Part 10

Of course we knew that Joe would be the first one back; he didn't care what they said--even then; he registered his oath that it made no difference what they did to him or what the others did, he would never desert the Tree. He commanded all of us to come back; if not by day then to gather in the moonlight and bring our chicken for the altar and our eggs for the ceremony, and he promised that he would be there. We were years and years in obeying Joe Nevison. Many of us have had long journeys to go; and some of us lead little children by the hand as we creep up the hollow, crawl through the gooseberry bushes, and 'coon the log over the chasm to our meeting place. But we are nearly all there now; and in the moonlight, when the corn seems to be waving over a wide field, a tree springs up as by magic and we take our places again as of old.

Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons; but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys run on home--but mind you if I ever----" and he never did--except Joe Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg, and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy--defiant of law, reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for "Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to keep him out of the penitentiary.

We knew that Joe Nevison was in the West. People from our town, who seem to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona--wherever there was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival towns; sometimes he was a free lance--living the devil knows how--always dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his twenties--a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass, seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys--the old boys he called them--and becoming possessed of a post-office address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy, story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men. But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to South McAlester and opened a faro game--a square game they said it was--for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money, and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together. Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children could count.

[Illustration: A desert Scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it]

A year ago a new reporter brought in this item: "Joseph Nevison, of South McAlester, I. T., is visiting his mother, Mrs. Julia Nevison, at 234 South Fifth Street."

We sent the reporter out for more about Joe Nevison and at noon George Kirwin hurried down to the little home below the tracks. From these two searchers after truth we learned that Joe Nevison's mother had brought him home from the Indian Territory mortally sick. Half-a-dozen of us who had played with him as boys went to see him that evening, and found a wan, haggard man with burned-out black eyes, lying in a clean white bed. He seemed to know each of us for a moment and spoke to us through his delirium in a tired, piping voice--like the voice of the little boy who had been our leader. He called us by forgotten nicknames, and he hummed at a tune that we had not heard for a score of years. Then he piped out "While the Landlubbers Lie Down Below, Below, Below," and followed that with "Green Grass Growing all Around, all Around," and that with the song about the "Tonga Islands," his voice growing into a clearer alto as he sang. His mother tried to quiet him, but he smiled his dead smile at her through his cindery eyes, shook his head and went on. When he had lain quiet for a moment, he turned to one of us and said: "Dock, I'm goin' up and dive off that stump--a back flip-flop--you dassent!" Pretty soon he seemed to come up snuffing and blowing and grinning and said, "Last man dressed got to chaw beef." Then he cried: "Dock's it--Dock's it; catch 'im, hold him--there he goes--duck him, strip him. O well, let him go if he's go'n' to cry. Say, boys, I wish you fellers'd come over t' my stick horse livery stable--honest I got the best hickory horse you ever see. Whoa, there--whoa now, I tell you. You Pilliken Dunlevy let me harness you; there, put it under your arm, and back of your neck--no I ain't go'n' to let you hold it--I'll jerk the tar out of you if you don't go. Whe-e-e that's the way to go, hol--hold on, whoa there. Back up. Let's go over to Jim's and run on his track. Say, Jim, I got the best little pacer in the country here--get up there, Pilliken," and he clucked and sawed his arms, and cracked an imaginary whip. When George came in, the face on the bed brightened and the treble voice said: "Hello Fatty--we've been waitin' for you. Now let's go on. What you got in your wagon--humph--bet it's a pumpkin. Did old Boswell chase you?" and then he laughed, and turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver, and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice broke forth: "Me first--first up--get away from here, Dock--I said first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.

His face glowed with the excitement of his delirium as he climbed, and then apparently catching his breath he rested before he called out: "I'm comin' down, clear the track for old Dan Tucker," and from the convulsive gripping of his hands and arms and the hysterical intake of his breath we who had seen Joe Nevison dive from the top of the old tree, from limb to limb to the bottom, knew what he was doing. His heart was thumping audibly when he finished, and we tried to calm him. For a while we all sat about him in silence--forgetting the walls that shut us in, and living with him in the open, Slaves of the Magic Tree. Then one by one we left and only George Kirwin stayed with the sick man.

