Part 2

To depict one revival season is to give a general outline of all. The itinerant preacher was generally a young man and a bachelor. In his annual returns to the scenes of his emotional endeavors to save the unconverted, he would find that many had backslidden; and the first week was usually spent in getting those who had not “held out faithful” up to the mourners’ bench for re-conversion.

Agnostics, of whom John Ranger was an example, were many, who took a humorous or good-naturedly critical view of the situation. But the preacher’s efforts to arouse the emotional nature, especially of the women, began to bear fruit generally after the first week’s praying, singing, and exhorting; and the excitement, once begun, went on without interruption as long as temporal affairs permitted. The rankest infidel in the district kept open house, in his turn, for the preacher and exhorter; and once, when the schoolhouse was partly destroyed by fire, John Ranger permitted the meetings to be held in his house till the damage was repaired by the tax-payers of the district.

The kindly preacher who most frequently visited the Ranger district as a revivalist would not knowingly have given needless pain to a fly. But, when wrought up to great tension by religious frenzy, he seemed to find delight in holding the frightened penitent spellbound, while he led him to the very brink of perdition, where he would hang him suspended, mentally, as by a hair, over a liquid lake of fire and brimstone, with the blue blazes shooting, like tongues of forked lightning, beneath his writhing body; while overhead, looking on, sat his Heavenly Father, as a benignant and affectionate Deity, pictured to the speaker’s imagination, nevertheless, as waiting with scythe in hand to snip that hair.

“I can’t see a bit of logic in any of it!” exclaimed Jean Ranger, as she and Mary, accompanied by Hal, were returning home one night from such a meeting.

“God’s ways are not our ways,” sighed Mary, as she tripped over the frozen path under the denuded maple-trees, where night owls hooted and wild turkeys slept.

Harry laughed immoderately. “Jean, you’re right,” he exclaimed. “I’m going to get religion myself some day before I die, but I’ve got first to find a Heavenly Father who’s better’n I am. There’s no preacher on top o’ dirt can make me believe that the great Author of all Creation deserves the awful character they’re giving Him at the schoolhouse!”

“Don’t blaspheme, Hal. It’s wicked!” said Mary.

“I’m not blaspheming; I’m defending God!” retorted Hal.

“You used to be a sensible girl, Mame,” said Jean; “and you could then see the ridiculous side of all this excitement just as Hal and I now see it. But you’re in love with the preacher now, and that has turned your head.”

Jean was cold and sleepy and cross; but she did not mean to be unkind, and on reflection added, “Forgive me, sister dear. I was only in fun. I have no right to meddle with your love affairs or your religious feelings, and neither has Hal. S’pose we talk about maple sugar.”

Mary did not reply, but her thoughts went toward heaven in silent, self-satisfying prayer.

The Reverend Thomas Rogers—so he must be designated in these pages, because he yet lives—was the avowed suitor for the hand and heart of Mary Ranger; and the winsome girl, with whose prematurely aroused affections her parents had no patience,—and with reason, for she was but a child,—was the envy of all the older girls of the district, any one of whom, while censuring her for her folly in encouraging the poverty-stricken preacher’s suit, would gladly have found like favor in his eyes, if the opportunity had been given her.

But while romantic maidens were going into rhapsodies over their hero, and many of the dowager mothers echoed their sentiments, most of the unmarried men of the district remained aloof from his persuasions and unmoved by his fiery eloquence. But they took him out “sniping” one off-night in true schoolboy fashion; and while Mary Ranger dreamed of him in the seclusion of her snug chamber, the poor fellow stood half frozen at the end of a gulch, holding a bag to catch the snipes that never came.

“If I were not too poor in worldly goods to pay my way in your father’s train, I’d go to Oregon,” he said, a few nights after the “sniping” episode, as he walked homeward with Mary after coaxing Jean and Hal to keep the little episode a secret from their parents,—a promise they made after due hesitation, but with much sly chuckling, as they munched the red-and-white-striped sugar sticks with which they had been bribed.

