Caddie Woodlawn (3 page)

“Come on,” said Tom, “we've got enough.” But Caddie's skirt was not half filled, and she didn't want to
go. Warren was thinking of supper and Tom was remembering that he was the eldest of the three, and that the longer they were gone, the more time his mother would have in which to get angry.

“All right for you,” he said, “I'm going home and you'd better come, too.” Crackling and rustling through the dry leaves and underbrush, the boys went home. Tom whistled to Nero, but Nero pretended not to hear, for Caddie was his favorite.

Caddie picked furiously, filling her skirt. It was not often that she got more nuts than Tom. Today she would have more than anybody. An evening stillness crept through the golden woods. Suddenly Caddie knew that she had better go or supper would be begun. To be late for a meal was one of the unpardonable sins in the Woodlawn family. Clutching the edges of her heavy skirt, she began to run. A thorn reached out and tore her sleeve, twigs caught in her tangled hair, her face was dirty and streaked with perspiration, but she didn't stop running until she reached the farmhouse. In fact, she didn't stop even then, for the deserted look of the yard told her that they were all at supper. She rushed on, red and disheveled, and flung open the dining-room door.

There she stopped for the first time, frozen with astonishment and dismay. It wasn't an ordinary supper.
It was a company supper! Everybody was calm and clean and sedate, and at one end of the table sat the circuit rider! Paralyzed with horror, Caddie's fingers let go her shirt, and a flood of green hazelnuts rolled all over the floor. In a terrible lull in the conversation they could be heard bumping and rattling to the farthest corners of the room.

“How do you do, Caroline Augusta?” said the circuit rider in his deep voice—that voice which filled the schoolhouse with the fervor of his praying. The circuit rider was the only person who bothered to remember that Caddie was really Caroline Augusta and that Hetty was Henrietta. He turned his dark, deep-set eyes on Mrs. Woodlawn, who sat beside him at the end of the long table.

“When are you going to begin making a young lady out of this wild Indian, Mrs. Woodlawn?” he inquired.

The cameo brooch, which she wore only on Sundays or special occasions, rose and fell on Mrs. Woodlawn's bosom. The cameo earrings trembled in her ears, but
she answered in as calm a voice as she could muster.

“You must ask my husband that question, Mr. Tanner.”

“Caddie!” said Mr. Woodlawn abruptly. “Don't stand there staring, my child. Get washed and to table.” Caddie disappeared in an instant. But, as she went, she heard her father saying: “Yes, Mr. Tanner, it is my fault that Caddie is running wild instead of making samplers and dipping candles. I will tell you why.”

Caddie heard no more, but she knew what Father had to say. She loved to hear him say it in his deep, quiet voice. He would be telling how frail she and little Mary had been when they came to Wisconsin from Boston, and how, after little Mary had died, he had begged his wife to let him try an experiment with Caddie. “Harriet,” he had said, “I want you to let Caddie run wild with the boys. Don't keep her in the house learning to be a lady. I would rather see her learn to plow than make samplers, if she can get her health by doing so. I believe it is worth trying. Bring the other girls up as you like, but let me have Caddie.”

So, for seven years, Caddie had run the woods with Tom and Warren. She was no longer pale or delicate. She was brown and strong, and, if Tom climbed a tree, Caddie climbed a taller one. If Warren caught a
snake, Caddie went after a longer one. Her mother and sisters looked at her and sighed, but Father smiled and knew that he had been a good doctor.

As these things went through her mind, Caddie ran a comb through her tangled curls and splashed water over her red, dusty face. A few moments later, when she slipped silently into her place between Tom and Warren, the grownups were talking of something else and no one paid any attention to her.

Tom and Warren, still a little untidy and flushed from the afternoon's escapade, glanced at her mischievously. They had come through the barn and seen the circuit rider's horse munching oats in the extra stall. Hastily they had cleaned themselves at the pump and got to the supper table in the very nick of time. Across the table Clara, Hetty, and little Minnie, in white aprons and neat braids, sat up straight and clean with their eyes fixed piously on the circuit rider's face. Even baby Joe, in his high chair, trying his new tooth on a silver spoon, was in spotless white. Mrs. Conroy, the hired girl, moved about the table with fresh supplies of food. Her eyes rested on Caddie in silent amusement. Caddie was her favorite among the Woodlawn children, largely because of the amusing scrapes the child got herself into. Mr. Woodlawn sent a heaping plate of beans and brown bread down to
his second daughter, and Caddie ate obediently. But she was smarting with disgrace. Beneath the table, she could still feel some of her hazelnuts rolling about under her feet. And the circuit rider had asked Mother when she intended making a young lady out of her! A young lady, indeed! Who wanted to be a young lady? Certainly not Caddie! But still there were times when it was uncomfortable
not
to be one, even with Father's loyal support.

They were talking about the Indian massacres now, and, forgetting herself, Caddie began to listen. Nowadays everyone talked of the Civil War, which seemed far away from Wisconsin, and of the Indian massacres which seemed uncomfortably near.

“It's those Southerners who come North and incite the Indians to rebellion, just to make more trouble for the North,” said Mrs. Woodlawn decidedly.

“Yes,” said Mr. Tanner, “I fear that we cannot trust the Indians, even when they seem to be friendly.”

“I don't believe we'll have massacres here, Mr. Tanner,” said Father. “I do trust these Indians.”

“It's true enough that they ought to be loyal to us,” cried Mrs. Woodlawn, smiling at her husband. “Goodness knows, I've fed them enough victuals, and, of course, you know how my husband has treated them?”

