ahead at Satan's bridle, whistling and singing by turns, Lance with his banjo on his back, Callista at first carrying the boy because he wanted her to, and afterward relinquishing him to Lance or Sylvane. The route lay over springy leaf-mold, under great trees for the most part, leaving the main road, and taking merely an occasional cattle-path, while always it wound upward. After a time, the timber became more scattered, and from going forward under a leafage that shut out the rising sun, there were patches of open, meadow-like grasses, called by the mountain dweller, balds, interspersed with groups of cedars and oaks. The last mile was up the dry bed of Caney, and it consisted of a scramble over great boulders, where only a mountain-bred horse might keep his footing. Turning suddenly and scaling a bank that was like a precipice, one came on Lance's find, a cup-like hollow between the cleft portions of a mountain peak, where the great gray rocks lay strewn thick, the ferns grew waist high, and the trickling spring-branch was so blue-cold that it made your teeth ache to drink of it even on a summer's day.

The three stood for a moment silent, on the edge of the miniature valley, studying its perfections with loving eyes; the mountaineer leads all others in passionate admiration for the beauty of his native highlands.

"Oh, Lance!" Callista said at length, very softly. "You never told me it was as sightly as all this."

"Couldn't," murmured Lance, pleased to the soul. "I ain't got the words by me."

Sylvane helped them unpack, waited for a hasty dinner for himself and Satan; then having agreed to return for them at the end of a week, he went back, leading his black horse, looking with boyish envy over his shoulder at the happy little group in the hidden pocket of the hills. When he was out of sight of them, he could still see the blue smoke of their camp fire rising clear and high, and stopping to mount Satan, when the trail became fit for it, he hearkened a moment, and thought he heard the sound of the banjo.

It was Lance who made the camp, deftly, swiftly; Callista looked after her baby and explored their new domain, moving about, girlish, light-footed, singing to herself, so that the eyes of the man bending over his task followed her eagerly. Two great boulders leaning together made them a rock house. Lance soon had a chimney up, of loose stones to be sure, but drawing sufficiently to keep the smoke out of your eyes unless the wind was more perverse than a summer breeze is apt to be. That evening they ate a supper of the cooked food they had brought and rested as the first pair might have done in Eden, sleeping soundly on their light, springy couch of tender hemlock tips. But next day Lance fished in the little stream and came up with a wonderful catch of tiny silver-sided, rainbow trout, cleaned and laid in a great leaf-cup ready for the frying pan.

"Lance, oh Lance! – ain't it too bad?" Callista greeted him from the fire where she had her cornbread nearly ready to accompany his fish. "I believe in my soul we've come clean over here and forgot the salt – the salt! I put some in my meal, or the bread wouldn't be fit to eat. Do you reckon the meat fryings will make your fish taste all right? No – of course it won't. I'm mighty sorry. Looks like that is certainly the prettiest fish I ever saw in my life, and they're so good right fresh from the water."

"It is too bad," agreed Lance, with a very sober countenance, going ahead however with his preparations. "'Pears as if somebody in this crowd is a pore manager."

"It's me. Lance," Callista hastened to avow, kneeling by their primitive hearthstone to tend her bread. "It was my business to see that the salt was in; but I got so took up with the baby that I left everything to you; and a body can't expect a man – "

She broke off; Lance, kneeling beside her, engaged in his own enterprise of fish-frying had suddenly turned and kissed her flushed cheek. There was always a sort of embarrassment in this unusual demonstrativeness of her husband's; and yet it subdued her heart as nothing else could, as nothing had ever done. That heart beat swiftly and the long fair lashes lay almost on the glowing cheek above where Lance had kissed.

A few moments later, when the primitive meal was spread under the open sky, Callista tasted her fish.

"Lance!" she looked at him reproachfully. "You rogue! You had salt along with you all the time! Why didn't you tell me, and put my mind at rest?"

