slippery cuss and you’ll have to watch him.”
“Alex Tracy, four miles north—”
“You’ll find my mortgage for thirty-seven hundred in my box at the bank. He’s two coupons behind in his interest. I made him give me a chattel on his growing corn. Watch him—he’s treacherous. He may think he can sneak around because you’re a woman and stall you. He’s just likely to turn his hogs into that corn. Your chattel is for growing corn, not for corn in a hog’s belly. If he tries any dirty business get the sheriff after him.”
“It’s on the growing corn,” said Rose.
“And here’s another important point—taxes. Don’t pay any taxes on mortgages. What’s the use of giving the politicians more money to waste? Hold on to your bank stock and arrange to have all mortgages in the name of the bank, not in your own. They pay taxes on their capital and surplus, not on their loans. But be sure to get a written acknowledgment on each mortgage from Osborne. He’s square, but you can’t ever tell what changes might take place and then there might be some question about mortgages in the bank’s name.”
“Keep them in the bank’s name,” said Rose.
“And a written acknowledgment,” Martin stressed. “A written acknowledgment,” she echoed.
For probably fifteen minutes he lay without further talk; then, a little more weariness in his voice than she had ever known before, he began to speak again.
“I’ve been thinking a great deal, Rose.” There was still that new tenderness in the manner in which he pronounced her name, that new tone she had never heard before and which caused her to feel a little nervous. “I’ve been thinking, Rose, about the years we’ve lived together here on a Kansas prairie farm—”
“It lacks just a few months of being twenty-eight years,” she added.
“Yes, it sounds like a long time when you put it that way, but it doesn’t seem any longer than a short sigh to me lying here. I’ve been thinking, Rose, how you’ve always got it over to me that you loved me or could love me—”
“I’ve always loved you, Martin—deeply.”
“Yes, that’s what’s always made me so hard with you. It would have been far better for you if you hadn’t cared for me at all. I’ve never loved anybody, not even my own mother, nor Bill, nor myself for that matter.” Their eyes shifted away from each other quickly as both thought of one other whom he did not mention. “I wasn’t made that way, Rose. Now you could love anything—lots of women are like that, and men, too. But I wasn’t. Life to me has always been a strange world that I never got over thinking about and trying to understand, and at the same time hustling to get through with every day of it as fast as I could by keeping at the only thing I knew which would make it all more bearable. There’s a lot of pain in work, but it’s only of the muscles and my pain has always been in the things I’ve thought about. The awful waste and futility of it all! Take this farm—I came here when this was hardly more than a desert. You ought to have seen how thick the dust was the first day we got down here. And I’ve built up this place. You’ve helped me. Bill didn’t care for it—even if he had lived, he’d never have stayed here. But you do, in spite of all that’s happened.”
“Yes, Martin, I do,” she returned fervently. “It’s a wonderful monument to leave behind you—this farm is.”
His eyes grew somber. “That’s what I’ve always thought it would be,” he answered, very low. “I’ve felt as if I was building something that would last. Even the barns—they’re ready to stand for generations. But this minute, when the end is sitting at the foot of this bed, I seem to see it all crumbling before me. You won’t stay here. Why should you—even if you do for a few years you’ll have to leave it sometime, and there’s nothing that goes to rack and ruin as quickly as a farm—even one like this.”
“Oh, Martin, don’t think such thoughts,” she begged. “Your fever is coming up; I can see it.”
“What has it all been about, that’s what I want to know,” he went on with quiet cynicism. “What have I been sweating about—nothing. What is anyone’s life? No more than mine. We’re all like a lot of hens in a backyard, scratching so many hours a day. Some scratch a little deeper than those who aren’t so skilled or so strong. And when I stand off a little, it’s all alike. The end is as blind and senseless as the beginning on this farm—drought and dust.”
Martin closed his eyes wearily and gave a deep sigh. To his wife’s quickened ears, it was charged with lingering regret for frustrated plans and palpitant with his consciousness of life’s evanescence and of the futility of his own success.
She waited patiently for him to continue his instructions, but the opiates had begun to take effect and Martin lapsed into sleep. Although he lived until the next morning, he never again regained full consciousness.
Chapter XI
He Dust Settles
Rose’s grief was a surprise to herself; there was no blinking the fact that her life was going to be far more disrupted by Martin’s death than it had been by Bill’s. There were other differences. Where that loss had struck her numb, this quickened every sensibility, drove her into action; more than that, as she realized how much less there was to regret in the boy’s life than in his father’s, how much more he had got out of his few short years, the edge of the older, more precious sorrow, dulled. During quite long periods she would be so absorbed in her thoughts of Martin that Bill would not enter her mind. Was it possible, that this husband who with his own lips had confessed he had never loved her, had been a more integral part of herself than the son who had adored her? What was this bond that had roots deeper than love? Was it merely because they had grown so used to each other that she felt as if half of her had been torn away and buried, leaving her crippled and helpless? Probably it would have been different if Bill had been living. Was it because when he had died, she still had had Martin, demanding, vital, to goad her on and give the semblance of a point to her life, and now she was left alone, adrift? She pondered over these questions, broodingly.
“I suppose you’ll want to sell out, Rose,” Nellie’s husband, Bert Mall, big and cordial as Peter had been before him, suggested a day or two after the funeral. “I’ll try to get you a buyer, or would you rather rent?”
“I haven’t any plans yet, Bert,” Mrs. Wade had evaded adroitly, “it’s all happened so quickly. I have plenty of time and there are lots of things to be seen to.” There had been that in her voice which had forbidden discussion, and it was a tone to which she was forced to have recourse more than once during the following days when it seemed to her that all her friends were in a conspiracy to persuade her to a hasty, ill-advised upheaval.
Nothing, she resolved, should push her from this farm or into final decisions until a year had passed. She must have something to which she could cling if it were nothing more than a familiar routine. Without that to sustain and support her, she felt she could never meet the responsibilities which had suddenly descended, with such a terrific impact, upon her shoulders. In an inexplicable way, these new burdens, her black dress—the first silk one since the winter before Billy came—and the softening folds of her veil, all invested her with a new and touching majesty that seemed to set her a little apart from her neighbors.
Nellie had been frankly scandalized at the idea of mourning. “Nobody does that out here—exceptin’ during the services,” she had said sharply to her daughter-in-law when Rose had told her of the hasty trip she and her aunt had made to the largest town in the county. “Folks’ll
