McClure's Magazine/Volume 25/Number 2/The Soul Problem of Marthy Thomas

BY

MRS. WILSON WOODROW

T was spring in the mountains when Seth Thomas, after a winter's struggle with miner's consumption, yielded to his stronger adversary and died. To his widow he left what was regarded in Zenith as a comfortable fortune, for Thomas had been one who had enjoyed a bout with the earth for its fruits, and what he gained he clutched tight from the grasp of his seeking fellows.

The estate then, comprised a half-interest in the Zenobia, a “prospect” with an excellent showing on Eureka mountain; a patch of land down in the valley, which was devoted to melon culture; and three well-rented houses on Sunshine Avenue, the poetic name of the dusty mountain road which served as the one street of the straggling village. This property was left in trust for the widow and children in the hands of Dan Mayhew, the village lawyer and notary public; but a life insurance of two thousand dollars was bequeathed exclusively to Mrs. Thomas to be used as she saw fit.

This latter served as the conveniently shifting foundation of many a towering castle in Spain; for no sooner had the weight of Thomas's personality been lifted, than his wife's essentially romantic and emotional nature knew a period of bloom and efflorescence all the more exotic because so long repressed. The first few days after his death she passed in a daze, her mind benumbed; but the sordidly spectacular event of the funeral roused her to a sense of the possibilities of the situation. She felt the quick response of her sensuous temperament to the rows of Red Men marching unevenly along the dusty road, to the discordant strains of the funeral march from “Saul,” and then slowly filing into the unpainted, rickety, little frame church. She thrilled at the importance of her own position as she, too, entered, shrouded in somber weeds and supported on either side by a sunburnt brother in unaccustomed black, who had journeyed from a neighboring camp for the occasion.

Afterward followed days when the consolatory offices of friends waxed and then waned, and she declined from a tragedy to a commonplace, and the prosaic world asserted its claims.

But Nature offers eternal compensation for Life's affronts. Almost in a single night, the bare, bleak mountains rippled with the pink and blue of countless pentstemon, and the silvery green of the sage bushes. The magpies and blue-jays fluttered through the pine trees, the chipmunks whisked over the rocks, and Mrs. Thomas's heart rose up and answered the summons of the spring.

Thomas had been a dour creature, with a highly cultivated gift of sarcasm, and an uncanny way of divining her hidden impulses and dragging them to the merciless light of ridicule, thus skilfully circumventing any possible expression of them; so, day by day, as she became more accustomed to the absence of this cog upon her actions, her imagination fluttered its newly unbound wings, and ventured in wider and wider circles.

“I'm thinkin' of doin' up the parlor,” she remarked tentatively one day in a session of her intimate friends, anxiously scanning their faces for signs of approval.

“Gosh A'mighty!” murmured Mrs. Nitschkan, with a portentous yawn. “I wouldn't waste no money that way. Get yourself a cart and horse, pile the kids in an' jant' round havin' a good time. You'd better believe I would. I'd bake up a mess of doughnuts and meat-turnovers, and the devil could go a courtin' for all of me. I'd have a picnic every day in the year.”

“Aw, shut up, Nitschkan,” said Mrs. Evans, trim as a neat, brown wren “Don't be putting such ideas into Mis' Thomas's head. Every woman don't want to go gypsyin' like you. Some of us has got a little respectability and domestication. You go ahead, Mis' Thomas, an' get your parlor fixed up. Have some style about you; an' fer the land's sake, whitewash the kitchen. It's scaling something fierce.”

“You'd get more fun out of a horse and cart,” asserted Mrs. Nitschkan, a teasing gleam in her small, bright blue eyes.