"I'm not so terrible sure that a restful mind is what's needed in your case," Lance teased her. "I thought you looked mighty sweet and sounded mighty sweet, too, when you was a blamin' yourse'f."

Lance had spoken truly when he praised the huckleberries that grew in the little valley where nobody came to pick them. They stood thick all over its steep, shelving sides, taller bushes than those of the lowland, with great blue berries, tender of skin, sun sweetened, bursting with juice. Callista was almost wearisome in her triumph over the fruit. Forest fires and drought had made the berry crop nearer home a failure this year; she would be the only woman in the neighborhood with such canned huckleberries to boast of. She picked them tirelessly, making work of her play, Callista fashion, spreading her apron under the bush and raking down green ones, leaves and all, into it, then afterward harrying Lance into helping her look them over while the baby played near by or slept. This gipsying was not her plan; she had come along in mere complaisance; yet in the simple outdoor life she throve beautifully; her cheeks rounded out, and her temples lost their bleached look; she was the old delicious Callista, with an added glow and bloom and softness.

It was in the early days of their stay, that Lance, with the air of a boy disclosing to some chosen companion a long-cherished treasure, took her by a circuitous way up the steep wall of their little valley, and helping her around a big boulder and through a thicket of laurel, showed her the opening of a cave. Man-high the entrance was, with a tiny cup of a spring in its lap; but six or eight feet in there was an abrupt turning so that the cave's extent was entirely hidden. He stood smilingly by, enjoying her astonishment.

"Why, Lance!" she cried. "Well, I vow! Why, no one in the world would ever suspicion there was a cave here!"

The two turned to look back at their camp, only to find themselves wholly screened by the oblique side of the great boulder and the laurel bushes, cut off from sight and sound of all that went on in the little valley.

"They sure never would," Lance assented. "And I've never told a soul – _but_ Sylvane – about the place. I was even kind o' duberous about showing you," and he laughed teasingly. "Might need a hide-out some time, that nobody didn't know where to find."

There was a Phoebe-bird's nest just at the opening of the cave. Lance drew Callista back, both of them standing half crouched, while the mother, returning home, flitted past them and fed her babies.

"Mighty late for that business," whispered Lance.

"Second brood, I reckon," Callista murmured back.

"Or maybe got broke up with the first brood," Lance added.

The little dell was so remote that the birds were less shy than where they have been intruded upon by man and civilization, and the mother betrayed little uneasiness when the two visitors crept closer.

"My, ain't it scairy!" Callista said, peering beyond into the cave. Then, as they descended the bank once more, "Hit looked like there might be wildcats in it."

"I aimed to explore it this time and get to the end if I could," Lance replied. "I was fifteen year old when I found that place, and I used to scheme it out, like a boy will, that if I'd ever go with the Jesse James gang, or kill a man, or anything to get the law out after me, I'd hide there; and then, oncet Caney was up, all the world couldn't find me."

"What'd you eat?" objected practical Callista.

Lance smiled. "I could take care of myself in the woods about as well as any of the critters," he told her.

"I reckon I'd have to come and bring you a pone," bantered Callista. And they turned and smiled happily into each other's eyes, all in the blue, unclouded summer, with the baby asleep back in the rock house, and the two of them climbing down to him and their gipsy home hand in hand.

And now perfect day followed perfect day. The work of the camp was frolic to Lance; he did it laughing, as he would have gone through a game, and then tolerantly helped Callista with the play of which she made work. The high noon of summer brooded over the mountains, with a wonderful blue haze and a silence that was almost palpable. In their little cup of the hills, there was a hoarded wine of coolness. The drowsy tinkle of the tiny branch that ran from their spring backgrounded the rare sound of their voices. And Lance would lie full length on the earth as he loved to do, strumming sometimes on his banjo, drowsing a little, amusing and being amused by the baby. Callista, her head bent, her face intent above the work, would be picking over her berries. The boy was intensely, solemnly interested in the banjo; but when its music ceased, he would roll away from his father's arm and creep to his mother's skirts, there to cuddle down and sleep, a dimpled picture of infantile perfection.

