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Jim Lancy’s Waterloo
by
Ten days after this Jim got a letter from her. “I am never coming back, Jim,” it said. “It is hopeless. I don’t think I would mind standing still to be shot down if there was any good in it. But I’m not going back there to work harder than any slave for those money-loaners and the railroads. I guess they can all get along without me. And I am sure I can get along without them. I do not think this will make you feel very bad. You haven’t seemed to notice me very much lately when I’ve been around, and I do not think you will notice very much when I am gone. I know what this means. I know I am breaking my word when I leave you. But remember, it is not you I leave, but the soil, Jim! I will not be its slave any longer. If you care to come for me here, and live another life–but no, there would be no use. Our love, like our toil, has been eaten up by those rapacious acres. Let us say goodby.”
Jim sat all night with this letter in his hand. Sometimes he dozed heavily in his chair. But he did not go to bed; and the next morning he hitched up his horses and rode to town. He went to the bank which held his notes.
“I’ll confess judgment as soon as you like,” he said. “It’s all up with me.”
It was done as quickly as the law would allow. And the things in the house were sold by auction. All the farmers were there with their wives. It made quite an outing for them. Jim moved around impassively, and chatted, now and then, with some of the men about what the horses ought to bring.
The auctioneer was a clever fellow. Between the putting up of the articles, he sang comic songs, and the funnier the song, the livelier the bidding that followed. The horses brought a decent price, and the machinery a disappointing one; and then, after a delicious snatch about Nell who rode the sway-backed mare at the county fair, he got down to the furniture,–the furniture which Jim had bought when he was expecting Annie.
Jim was walking around with his hands in his pockets, looking unconcerned, and, as the furniture began to go off, he came and sat down in the midst of it. Every one noticed his indifference. Some of them said that after all he couldn’t have been very ambitious. He didn’t seem to take his failure much to heart. Every one was concentrating attention on the cooking-stove, when Jim leaned forward, quickly, over a little wicker work-stand.
There was a bit of unfinished sewing there, and it fell out as he lifted the cover. It was a baby’s linen shirt. Jim let it lie, and then lifted from its receptacle a silver thimble. He put it in his vest-pocket.
The campaign came on shortly after this, and Jim Lancy was defeated. “I’m going to Omaha,” said he to the station-master, “and I’ve got just enough to buy a ticket with. There’s a kind of satisfaction in giving the last cent I have to the railroads.”
Two months later, a “plain drunk” was registered at the station in Nebraska’s metropolis. When they searched him they found nothing in his pockets but a silver thimble, and Joe Benson, the policeman who had brought in the “drunk,” gave it to the matron, with his compliments. But she, when no one noticed, went softly to where the man was sleeping, and slipped it back into his pocket, with a sigh. For she knew somehow–as women do know things–that he had not stolen that thimble.