'Maybe you would,” returned Mrs. Evans, with an emphasis upon the pronoun, “but it wouldn't make no show when folks come to the house. You know everybody'll want to know what you done with Thomas's insurance,” speaking authoritatively to Mrs. Thomas, “and you know yourself it'll look real frivolous to show 'em a horse an' cart, an' the house needin' paint, an' the nap all off the plush in the parlor set; an' the pillow-shams on the parlor bed only scalloped, not a shred of lace on 'em. It wouldn't look right honest, Mis' Thomas, when Thomas done so well by you an' left you all that he did.”

“Dat's so,” commented Mrs. Landvetter, refilling her coffee cup, and then sinking back like a great feather pillow into her rocking-chair.

“I'll tell you what,” said Mrs. Nitschkan, rising to her feet and buttoning her man's coat about her burly figure, “I'll be honest, woman dear, and tell the truth. I never had no use fer Thomas in life. I can see him yet lookin' at me with that black, twisted smile of his an' sayin' things that you couldn't a' helped swattin' him for if he'd had his lights. That hole where his lungs ought to been was all that saved him from me time and again; but I do say, and I'll say it loud enough for every one to hear, that the way he's left you, woman dear, is an example to every man in this camp. Maybe you think I ain't rubbed it into Jack.”

She but voiced the universal feminine sentiment in Zenith. There had been no hesitation, no slack work in the effort to “rub it in” to every separate Jack.

Secure, then, in the approbation of her friends, who were capable of displaying well-exercised critical judgment and marked executive ability when dealing with the affairs of others, Mrs. Thomas joyously absorbed herself in cleaning and refurnishing the house; but when the pillow-shams on the thick, parlor bed were properly bordered and inserted with lace, the parlor set was glaring with red plush and the kitchen fresh with whitewash and sticky with varnish—when any lingering obligation to Thomas was fully liquidated by the planting of a headstone at one end of his grave and a rose-bush at the other, then, with a half-guilty sense of finality, she resolutely closed the portal of the past, and fingered with fascinated interest and curiosity the key which was to open the door of the future.

At first, her long hobbled mind merely wandered within the circumscribed radius of the present; but when, at last, it dawned upon her that she was free to follow the dictates of her whims, then a sense of ennui and discouragement at the narrow limits of her environment overcame her. There was no more setting of her house in order to be done; her children were beyond the care of babyhood, and had not arrived at the age when maternal ambition would brood over them.

While in this frame of mind, she read in the Mt. Tabor Review, a weekly paper which disseminated the news of the entire county, the fact that Professor Alexis Hartshorn, the distinguished astrologer, palmist, crystal gazer, and psychic reader, was located at Mt. Tabor for a few weeks, and could be consulted at his rooms in Lamont Street from 9 until 9  each day. His picture accompanied the advertisement—a dark, poetic face, with a touch of Mephistophelian cynicism, eternally alluring to the feminine imagination.

Mrs. Thomas gazed long and admiringly at the smudgy half-tone, read and re-read the advertisement, and then cutting it out with her scissors placed it thoughtfully between the leaves of the family Bible, with as much an expression of decision on her face as it was capable of assuming.

The next morning she hired from the village blacksmith shop, which also did duty as the village livery stable, the sole vehicle it had to rent—a rattling buck-board, with but one uncertain seat. This wagon was drawn by an old and jaded white horse, whose reluctant head she turned in the direction of Mt. Tabor and, slapping the lines on his back, drove slowly off with a lambent excitement and fear in her wide, appealing eyes.

From that day Mrs. Thomas was another woman, abstracted, absorbed, remote. Her friends commented on her withdrawal from the common interest; but failed to convince themselves with an adequate explanation of the alteration.

“It may be grief, or it may be comin' into property; but Thomas's takin' off has certainly changed her,” remarked Mrs. Evans as the group of intimates sat sewing one May afternoon in Mrs. Nitschkan's bare and rather disorderly cabin.

“I guess she's grieved more as we give her credit for,” replied Mrs. Landvetter ruminatively. “Vell, you can't neffer tell.”