Lance would regard them both from under his lashes. Beauty-worshipper that he was, they satisfied every whim and caprice of longing, so far as the eyes spoke. And they were his. Callista was his own, she had come with him to the place he found for her; she was an amiable, complying companion. And yet – and yet —

The birds were all silent now, except for an occasional chirp or twitter in among the leafage. The little breeze that seemed to live only in their high eyrie went by softly, making its own music. "How many miles, how many years?" But there were no longer miles and years between him and his beloved. No, she was within hand-reach. He could stretch forth his fingers and touch the hem of her skirts. With an impatient sigh he would turn over and take up his banjo.

"Don't play now, Lance – you'll wake the baby," Callista would murmur half mechanically, in that hushed tone mothers learn so soon.

One day Lance snared a couple of partridges, and, cleaning and salting them, roasted them with the feathers on, by daubing each with the stiff, tough blue clay of the region, and burying the balls in the embers. They came out delicious. When the clay coating was broken off, feathers and skin went with it, leaving all the delicate juices of the meat steaming, His helpmate praised his skill generously.

"Ola Derf showed me that trick," Lance said, in fairness, clearing a dainty little drumstick with his teeth. "We was fishing over on Laurel one day, and we didn't get no fish. So she caught a couple of chickens, and cooked them that-a-way. Good, ain't they?"

Callista nodded.

"Whose chickens were they – them you and Ola Derf caught?" she asked, after a moment's silence.

Lance laughed long and uproariously.

"Whose chickens?" he repeated. "Our'n, I reckon, oncet we'd cooked 'em and et 'em. I never axed 'em their names. They tasted all right. I ain't got no objections to strangers – in chickens that-a-way."

"I don't think that was right," Callista-told him with great finality. "It's likely some poor old woman had her mouth all fixed for chicken dinner, or was going to have the preacher at her house, and then you and Ola stole her chickens and she never knew what became of them. I think it was right mean."

"So do I," agreed Lance lightly. "That's the reason I enjoyed it. I get mighty tired of bein' good."

"You do?" inquired his wife with gay scorn. "I didn't know you'd ever had the chance."

Yet of this conversation remained the knowledge that such gipsying meals as this had been eaten with Ola Derf before she and Lance cooked for each other. Had he found Ola an entirely satisfactory companion? Evidently not, for he could have had her for the asking. Did she, Callista, compare in any way unfavorably with the Derf girl? Such questionings were new to Callista, and they were decidedly uncomfortable. She resented them; yet she could not quite put them by.

Lance was used to sleeping the deep and dreamless slumber of those who labor much in the open air; but on the last night of their stay in the little hollow by the spring, he lay long awake.

"Callista, air you asleep?" he inquired with caution.

"N – no," murmured Callista drowsily.

"Well, somehow I cain't git to sleep," said Lance. "I feel like this rock house was goin' to fall down on me. I believe I'd like to take my blanket out there on the grass if you won't be scared to be alone. You could call to me."

Callista assented, only half awake. Once sprawled at ease under the stars, sleep seemed definitely to have forsaken him. He lay and stared up into the velvety blue-black spaces above him. His mind went dreamily over the past few days. How good it had been. And yet – he broke off and ruminated for awhile on whether or no a body should ever cherish a plan for years as he had cherished this plan of camping out some time in the rock house with Callista. It seemed to him that if a man had planned a thing for so long, it was better not to bring it to pass, for the reality could never compare favorably with the dream. He sighed impatiently, and turned his face resolutely down against the grass, dew-wet and cool. But there was no sleep for him in the earth, as there had been none in the heavens. Before his eyes, quite as real as daylight seeing, came the vision of Callista and his boy. There was not such a woman nor such a child in all his knowledge. He had chosen well. Idle dreams of Callista as a girl among her mates; of Callista lying spent and white in her bed with his child, new born, on her arm; of Callista kneeling flushed and housewifely by this outdoor hearth to prepare his meal – these strung themselves into an endless, tantalizing line, a shadowy gallery of pictures, a visioned processional, each face in some sort a stranger's. What was it he had thought to compass by coming here with her? Why was the realization not enough?