III

_MARRYING AND GIVING IN MARRIAGE_

The destinies of the Ranger and Robinson families had been linked together by the double ties of affinity and consanguinity in the first third of the nineteenth century. Their broad and fertile lands, to which they held the original title-deeds direct from the government, bore the signature and seal of Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States; and their children and children’s children, though scattered now in the farthest West, from Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands to the Philippine Archipelago, treasure to this day among their most valued heirlooms the historic parchments. For these were signed by Old Hickory when the original West was bounded on its outermost verge by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and when the new West, though discovered in the infancy of the century by Lewis and Clark (aided by Sacajawea, their one woman ally and pathfinder), was to the average American citizen an unknown country, quite as obscure to his understanding as was the Dark Continent of Africa in the days antedating Sir Samuel Baker, Oom Paul, and Cecil Rhodes.

The elder Rangers, who claimed Knickerbocker blood, and the Robinsons, who boasted of Scotch ancestry, though living in adjoining counties in Kentucky in their earlier years, had never met until, as if by accident,—if accident it might be called through which there seems to have been an original, interwoven design,—the fates of the two families became interlinked through their settlement upon adjoining lands, situated some fifty miles south of old Fort Dearborn, in the days when Chicago was a mosquito-beleaguered swamp, and Portland, Oregon, an unbroken forest of pointed firs.

There was a double wedding on the memorable day when John Ranger, Junior, and pretty Annie Robinson, the belle of Pleasant Prairie, linked their destinies together in marriage; and when, without previous notice to the assembled multitude or any other parties but their parents, the preacher, and the necessary legal authorities, Elijah Robinson and Mary Ranger took their allotted places beside their brother and sister, as candidates for matrimony, the festivities were doubled in interest and rejoicing.

“It seems but yesterday since our bonnie bairns were babes in arms,” said the elder Mrs. Robinson, as she advanced with Mrs. Ranger _mère_ to give a tearful greeting to each newly wedded pair. And there was scarcely a dry eye in the assembled multitude when the mother’s voice arose in a shrill treble as she sang, in the ears of the startled listeners, from an old Scottish ballad the words,—

“An’ I can scarce believe it true, So late thy life began, The playful bairn I fondled then Stands by me now, a man!”

Her voice, which at first was as clear as the tones of a silver bell, quavered at the close of the first stanza and then ceased altogether. But by this time old Mrs. Ranger had caught the spirit of the ballad, and though her voice was husky, she cleared her throat and added, in a low contralto, the impressive lines, paraphrased somewhat to suit the occasion,—

“Oh, fondly cherish her, dearie; She is sae young and fair! She hasna known a single cloud, Nor felt a single care. And if a cauld world’s storms should come, Thy way to overcast, Oh, ever stan’—thou art a man— Between her an’ the blast!”

At the close of this stanza, Mrs. Ranger’s voice broke also; and the good circuit rider, parson of many a scattered flock, who had pronounced the double ceremony, caught the tune and, in a mellow barytone that rose upon the air like an inspired benediction, added most impressively another stanza:

“An’ may the God who reigns above An’ sees ye a’ the while, Look down upon your plighted troth An’ bless ye wi’ His smile.”[1]

“It’s high time there was a little change o’ sentiment in all this!” cried a bachelor uncle, whose eyes were suspiciously red notwithstanding his affected gayety. “I move that we march in a solid phalanx on the victuals!”

The primitive cabin homes of the borderers of no Western settlement were large enough to hold the crowds that were invariably bidden to a neighborhood merrymaking. The ceremonies of this occasion, including a most sumptuous feast, were held on the sloping green beneath an overtopping elm, which, rising high above its fellows, made a noted landmark for a circumference of many miles.