“Gosh A'mighty!” exclaimed Mrs. Nitschkan, with robust contempt. “Grievin'! Well, if I'd a bin in her shoes, I'd be out kickin' up my heels in pastur' this minute. Thomas! My Lord! You know, girls, what a raspin' tongue he had and how his pockets was jus' lined with glue when it come to pullin' any money out of 'em. Lord! I'd a”

But Mrs. Nitschkan's declaration of independence was interrupted by a shrill exclamation from Mrs. Evans who had half risen from her seat by the window and, holding aside the straight, white muslin curtain, was peering out at what, judging by the expression of her face, must have been some strange and unwonted spectacle. “Girls,” in a queer, strained voice, “is my eyes gone bad or my head? For Heaven's sake, look at this!”

Along the mountain road, its head pointed to the distant peaks, ambled the dejected white horse; behind it rattled the wagon with its swaying wheels, and high upon the uncertain seat were perched Mrs. Thomas and a man—the unidealized and coarsened reality of Professor Alexis Hartshorn. Mrs. Thomas's new crepe veil, hitherto only worn on Sunday, floated behind her, and above her best black gown her pink-and-white face smiled with a tremulous and April-like joy. She appeared oblivious to the fact that behind the wagon trotted a tow-headed child of about six years, tears raining down its dirty little cheeks, while from its mouth burst a series of ear-piercing wails, ““Ma-ma-I-wa'-a' go-too-o-o.” Further back in the road a ragged urchin, a year or two older, indifferent to his parent's pleasuring, scooped up handfulls of the deep, yellow dust and threw it high in the air to descend again upon his head in a sifting cloud.

As the pair vanished in the same golden haze, the women who had crowded to the window with panting ejaculations of surprise and consternation, turned away and sank weakly into their seats.

“Vell, my goodness cracious!” sighed Mrs. Landvetter, mechanically seizing the coffee pot. “Who vas dat? One of dem brudders of hern? Hein?”

“H-m-m,” sniffed Mrs. Evans significantly. “She was wearing her best veil and her Sunday dress—in this dust, too. Does that look like brothers? Not much. Pass me the tea-pot, Nitschkan. I could keel right over.”

“Vell, who you spos'n it vas?”

“How should I know,” replied Mrs. Evans tartly. “I only know from the way she's got up an' the way she looks that she ain't entertainin' no relations. An' this soon, too. I don't think it looks real nice.”

“Ho, ho!” chorused Mrs. Nitschkan, “Marthy's got a beau. Well, she surely ain't lost any time.”

“And dose kids, too,” sighed Mrs. Landvetter. “Vasn't dey dirty now?”

“They ain't no more neglected than the rose-bush she planted at Thomas's grave,” remarked Mrs. Evans. “Paid two fifty for it, stuck it in the earth, and then never went back to give it a drop of water.”

“I d'know if she ever did get the stones put in his grave. For all she knows the kiotes may have scratched him up an' et him,” said Mrs. Nitschkan, with gloomy relish.

“Like as not,” answered Mrs. Evans abstractedly; but her brow had cleared. “I tell you what, girls, I think some one had ought to talk to Marthy Thomas.”

“Some one seems to be tryin' to this afternoon,” chuckled Mrs. Nitschkan. 'An' to-night, Dan Mayhew an' ol' man McKenzie'll be showin' up.”

“Ol man McKenzie's wrong in his head,” said Mrs. Evans contemptuously, “and Dan Mayhew 'tends to her business. He wouldn't look at Marthy Thomas anyway when he could have his pick of all the girls in the county. Still, it don't look right for her to be cavortin' 'round this soon, and I think the Missioner is the one to speak to her. Maybe this is one of them soul problems she preached about last Sunday.”

“Say, wasn't she great!” exclaimed Mrs. Nitschkan enthusiastically, slapping her knee. “Her eyes was rolled up an' her face kind of shone. I says to her comin' out, I says, 'Missioner, you minded me this morning of the serpent that was lifted up in the wilderness. I bet he didn't look no nicer than you.'”