Through dreams and waking this question followed him, giving him no deep rest; and dawn found him already afoot and busy with the preparations for their return home.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE HEGIRA

CALLISTA roused that morning, to see Lance moving, light-footed, a shadow between her and the first struggling blaze of the fire he had kindled. With sleepy surprise she noted his activities. When she observed that he was packing her canned fruit, with quick, deft fingers, she inquired,

"What you doin' there. Lance? No use fixin' them up now. Sylvane won't be here till in the morning."

Lance broke off the low whistling which had wakened her, and turned to regard his wife for a moment before he spoke.

"I thought I'd get this packing done," he said non-committally. "If we was to go home to-day I could tote whatever we needed, and Buddy could fetch over the heaviest stuff to-morrow."

Callista dozed a little luxuriously, and woke to a smell of boiling coffee and frying pork.

"You've got breakfast enough there for three people," she commented, when she finally drew near the fire.

"Uh-huh," assented Lance. "I 'lowed Sylvane might come to-day, place of Saturday. Anyhow, we'll need something for a bite on the way." And Callista realized that her husband was indeed making the final preparations for their return.

As they sat down either side the frying pan, and Callista lifted the lid from the Dutch oven to take the bread out, they became aware of the sound of scrambling hoofs and parting branches. Whenever there was high water in Caney, this little valley was cut off, it was a retreat unknown, unvisited; the newcomer could be nobody but Sylvane. A moment later the boy made his appearance, clambering over the rocks, leading Satan by a long line.

"I 'lowed you-all wouldn't mind coming back a day sooner," he apologized, as he gratefully seated himself for an addition to his hastily snatched breakfast eaten by candle-light. "They's a feller that the Company has sent up to look over lands, and he's a-buyin' mineral rights – or ruther, gettin' options – on everybody's farms. They'll pay big prices, and Sis' Roxy said I ought to come and tell Lance of it."

The man listened indifferently, but the woman was all aglow. The touch of practical life had dissolved whatever of the gipsy mood Lance's nature had been able to lend hers. She questioned the boy minutely. Lance listening with ill-concealed impatience; and when the subject was exhausted, began to ask him with great particularity concerning her truck patch at home and whether Spotty, the young cow Lance had traded with Squire Ashe for, was doing well in her milk.

In spite of Lance's packing, there was much to do before camp could be struck, and on account of the canned fruit they moved so slowly that noon saw them still in the wilderness, dropping down by the stream's side to eat the snack they had brought with them. They went around by Father Cleaverage's this time, and stopped there, since Callista intended to present a few of her cherished huckleberries to Roxy, and they reached the cabin at the head of Lance's Laurel late in the afternoon.

For some reason which he could not himself have told you, Lance felt strangely wearied and dissatisfied. He looked back to the week past, and admitted that all had gone well; days of fishing and dreaming, evenings under the open sky with the banjo humming, the not unwelcome fire leaping up, and the baby asleep on Callista's lap. Could a man have asked more?

The son of the house had thriven amazingly on it, and this evening he was assuming airs so domineering that his father professed fear of him.

"Look a here, young feller," Lance said, as the big eight-months-old came creeping across the floor and hammered on his knee to be taken up, "you're about to run me out o' the house." He lifted his son on his arm, and, carrying the banjo in the other hand, beyond reach of the clutching, fat fingers, went to the doorstone with them. "Oh, you're your mammy over again," he admonished the baby. "You don't own up to me at all. I wisht I had me a nice gal o' your size, that would admit I was her daddy."