People who live apart from markets, in fertile regions where the very forests drop richness, subsist literally on the fat of the land. Having no sale for their surplus products, they feast upon them in the most prodigal way. Although through gormandizing they beget malaria, not to say dyspepsia and rheumatic ails, they boast of “living well”; and the sympathy they bestow upon the city denizen who in his wanderings sometimes feasts at their hospitable boards, and praises without stint their prodigal display of viands, is often more sincere than wise.

The lands of the early settlers, with whom these chronicles have to deal, had been surrounded, as soon as possible after occupancy, with substantial rail fences, laid in zigzag fashion along dividing lines, marking the boundaries between neighbors who lived at peace with each other and with all the world. These fences, built to a sufficient height to discourage all attempts at trespass by man or beast, were securely staked at the corners, and weighted with heavy top rails, or “riders,” so stanchly placed that many miles of such enclosures remain to this day, long surviving the brawny hands that felled the trees and split the rails. In their mute eloquence they reveal the lasting qualities of the hardwood timber that abounded in the many and beautiful groves which flourished in the prairie States in the early part of the nineteenth century, when Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri comprised all that was generally known as the West.

Much of the primitive glory of these diversified landscapes departed long ago with the trees. The “Hook-and-Eye Dutch,” as the thrifty followers of ancient Ohm are called by their American neighbors (with whom they do not assimilate), are rapidly replacing the old-time maple and black walnut fences with the modern barbed-wire horror; they are selling off the historical rails, stakes and riders and all, to the equally thrifty and not a whit more sentimental timber-dealers of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids, to be manufactured into high-grade lumber, which is destined to find lodgment as costly furniture in the palatial homes, gilded churches, great club-houses, and mammoth modern hostelries that abound on the shores of Lake Michigan, Massachusetts Bay, Manhattan Island, and Long Island Sound. But no vandalism yet invented by man can wholly despoil the rolling lands of the middle West of their beauty, nor rob Mother Nature of her power to rehabilitate them with the living green of cultivated loveliness.

Original settlers of the border-lands had little time and less opportunity for the observation of the beautiful in art or nature. Their lives were spent in toil, which blunted many of the finer sensibilities of a more leisurely existence. The hardy huntsman who spent his only hours of relaxation in chasing the wild game, and the weary mother who scarcely ever left her wheel or loom and shuttle by the light of day, except to bake her brain before a great open fire while preparing food, or to nurse to sleep the future lawmakers of a coming world-round republic, were alike too busy to ponder deeply the far-reaching possibilities of the lives they led.

Such men of renown as Lincoln, Douglas, Baker, Grant, Logan, and Oglesby were evolved from environments similar to these, as were also the numerous adventurous borderers not known to fame (many of whom are yet living) who crossed the continent with ox teams, and whose patient and enduring wives nursed the future statesmen of a coming West in fear and trembling, as they protected their camps from the depredations of the wily Indian or the frenzy of the desert’s storms.

Rail-making in the middle West was long a diversion and an art. The destruction of the hardwood timber, which if spared till to-day would be almost priceless, could not have been prevented, even if this commercial fact had been foreseen. The urgent need of fuel, shelter, bridges, public buildings, and fences allowed no consideration for future values to intervene and save the trees.

In times of a temporary lull in a season’s activities, when, for a wonder, there were days together that the stroke of the woodman’s ax was not heard and the music of the cross-cut saw had ceased, the settler would take advantage of the interim to draw a bead with unerring aim upon the eye of a squirrel in a treetop, or bring down a wild turkey from its covert in the lower branches; or, if favored by a fall of virgin snow, it would be his delight to track the wild deer, and drag it home as a trophy of his marksmanship,—an earnest of the feast in which all his neighbors were invited to partake.