Almost prophetic seemed their words, for not three days later Mrs. Evans might have been seen hurrying up the mountain path to the Missionary's cabin, her whole bearing expressing an errand of importance.

Miss Benson had chosen to live in a tiny cabin about a quarter of a mile above the village on the mountain side, with a ledge of protecting rock above her roof. This spring morning she sat in her doorway in the dancing light and shade of the quivering aspens which grew thickly about the cabin. Several chipmunks, a magpie, and a blue jay or so fed amicably from a bowl of cooked oatmeal without the door; but Frances Benson's gaze was not on them, nor on the open Bible on her knee. It was fixed on the etherial [sic], blue deeps above the tree tops. Her lips moved slightly and in her eyes were the exalted dreams, the unseeing rapture of the mystic who has bridged time and space, joy and sorrow, with prayer.

As Mrs. Evans approached, the Missionary's glance dropped from the skies and looked through and beyond that feminine epitome of practicality.

“It is all love and beauty, Mrs. Evans, the whole universe.” Her finger traced the lines in the Bible and her voice thrilled. “If we love not our brother whom we have seen, how shall we love God whom we have not seen.”

Mrs. Evans looked at her with protecting pride and admiration. “That's all right, Miss Benson; but we got to get away from God to man this morning. Marthy Thomas has got a soul problem, an' 'course, she don't know what to do with it no more'n a kitten. She sent Vi'let and Clemency over with a note a while back, an' I just loped on to find you.” She held out a crumpled bit of paper, whereon was scrawled in painful characters:

Miss Benson smoothed it out and read it. “Poor Mrs. Thomas!” she exclaimed, her eyes becoming practical the moment there was work for her hands to do. She picked up her hat and, leaving the door open for the jays and chipmunks to enter at will, she and Mrs. Evans set out for the newly-painted Thomas residence. There in the cool, white kitchen Mrs. Landvetter and Mrs. Nitschkan were busying themselves preparing tea and coffee, while Mrs. Thomas sat beside a table, limp and dejected. There was a droop to her mouth like a child's, and her eyes slowly filled and brimmed over with tears which she occasionally wiped away with a wet handkerchief rolled into a tight ball.

“Well, here we are,” said Mrs. Evans with loud cheerfulness as she and Miss Benson entered. “Now, one of you girls pour us out a cup apiece, an' Mis' Thomas, you jes' begin at the beginning an' tell Missioner all about it. She'll get you out of any scrape you're in, won't you, Missioner?”

“I'll try,” said Miss Benson kindly.

Mrs. Thomas gulped convulsively once or twice, and rolled and unrolled her handkerchief. “It's about the Perfessor,” she wailed. “At first he was awful nice. He come to see me often an' he certainly talked lovely. He quoted poetry an' everything like Thomas never did, even before we was married, an' then he got to askin' me how I was fixed, an' I told him. He said he had to know before he could foretell the futur' for me, an' then he was nicer than ever. He come right out an' said he loved me so he couldn't sleep at nights for thinkin' of me.”

Upon the faces of her listening friends dawned that faintly astonished, sarcastic expression which women assume on hearing that a man is actually blinded by the fascinations of another of their sex. Having no illusions concerning each other, they cannot but regard with contempt this pitiable evidence of masculine dementia.

The practical, shrewd kindliness had faded from the Missionary's eyes, leaving them puzzled and a little impatient. There occurred to her no remedy in the whole pharmacopœia of a soul doctor which can minister to a woman's infatuation.

After listening thus far to Mrs. Thomas's tale, despite herself, the spirit of warm helpfulness with which she had sought one in trouble had congealed to something perfunctory and professional, while her impatience was becoming vital. As for Mrs. Thomas, she was about to acquire the bitter knowledge that while in sickness or in sorrow women turn instinctively to one another, knowing that they will thus find the truest comfort, the completest understanding of their needs; in love, they must fly to the wilderness, for they stand alone, aloof, alien to feminine sympathy.