“Someone told me that you had remodeled the guns
of the whole tribe, Woodlawn. Is that possible?” asked the circuit rider.

Mr. Woodlawn laughed. “Well,” he said, “that's about the size of it, although that wasn't my intention when I started it. As a compliment to the chief of the tribe, when I came here to install the mill, I replaced the old flintlock on his gun with a spring lock. The old fellow was delighted. I thought that that was the end of the affair, but the next day when I went to the mill, there was the chief waiting for me with his whole tribe. And every man of them had brought his flintlock gun to have a spring lock put on it. It kept me busy for a week, but the mill company was glad to pay for the locks to insure the Indians' friendship. We've never regretted it, and I don't think we shall have cause to later.”

The children loved this familiar story and were sorry when the conversation drifted on to other things. But, when Mr. Tanner began to recount his travels and adventures since the last night he had spent under their roof, they were once more enthralled.

In those days the circuit riders, or traveling ministers, served large territories, riding from place to place and holding services in cabins or schoolhouses. Mr. Tanner was one of these. Weathered by sun and rain
and snow, he rode from day to day over a parish which covered most of western Wisconsin. Weddings and christenings were put off until his arrival, and sometimes he found new-made graves awaiting his benediction. The settlers always opened their homes to him, and it was a great occasion when they could entertain the circuit rider. Everyone stood in awe of him. He was not only a man of God who could wrestle in spiritual battle with angels and spirits of evil, but it was said that there was not a man on his circuit who could show a strength of muscle equal to his. When, in his deep voice, he spoke of punishment for sinners, the little schoolhouse seemed to be filled with the crackling roar of the fires of hell.

But, when he sat with the Woodlawns at their table, all his sternness fell away. It was perhaps the only place on his circuit where he felt entirely at home. Their home, the largest in the neighborhood, was the one expected to offer him hospitality. But there was another reason why he always stayed there. Mr. Tanner was from Boston, too. He loved the beans and brown bread on Saturday night and the familiar talk of home. For him, as for Mrs. Woodlawn, the real beauty and meaning of life centered in the churches, the bookshops, the lecture rooms of Boston. They shared their bits of news and gossip and recalled old
scenes and events as homesick people love to do. Mr. Woodlawn heard them with quiet amusement. He was entirely happy on the outskirts of civilization. Here he could breathe freely as he had never done in the narrow streets of Boston. His own home had been in England, but he did not speak of the past. The children, all except Clara, who remembered and loved Boston, listened with wide eyes of astonishment. For how could anyone prefer Boston to this enchanting place of adventure, of lake and river, prairie and forest?

When the meal was finished, the circuit rider rose and went to his saddlebags which he had left on the back porch. He dusted them carelessly and opened one. He took out first his well-worn Bible for the family prayers which were never forgotten when Mr. Tanner spent the night. Then he took out something else which suddenly made Caddie's eyes sparkle with interest. She forgot her embarrassment and came to stand beside him. It was a small clock.

“Woodlawn,” said the minister, “I've brought you something to repair for me. There is not a soul on the circuit who knows how to tinker a clock as you do.”

Mr. Woodlawn smiled. His workshop was already full of clocks which people had brought to him from miles around. When there was time from his farm and his duties as master mechanic at the mill, he took the
neighbors' clocks apart and oiled, mended, or refitted parts to them. He was the only man in that part of the country who could do it, and, although he liked the work well enough, it was sometimes irksome to have so much of it to do. But Caddie never tired of seeing new clocks come in. She liked to see them wag their pendulums and hear their busy ticking. Her eager fingers itched to help her father take them apart and set them in motion once again.

“What's wrong with it?” she asked.

The circuit rider hesitated. He knew all about horses and ways of predicting the weather; he could quote you almost any passage in the Bible and make clear the book of Revelations. But anything with wheels or cogs or springs was an unfathomable mystery to him.

“Well,” he said, “I don't rightly know. I was winding it up one night, when suddenly it gave a little gasp and a long sigh, like a soul departing from the body; and it wouldn't go after that. Sometimes, from force of habit, I take it out at night and start to wind it. Then I miss its genial tick, and I feel as if I am looking at the face of a dead friend.”

A dead friend! The phrase sank into Caddie's mind. Perhaps that was why she always hated to see an unwound clock standing idle.

Mrs. Woodlawn had come to join the group. “Jacob

Allen, Tremont St., Boston,” she read from the back of the clock. “Think of that! How many times I have been in and out of Jacob Allen's shop! Dear! Dear!”

“Yes,” said Mr. Tanner, “it is a friend from home.”

“I'll mend it for you tonight,” said Mr. Woodlawn.

“No! No!” cried Mr. Tanner hastily. “Saturday's sun has gone down. I like to think that the Sabbath has begun. No, I would rather talk with you tonight, my friend. I'll leave my clock until I come back again. It may be two or three months this time. I'm going back into the interior to a new settlement where no one has yet brought the word of God.”

Caddie slipped away to join Tom and Warren on the back step. They sat together, and Nero lay close to their feet. Out by the barn, Robert Ireton was strumming his banjo and singing softly. Of the three hired men, he was the one the children all loved best. It was Robert Ireton who had taught them most of the songs they knew. They knew the song he was singing now. It tickled their ears but did not lure them farther than the step. Behind the barn there were northern lights, long white fingers shooting up in the blackness of the sky; and the three adventurers were overcome by that delicious weariness which suddenly overtakes one at the end of an outdoor day.