Joe Nevison had lived a wicked life. He had been the friend and companion of vile men and the women whom such men choose, and they had lived lives such as we in our little town only read about--and do not understand. Yet all that night Joe Nevison roamed through the woods by the creek, a little child, and no word passed his lips that could have brought a hint of the vicious life that his manhood had known.

In that long night, while George Kirwin sat by his dying friend, listening to his babble, two men were in the genii's hands. They put off their years as a garment. Together they ran over the roofs of buildings on Main Street that have been torn down for thirty years; they played in barns and corncribs burned down so long ago that their very site is in doubt; they romped over prairies where now are elm-covered streets; and they played with boys and girls who have lain forgotten in little sunken graves for a quarter of a century, out on the hill; or they called from the four winds of heaven playmates who left our town at a time so remote that to the watcher by the bed it seemed ages ago. The games they played were of another day than this. When Joe began crying "Barbaree," he summoned a troop of ghosts, and the pack went scampering through the spectre town in the starlight; and when that game had tired him the voice began to chatter of "Slap-and-a-kick," and "Foot-and-a-half," and of "Rolly-poley," and of the ball games--"Scrub," and "Town-ball," and "Anteover," each old game conjuring up spirits from its own vasty deep until the room was full of phantoms and the watcher's memory ached with the sweet sorrow of old joys.

George Kirwin says that long after midnight Joe awakened from a doze, fumbling through the bedclothes, looking for something. Finally he complained that he could not find his mouth-harp. They tried to make him forget it, but when they failed, his mother went to the bureau and pulling open the lower drawer found a little varnished box; under the shaded lamp she brought out a sack of marbles, a broken bean-shooter, with whittled prongs, a Barlow knife, a tintype picture of a boy, and the mouth-organ. This she gave to the hands that fluttered about the face on the pillow. He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak. But when his voice came back they knew that he was far afield again; for he said, "Come on, fellers, let's set down here under the hill and rest. It's a long ways back." When he had rested he spoke up again, "Say, fellers, what'll we sing?" George tried him with a gospel hymn, but Joe would have none of it, and reviled the song and the singer after the fashion of boys. In a moment he exclaimed: "Here--listen to me. Let's sing this," and his alto voice came out uncertainly and faintly: "Wrap Me up in My Tarpaulin Jacket."

George Kirwin's rough voice joined the song and the mother listened and wept. Other old songs followed, but Joe Nevison, the man, never woke up. It was the little boy full of the poetry and sweetness of a child at play, the boy who had turned the poetry of his boyish soul into a life of adventure unchecked by moral restraint, whose eyes they closed that morning.

And George Kirwin explained to us when he came down to work that afternoon, that maybe the bad part of Joe Nevison's soul had shrivelled away during his sickness, instead of waiting for death. George told us that what made him sad was that a soul in which there was so much that might have been good had been stunted by life and was entering eternity with so little to show for its earthly journey.

When one considers it, one finds that Joe Nevison wasted his life most miserably. There was nothing to his credit to say in his obituary--no good deed to recount and there were many, many bad ones. Moreover, the sorrow and bitterness that he brought into his father's last days, and the shame that he put upon his mother, who lived to see his end, made it impossible for our paper to say of him any kind thing that would not have seemed maudlin.

Yet at Joe Nevison's funeral the old settlers, many of them broken in years and by trouble, gathered at the little wooden church in the hollow below the track, to see the last of him, though certainly not to pay him a tribute of respect. They remembered him as the little boy who had trudged up the hill to school when the old stone schoolhouse was the only stone building in town; they remembered him as he was in the days when he began to turn Marshal Furgeson's hair grey with wild pranks. They remembered the boy's childish virtues, and could feel the remorse that must at times have gnawed his heart. Also these old men and women knew of the devil of unbridled passion that the child's father had put into Joe's blood. And when he started down the broad road they had seen his track beyond him. So as the little gathering of old people filed through the church door and lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the mourners to come out, we heard through the crowd white haired men sighing: "Poor Joe; poor fellow." Can one hope that God's forgiveness will be fuller than that!