“He said,” continued Mrs. Thomas with tearful pride, “that he couldn't even eat 'less he was with me; but he did make up for it then. They hasn't been an evening that he's et with me that I haven't been cookin' all day for him, an' not enough left to feed the chickens.”

“H-m-m, I bet you got to keep cookin' between him, an' that half-witted ol' man McKenzie, an' Dan Mayhew. It seems to me they keep the path to your gate warm,” cried Mrs. Nitschkan rollickingly.

A faint, pink flush crept up Mrs. Thomas's face. “Mr. McKenzie ain't neither half-witted,” she said stoutly, “an' as for Dan Mayhew, he comes to talk business.”

“How much does he know of this here Hartshorn?” asked Mrs. Evans pointedly.

“He don't know nothin',” returned Mrs. Thomas reluctantly.

The women cast meaning glances at one another over their cups.

“Vell, vy don' you go to him an' get him to shoo dis feller off, if you vants to get rid of him?” asked Mrs. Landvetter, with Teuton common-sense.

“I d'know if I do want to get rid of him,” murmured Mrs. Thomas forlornly. “He can be awful nice, an' our courtship was jus' like a book, until I kind o' hesitated about the money. Then he come every day, an' he said it made him feel real impatient to see me actin' like I didn't trust him. It's the insurance money, you know. He says he wouldn't lay a finger on a penny of it; but he's got to save me from an awful fate he sees hangin' over me. He says he sees it in the stars an' in the crystal, an' it's wrote on the cards too plain not to believe. It's something sudden, like bein' struck by lightning, if I don't get that money out of my hands before the third of June. He says the only way he sees to save me is to give him the money and not to ask no questions about it for six months.

“He's awful cross with me because I d'know what to do, an' he comes over every day most, an' sets there in that chair you're in, Mis' Evans, an' glares at me with them gimlet eyes until I'm so scared I most die. An',” at this point Mrs. Thomas's sobs were unrestrained, “he says that this must be kept so awful secret, for if he ever hears of me tellin' a living soul, he'll work some kind of a conjurin' game on me, an' publish the letters I wrote him in the Mt. Tabor Review.”

“Well, what the Devil do you care?” asked Mrs. Nitschkan.

Mrs. Thomas flamed like a peony, and caught her breath once or twice before she answered. “They're so terrible soft,” she said at last.

The missionary gave a quick expression of impatience. “Oh, Mrs. Thomas!” she exclaimed. “How could you do anything so foolish? How did you happen to go to this man in the first place?”

“There wasn't nothin' doin' here,” said Mrs. Thomas simply. “Dan Mayhew an' ol' man McKenzie wasn't droppin' in then. Oh,” she wailed, with something like despair in her voice, “I thought I was goin' to like bein' a widow; but it's terrible lonesome. When I first got free, I thought I was goin' to have the time of my life; but 'tain't so much fun as I thought it was goin' to be not to have Thomas jawin' me all day long.”

“Vell, you can't neffer tell,” remarked Mrs. Landvetter in surprised consternation at these sentiments, her lace needles poised in air.

It was noticeable during the interview with the woman she had come to succor that Miss Benson's eyes had grown constantly harder, and now something like contempt shadowed them. Her will, her executive ability, her skill, born of intuition and much practice in disentangling what she called soul problems, were powerless when opposed to this soft, immovable, wavering force which she now encountered. To the woman floundering in the bog of mistakes, mud-stained, worn with the struggle, she stretched forth her loving hands; but for one so elemental, so naïvely expressing her natural impulses as Mrs. Thomas, she had neither sympathy nor comprehension.

The inherent narrowness of the feminine nature, its unswerving devotion to the traditional dogmas of womanliness, now expressed itself in every line of her face and figure.

“I don't think any woman has any call to talk as you are doing,” she said with grave reproof.

