FullReads

“I think it is mean and cruel of her to turn us out! Uncle says mortgages are wicked anyhow, and I believe him!”

“I guess he couldn’t have bought this place if he didn’t give a mortgage on it. And he’d have had enough to pay cash, too, if Richards hadn’t begged him so to lend it to him.”

“When is Richards going to pay him?”

“It come due three months ago; Richards ain’t never paid up the interest even, and now he says he’s got to have the mortgage extended for three years; anyhow for two.”

“But don’t he KNOW we’ve got to pay our own mortgage? How can we help HIM? I wish Uncle would sell him out!”

The boy gave her the superior smile of the masculine creature. “I suppose,” he remarked with elaborate irony, “that he’s like Uncle and you; he thinks mortgages are wicked.”

“And just as like as not Uncle won’t want to go to the carnival,” Eve went on, her eyes filling again.

Tim gazed at her, scowling and sneering; but she was absorbed in dreams and hopes with which as yet his boyish mind had no point of contact.

“All the girls in the A class were going to go to see the fireworks together, and George Dean and some of the boys were going to take us, and we were going to have tea at May Arlington’s house, and I was to stay all night;”–this came in a half sob. “I think it is just too mean! I never have any good times!”

“Oh, yes, you do, sis, lots! Uncle always gits you everything you want. And he feels terrible bad when I–when he knows he can’t afford to git something you want—-“

“I know well enough who tells him we can’t afford things!”

“Well, do you want us to git things we can’t afford? I ain’t never advised him except the best I knew how. I told him Richards was a blow-hard, and I told him those Alliance grocery folks he bought such a lot of truck of would skin him, and they did; those canned things they sold him was all musty, and they said there wasn’t any freight on ’em, and he had to pay freight and a fancy price besides; and I don’t believe they had any more to do with the Alliance than our cow!”

“Uncle always believes everything. He always is so sure things are going to turn out just splendid; and they don’t–only just middling; and then he loses a lot of money.”

“But he is an awful good man,” said the boy, musingly.

“I don’t believe in being so good you can’t make money. I don’t want always to be poor and despised, and have the other girls have prettier clothes than me!”

“I guess you can be pretty good and yet make money, if you are sharp enough. Of course you got to be sharper to be good and make money than you got to be, to be mean and make money.”

“Well, I know one thing, that Uncle ain’t EVER going to make money. He—-” The last word shrivelled on her lips, which puckered into a confused smile at the warning frown of her brother. The man that they were discussing had come round to them past the henhouse. How much had he overheard?

He didn’t seem angry, anyhow. He called: “Well, Evy, ready?” and Eve was glad to run into the house for her hat without looking at him. It was a relief that she must sit on the back seat where she need not face Uncle Nelson. Tim sat in front; but Tim was so stupid he wouldn’t mind.

Nor did he; it was Nelson Forrest that stole furtive glances at the lad’s profile, the knitted brows, the freckled cheeks, the undecided nose, and firm mouth.

The boyish shoulders slouched forward at the same angle as that of the fifty-year-old shoulders beside him. Nelson, through long following of the plough, had lost the erect carriage painfully acquired in the army. He was a handsome man, whose fresh-colored skin gave him a perpetual appearance of having just washed his face. The features were long and delicate. The brown eyes had a liquid softness like the eyes of a woman. In general the countenance was alertly intelligent; he looked younger than his years; but this afternoon the lines about his mouth and in his brows warranted every gray hair of his pointed short beard. There was a reason. Nelson was having one of those searing flashes of insight that do come occasionally to the most blindly hopeful souls. Nelson had hoped all his life. He hoped for himself, he hoped for the whole human race. He served the abstraction that he called “PROgress” with unflinching and unquestioning loyalty. Every new scheme of increasing happiness by force found a helper, a fighter, and a giver in him; by turns he had been an Abolitionist, a Fourierist, a Socialist, a Greenbacker, a Farmers’ Alliance man. Disappointment always was followed hard on its heels by a brand-new confidence. Progress ruled his farm as well as his politics; he bought the newest implements and subscribed trustfully to four agricultural papers; but being a born lover of the ground, a vein of saving doubt did assert itself sometimes in his work; and, on the whole, as a farmer he was successful. But his success never ventured outside his farm gates. At buying or selling, at a bargain in any form, the fourteen-year-old Tim was better than Nelson with his fifty years’ experience of a wicked and bargaining world.