XIII

A Pilgrim in the Wilderness

A few years ago we were getting out a special edition of our paper, printed on book-paper, and filled with pictures of the old settlers, and we called it "the historical edition." In preparing the historical edition we had to confer with "Aunt" Martha Merrifield so often that George Kirwin, the foreman, who was kept trotting to her with proof-slips and copy for her to revise, remarked, as he was making up the last form of the troublesome edition, that, if the recording angel ever had a fire in his office, he could make up the record for our town from "Aunt" Martha's scrapbook. In that big, fat, crinkly-leafed book, she has pasted so many wedding notices and birth notices and death notices that one who reads the book wonders how so many people could have been born, married and died in a town of only ten thousand inhabitants. One evening, while the historical edition was growing, a reporter spent the evening with "Aunt" Martha. The talk drifted back to the early days, and "Aunt" Martha mentioned Balderson. To identify him she went to her scrapbook, and as she was turning the pages she said:

"In those days of the early seventies, before the railroad came, when the town awoke in the morning and found a newly arrived covered waggon near a neighbour's house, it always meant that kin had come. If at school that day the children from the house of visitation bragged about their relatives, expatiating upon the power and riches that they left back East, the town knew that the visitors were ordinary kin; but if the children from the afflicted household said little about the visitors and evidently tried to avoid telling just who they were, then the town knew that the strangers were poor kin--probably some of "his folks"; for it was well understood that the women in this town all came from high connections 'back East' in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. Newcomers sometimes wondered how such a galaxy of princesses and duchesses and ladyships happened to marry so far beneath their station.

"But the Dixons had no children, so when a covered waggon drove up to their place in the night, and a fussy, pussy little man with a dingy, stringy beard, appeared in the Dixons' back yard in the morning, looking after the horses hitched to the strange waggon; the town had to wait until the next week's issue of the _Statesman_ to get reliable news about their prospective fellow-citizen." With that "Aunt" Martha opened her scrapbook and read a clipping from the _Statesman_, under the head, "A Valuable Acquisition to Our City." It ran:

"It has been many months since we have been favoured with a call from so cultured and learned a gentleman as the Hon. Andoneran P. Balderson, late of Quito, Hancock County, Iowa, who has finally determined to settle in our midst. Cramped by the irritating conventionalities of an effete civilisation, Colonel Balderson comes among us for that larger freedom and wider horizon which his growing powers demand. He comes with the ripened experience of a jurist, a soldier, and a publicist, and, when transportation facilities have been completed between this and the Missouri River, Judge Balderson will bring to our little city his magnificent law library; but until then he will be found over the Elite Oyster Bay, where he will be glad to welcome clients and others.

"Having participated in the late War of the Rebellion, as captain in Company G of Colonel Jennison's famous and invincible army of the border, Colonel Balderson will give special attention to pension matters. He also will set to work to obtain a complete set of abstracts, and will be glad to give advice on real-estate law and the practice of eminent domain, to which subject he has given deep study. All business done with neatness and despatch.

"Before leaving Iowa, and after considerable pressure, Judge Balderson consented to act as agent for a number of powerful Eastern fire insurance companies, and has in contemplation the establishment of the Southwestern distributing point for the Multum in Parvo Farm Gate Company, of which corporation Colonel Balderson owns the patent right for Kansas. This business, however, he would be willing to dispose of to proper parties. Terms on application.

"The colonel desires us to announce that there will be a meeting of the veterans of the late war at the schoolhouse next Saturday night, for the purpose of organising a society to refresh and perpetuate the sacred memories of that gigantic struggle, and to rally around the old flag, touch shoulders again, and come into a closer fellowship for benevolent, social, and other purposes. The judge, on that occasion, will deliver his famous address on the 'Battle of Look Out Mountain,' in which battle Colonel Balderson participated as a member of an Iowa regiment. Admission free. Silver collection to defray necessary expenses."

Accompanying this article was a slightly worn woodcut of the colonel in his soldier garb, a cap with the top drawn forward, the visor low over his eyes, and a military overcoat thrown gaily back, exposing his shoulder. The picture showed the soldier in profile, with a fierce military moustache and a stubby, runty goatee, meant to strike terror to the civilian heart.