Mrs. Thomas exhibited the obstinacy of the meek. “I'd like to know why not,” she cried defiantly. “I'd like to know what right you got to judge me, Miss Benson. You don't know the lonesomeness of bein' a widow.”

“Do you mean to say you are contemplating a second marriage not two months after your husband's death?” asked the Missionary aghast.

But Mrs. Thomas had endured to the limit. “I don't care,” in childish wrath. “You'd be a contemplatin' a second or a third, or any old kind if you knew the lonesomeness of bein' a widow. An' I bet if you was to tell the truth,” shrilly and 'mid streaming tears, “you'd want somebody to love you just the same as I do.”

The scarlet crept up the Missionary's neck; but compressing her lips she merely looked icily and remotely over the head of this possessor of a soul problem beyond her ken.

“Mrs. Thomas,” she said curtly, “your behavior and your sentiments make me ashamed of my sex.”

“I don't care,” reiterated Mrs. Thomas. “I don't care. It's your sex an' my sex that's talkin'. There ain't no woman that don't want a man to love her.” She put her head down on the table and sobbed afresh.

The women exchanged scornful and shocked glances over her head. “I guess we'd best leave you to yourself, Marthy Thomas,” said Mrs. Evans, rising. “If you're in such a frame of mind that you've got to sass the Missioner, you'll be throwin' things at the rest of us. An' Thomas hardly cold in his grave yet,” she exclaimed virtuously as she closed the door behind the little party of visitors. “Ain't she the limit? Lord save me from an undecided slob that don't know her own mind.”

“But she's certainly in the devil of a scrape,” remarked Mrs. Nitschkan good-naturedly. “Say the word, girls,” rolling up her sleeves and feeling tentatively her swelling muscles, “and I'll go over to Tabor an' do up the Perfessor.”

“That would never do, Nitschkan,” replied Mrs. Evans hastily. “What we got to do is to work on this end of the line.”

The Missionary who had walked silently down the little path leading to the paling gate, now spoke.

“I do not think it is worth while trying to do anything more with Mrs. Thomas. She is completely under that man's influence. As for him,” she added grimly, “a good, strong man should deal with him.”

“That is so,” responded Mrs. Evans, “but I don't know one that's got any call to mix in, unless it's Dan Mayhew. He's her trustee an' he might do something with her.”

“Dan's an awful sensible man,” said Mrs. Landvetter gloomily. “You go an' tell him de way she carry on and he won't be trustee no more. Den how she goin' to get along?”

“Goodness only knows,” answered Mrs. Evans desperately. “Still, we can't stop to think about that. What we got to do is to try as hard as we can to get her out of this muss. Ain't that so, Miss Benson?”

“I think so,” replied the Missionary in a depressed tone.

“She showed me a letter from him last night, women dear,” chuckled the irrepressible Nitschkan, “in which he said that she wasn't to hesitate no longer as the danger was at hand, an' he called her his blue-eyed beauty. A big ox like her, with a front tooth gone!”

“My Lord!” sighed Mrs. Evans. “Who'd have any patience? Well, girls, I heard Sile say that Dan was workin' on his prospect, so it's no use stoppin' at his law office. Up we'll have to go.”

It was something of a climb, up through a trail bordered with the pink and blue pentstemon all abloom in the sparkling, balsamic June air; but these were hardy mountain women, and it was not long before they reached the prospect where Dan Mayhew was hard at work with pick and shovel in a hole about twenty feet deep.

“Hello, Dan,” called the breezy voice of Mrs. Nitschkan as the women peered over the rim of his embryo mine.

“Hello, girls,” he answered heartily, throwing down his tools and pushing his hat further back on his head, the better to see his visitors. “Come up to call on me? What's in the wind now? Want a divorce apiece? Wait till I climb up since I ain't got electric elevators running yet. I can entertain you better up there. What do you think o' them for samples?” He threw some bits of quartz into Mrs. Landvetter's lap. “Looks like “The Marthy' was goin' to have a futur', don't it?”