Then, too, there were the merrymakings of the border. What modern banquet can equal the festive board at which a genial hostess, in a homespun cotton or linsey-woolsey gown, presided over her own stuffed turkey, huge corn-pone, and wild paw-paw preserves? What array of glittering china, gleaming cut-glass, or burnished silver, can give the jaded appetite of the _blasé_ reveller of to-day the enjoyment of a home-set table, laden with the best and sweetest “salt-rising” bread spread thick with golden butter, fresh from the old-fashioned churn? The freshest of meats and fish regularly graced the well-laden board, in localities where the modern _chef_ was unknown, where ice-cream was unheard of, and terrapin sauce and lobster salad found no place. House-raisings, log-rollings, barn-raisings, quilting bees, weddings, christenings, and even funerals, were times of feasting, though these last were divested of the gayety, but not of the gossip, that at other times abounded; and the sympathetic aid of an entire neighborhood was always voluntarily extended to any house of mourning. There were few if any wage-earners, the accommodating method of exchanging work among neighbors being generally in vogue.

Such, in brief, were the daily customs of the early settlers of the middle West, whose children wandered still farther westward in the forties and fifties, carrying with them the habits in which they had been reared to the distant Territory afterwards known as the “Whole of Oregon,” which originally comprised the great Northwest Territory, where now flourish massive blocks of mighty States.

* * * * *

Prior to the time of the departure of the subjects of these chronicles for the goal of John Ranger’s ambition, but one unusual occurrence had marred the lives and prosperity of the rising generation of Rangers and Robinsons. To the progenitors of the two families the mutations of time had brought problems serious and difficult, not the least of which was the infirmity of advancing years. This they had made doubly annoying through having assigned to their children, when they themselves needed it most, everything of value which they had struggled to accumulate during their years of vigorous effort to raise and educate their families.

In the two households under review, all dependent upon the energies and bounty of the second generation of Rangers and Robinsons, there were besides the great-grandmother (a universal favorite) two sexagenarian bachelor uncles and two elderly spinsters, the latter remote cousins of uncertain age, uncertain health, and still more uncertain temper, who had long outlived their usefulness, after having missed, in their young and vigorous years, the duties and responsibilities that accompany the founding of families and homes of their own. It was little wonder that drones like these were out of place in the overcrowded households of their more provident kinspeople, to whom the modern “Home of the Friendless” was unknown. What plan to pursue in making necessary provision for these outside incumbents, even John Ranger, the optimistic leader of the related hosts, could not conjecture.

“We’ve fixed it,—Mame and I,” said Jean, one evening, after an anxious discussion of the question had been carried on with some warmth between the two family heads, in which no conclusion had been reached except a flat refusal on the part of Elijah Robinson to quadruple the quota of dependants in his own household.

“And how have you fixed it?” asked her father, who often called Jean his “Heart’s Delight.”

“Our bachelor uncles and cousins are just rusting out with irresponsibility!” she cried with characteristic Ranger vehemence. “They ought to have a home of their own and be compelled to take care of it. There’s that house and garden where you board and lodge the mill-hands. Why not give ’em that and let ’em keep boarders? The boarders, the four acres of ground, and the cow and garden ought to keep them in modest comfort. This would make them free and independent, as everybody ought to be.”

“But the boarding-house belongs with the farm. I’ve sold it to your uncle.”

“Then let Uncle Lije lease or sell it to them, share and share alike.”

“What is it worth?” asked Mary.

“Only about three hundred dollars, the way property sells now,” said her uncle.

“Then let ’em pay you rent. The place ought to support them and pay interest and taxes.”

“Yes,” cried Mary; “the old bachelor contingent, that worry you all so much because you keep ’em dependent on your bounty, can take care of themselves for twenty years to come, if you’ll only let ’em.”

“The proposition is worth considering, certainly,” said their father, smiling admiringly upon his daughters.

“And we’ll consider it, too,” said the uncle. “That much is settled.”

IV

_OLD BLOOD AND NEW_

“I can’t see why old folks like us will persist in living after we’ve outgrown our usefulness,” exclaimed Grandfather Ranger, one sloppy March evening, as he entered the little kitchen and placed a pail of foaming milk upon the clean white table. The severely cold weather had given way to a springtime thaw; but a wet snow had begun falling at sundown, and a soft, muddy liquid made dirty pools wherever his feet pressed the polished floor.