He was a big, broad-shouldered fellow as he stood among his callers who sat about the yawning hole on convenient boulders. One of the strong men of this earth—a fitting type to stand erect in the stern and savage mountains, and to wrest from them the secret of their hidden treasures.

“Fine,” said Mrs Landvetter, leisurely examining the specimens. “Great! Dere's a streak of peacock.”

“Le's see.” Mrs. Evans scanned the bits of rock professionally. “Good, Dan, if the streak don't pinch. I'm kind o' 'fraid you've struck a pocket though.”

“Oh, we all know Mrs. Evans knows more about mining than Sile,” commented Mayhew good naturedly. “Now he thinks 'The Marthy's 'goin' to be a great mine. Sorry I have no seats but boulders to offer you ladies. When 'The Marthy' pans out you shall all have plush rockers.”

The constant iteration of the name, “Marthy,” seemed to react upon feminine nerves. Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Landvetter, and the Missionary glanced uneasily at one another. It remained for Mrs. Nitschkan, with her lack of nerves, to solve the problem, for at Mayhew's words she threw her head back with a great burst of laughter, showing every squirrel-white tooth in her head. “The Marthy! The Marthy!” she cried. “Why, Dan, it's the Marthy we've come to see you about.”

Mayhew's expression changed. “What's the matter with Mrs. Thomas?” he asked quickly, looking from one to the other.

“Oh, dere ain't nottin' de matter wid her, dat is—” said Mrs. Landvetter, and then paused in embarrassed silence, attempting to extricate her lace work from her pocket.

“Well, what is it then?” asked Mayhew impatiently. “You girls got something on your minds, or you wouldn't be up here.”

“That is true, Mr. Mayhew. We have something on our minds and we thought it best to come directly to you,” said the Missionary decisively. “We are all very much worried about Mrs. Thomas.”

“What's the matter with her?” anxiously. “Is she sick?”

“No, she is quite well; but—” Miss Benson tried to speak kindly. “She has gotten into quite a serious entanglement with this fortune-teller over in Mt. Tabor, Professor Hartshorn.”

“What do you mean by your 'serious entanglements'?” growled Mayhew. “Speak plain, Missioner.”

“I mean,” replied the Missionary, with a tightening of the lips and a heightened color, “that she is completely under the influence of this man, and that he is using that influence to extort money from her. She has promised to give him, day after to-morrow, all that remains of the two thousand dollars her husband left her.”

Mayhew's eyes glared from under his brows, but he looked from one woman to another in a dazed fashion.

“It's straight, Dan,” corroborated Mrs. Evans. “He's just hypnotized her, an' now she's in this box.”

“Well, why wasn't I told before?” asked Mayhew. “What did you let her get into it for? How'd she ever meet him?”

“She went to get her fortune told,” began Mrs. Evans.

“She's so lonesome, bein' a widow, an' she wanted somebody to love her,” mimicked Mrs. Nitschkan in a small voice, imitating closely Mrs. Thomas's lisp and coy manner.

The women rocked back and forth on their boulders with bursts of laughter.

“Aw, for the Lord's sake!”—exclaimed Mayhew disgustedly. “I wisht women had some sense. Missioner, can you tell me what this is all about?”

“It is just as these ladies say,” remarked Miss Benson coldly. She had small sympathy for the culprit and was actuated in her present course solely by a sense of duty. “Mrs. Thomas explained to us that she was lonesome after her husband's death and, with a desire for excitement, went to consult this Professor Hartshorn. He at first made love to her, and now informs her that he sees in his crystals, and his stars, and cards some terrible calamity impending unless she gives him her money. He has so succeeded in frightening her that I do not think she will dare refuse his demand.”

“He'll get his head broke before night,” threatened Mayhew. “My Lord!” mopping his brow with a blue and white cotton handkerchief and looking desperately at the row of women before him. “What was you women a thinkin' of, sittin' around doin' nothing and lettin' her get into such a scrape?”

“My patience,” cried Mrs. Evans, while her sisters gasped and gazed at one another. She sprang to her feet and drew up her tiny figure to the fullest. “You must think we ain't got nothin' to do, Dan Mayhew, but look after that over-grown baby? Maybe you think we ain't got husbands and childern an' houses to mind? Oh, yes, we ought to let them go to look after Marthy Thomas that ain't got sense enough to tend to her own business.”

“is that true?” said Mayhew, surveying her angrily and speaking with icy sarcasm. “Well, I guess there's a good many men in the camp, includin' poor Sile Evans, that wishes there was more like her. You all think you're too smart to mind your own business and got to stick your fingers in everybody else's pie. I guess if the truth was known you drove her to this. It speaks a lot for her friends, don't it, that she got so lonesome that she had to run to some—fakir for consolation?”

“Vy vasn't you around to do some of the consolin', Dan?” asked Mrs. Landvetter hardily.

“She was wantin' to be loved,” roared Mrs. Nitschkan. A suppressed giggle ran through the feminine part of the group.

“Well, it's a pity some of the rest of you didn't,” he exclaimed doggedly. “Oh, you're Miss Know-it-alls. If she'd a been treated right by you women,” he continued accusingly, “she wouldn't a gone traipsin' around to fakirs. You didn't show her no human sympathy. You're a cold-blooded lot. Oh, I know the whole of you. I could read your pedigrees from the beginning. It couldn't be expected that you'd understand her. She ain't made out of the same kind of clay that you are. She's trustin', that's what she is, trustin' and confidin'; but what's the use of trustin' in flint an' confidin' in ice?”

“My Gawd, Dan Mayhew! Air you a jumpin' on us 'cause Marthy Thomas is a D. F.?” asked Mrs. Evans shrilly.

He wheeled on her savagely. “You ought to be scrunched 'twixt a man's thumb and finger like you was a flea, which you are,” contemptuously. “I've asked you and you ain't give me any good answer—what did you ever let her get in such a muss for? Oh, yes,” interrupting the clamor of voices; “you could a helped it if you'd a wanted to. I know how much she thinks of all of you; but you couldn't lift a finger to help her, could you? That would be putting yourselves out some, wouldn't it? You couldn't do nothing but sit around and knock her behind her back.”

“You are not just to us, Mr. Mayhew.” The Missionary attempted to speak with dignity, but her lip trembled.

He made a scornful gesture as if renouncing them all; but it was plain from his absorbed gaze bent on the ground, his knotted brow, that he was oblivious to their presence.

Mrs. Evans fidgetted uneasily. “Dan,” she said at last, “get over your mad and tell us what had best be done.”

“I know what I'm agoing to do,” he cried with resolution, picking up his hat and coat from the ground. “I'm goin' to Mt. Tabor to drive that skunk out of the mountains. Then I'm a coming back and ask the best, the most trustin' and confidin' woman in the world to marry me. Good-morning, ladies.”

He walked lightly and rapidly down the trail before them.

The faces of the women left behind him were pale and stunned.

With a quick gesture of self-reproach the Missionary laid one hand against her cheek, as with the strange, sad eyes of the mystic she gazed above the swaying pine tops into the depths of the blue, blue sky.

“Oh, I haven't met it right,” she cried sorrowfully. “I haven't met it right. This was Mrs. Thomas's soul problem and I didn't help her solve it. I just got mad and quit.”

“Such is life,” murmured Mrs. Landvetter, with some vague attempt at consolation. “You can't neffer tell.”

“Take it back, Landvetter,” returned Mrs. Nitschkan practically, brushing a bit of adhering clay from her short skirt. “Take it back. Life ain't nothin' so cantankerous. You mean, 'such is men.'”