“You’re right, father; we’ve lived long enough,” sighed the feeble mother of many children, following her husband’s footprints with mop and broom.

“If you and John think you’ve lived long enough, what do you think of me?” cried the great-grandmother, who had passed her fourscore years and ten, but who still amply supported herself (if only she and the rest of the family had thought so) as she sat from early morning till late at night in her corner, knitting, always knitting.

“Never mind, grannie,” said her son, swallowing a lump that rose unbidden in his throat. “You’ve as good a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as any fellow that ever put his name to a Declaration of Independence! There’ll be room for you in the cosiest corner of this little house as long as there’s a corner for anybody. Don’t worry.”

“But this state of things isn’t just or fair!” exclaimed the wife, folding her last bit of mending and dropping back into her chair. “It seems to me that we, as parents, deserve a better fate in our old days than any set of bachelor hangers-on on earth, who’ve never had anybody but themselves to provide for. If Joseph would only come back, or the good Lord would let us know his fate, I could endure the rest.”

“There, there, mother! Not another word. Haven’t I forbidden the mention of his name?”

“But he was our darling, father. I can’t dismiss him from my thoughts as you say you can.”

“We must keep the grandchildren in ignorance of his existence, wife. It’s bad enough in all conscience for the stain of his misguided life to rest on older heads. We must forget our unfortunate son.”

“I can never forget my bonnie boy,—not even to obey you, father!”

The back door, which had been unintentionally left ajar, flew open, and Jean, who had for the first time in her life heard a word of complaint from her grandparents, or a word from them concerning her mysterious Uncle Joe, burst suddenly into the room and knelt at the feet of her grandmother, her whole frame convulsed with sobs.

“Forgive us, darlings, do!” she cried as soon as she could control her voice to speak. “You’ve borne so much sorrow, and we never knew it! We never meant to be thoughtless or unkind, but I see now how ungrateful we have been. We must have hurt your feelings often.”

“Don’t cry, Jean,” and the thin hand of the grandmother stroked the girl’s bright hair. “We don’t often repine at our lot. I am sorry you overheard a word.”

“But I am not sorry a single bit, grandma. We children have been thoughtless and impudent. I can see it all now. We didn’t ever mean to complain, though, about you, or grandpa, or you either, grannie dear. We only meant to draw the line at bachelor great-uncles and meddlesome second and third cousins, who ought to have provided themselves in their youth with homes of their own, as our parents did.”

“Do you think they can help themselves hereafter, Jean?”

“Why, of course! The feeling of self-dependence will make ’em young and strong again,—though they don’t deserve good treatment, for they ought to have had homes and families of their own in their youth, as you did.”

“It’s too late to lodge a complaint of that kind against them now, Jean,” said the grandmother, with a smile.

“Did you overhear all we were talking about?” asked the grandfather, his head bowed upon his cane.

“I am afraid I did, grandpa. I was cleaning the slush from my shoes, and I couldn’t help overhearing, though I hate eavesdroppers, on general principles. They never hear any good of themselves. But, say, grandpa, what about our Uncle Joe, whom I heard you denounce so bitterly? You haven’t said _I_ mustn’t speak his name, you know.”

“Don’t talk about him, child, to us or anybody else. He’s an outlaw. Dismiss him from your thoughts, just as I have.”

“Your uncle may not be living now, Jean; if he is alive, I hope he’ll find a better friend than his father,” exclaimed the great-grandmother, speaking in a tone of reproach that surprised none more than herself.

“Tell me all about it, grand-daddie darling! Do! I know there’s a sad secret somewhere in the family. Something unusual must have happened a long time ago to bring us all under the ban of poverty. I have heard hints of it now and then all my life; and now I must hear the whole story. The schoolmaster will tell me if you don’t.”

“No, no, Jean,” exclaimed her grandfather, anxiously. “Don’t speak of family affairs outside. It is never seemly.”