The Bondboy. George W. Ogden

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СКАЧАТЬ hands. I know you’re not the boy to shirk on me when my back’s turned, for you never tried to do it to my face. You stand by me, Joe, and I’ll stand by you; you’ll never lose anything by it in the end.

      “I may be a crabbed old feller once in a while, and snarl around some, but my bark’s worse than my bite, you know that by this time. So I’ll put everything in your hands, with a feeling that it’ll be looked after just the same as if I was here.”

      “I’ll do the best I can by you,” promised Joe, his generous heart warming to Isom a little in spite of past indignities, 72 and the fact that Joe knew very well the old man’s talk was artful pretense.

      “I know you will,” said Isom, patting his shoulder in fatherly approbation. “In case I’m held over there a week, you keep your eye on that agent, and don’t let him stay here a day overtime without another week’s board in advance.”

      “I’ll attend to him,” promised Joe.

      Isom’s hand had lingered a minute on Joe’s shoulder while he talked, and the old man’s satisfaction over the depth of muscle that he felt beneath it was great. He stood looking Joe over with quick-shifting, calculating eyes, measuring him in every part, from flank to hock, like a farrier. He was gratified to see how Joe had filled out in the past six months. If he had paid for a colt and been delivered a draft-horse, his surprise would not have been more pleasant.

      As it was, he had bargained for the services of a big-jointed, long-boned lad, and found himself possessed of a man. The fine part of it was that he had nearly two years more of service at ten dollars a month coming from Joe, who was worth twenty of any man’s money, and could command it, just as he stood. That was business, that was bargaining.

      Isom’s starved soul distended over it; the feeling was warm in his veins, like a gill of home-made brandy. He had him, bound body and limb, tied in a corner from which he could not escape, to send and call, to fetch and carry, for the better part of two good, profitable years.

      As Isom rode away he rubbed his dry, hard hands above his saddle-horn, feeling more comfortable than he had felt for many a day. He gloated over the excellent bargain that he had made with the Widow Newbolt; he grinned at the roots of his old rusty beard. If ever a man poked himself in the ribs in the excess of self-felicitation, Isom Chase did it as he rode along on his old buckskin horse that autumn morning, with the sun just lifting over the hill. 73

      It was an excellent thing, indeed, for a patriot to serve his country once in a while on a jury, thought Isom, especially when that patriot had been shrewd in his dealings with the widow and orphan, and had thus secured himself against loss at home while his country called him abroad. Jury duty was nothing but a pleasant season of relaxation in such case.

      There would be mileage and per diem, and the state would bear the expense of lodging and meals in the event of his being drawn out of the panel to serve in some long criminal case. Mileage and per diem would come in very nicely, in addition to the four dollars a week that loose-handed book agent was paying. For the first time in his life when called upon for jury service, Isom went to meet it with no sourness in his face. Mileage and per diem, but best of all, a great strong man left at home in his place; one to be trusted in and depended upon; one who would do both his master’s work and his own.

      Joe had no such pleasant cogitations to occupy his mind as he bent his long back to assume the double burden when Isom went away. For many days he had been unquiet with a strange, indefinable unrest, like the yearn of a wild-fowl when the season comes for it to wing away to southern seas. Curtis Morgan was behind that strong, wild feeling; he was the urge of it, and the fuel of its fire.

      Why it was so, Joe did not know, although he struggled in his reason to make it clear. For many days, almost from the first, Joe had felt that Morgan should not be in that house; that his pretext of lingering there on business was a blind too thin to deceive anybody but Isom. Anybody could deceive Isom if he would work his scheme behind a dollar. It was a shield beyond which Isom could not see, and had no wish to inquire.

      Joe did not like those late starts which Morgan made of 74 a morning, long after he and Isom were in the field, nor the early homings, long before they came in to do the chores. Joe left the house each morning with reluctance, after Isom’s departure, lingering over little things, finding hitherto undiscovered tasks to keep him about in the presence of Ollie, and to throw him between her and the talkative boarder, who seemed always hanging at her heels. Since their talk at dinner on the day that Morgan came, Joe had felt a new and deep interest in Ollie, and held for her an unaccountable feeling of friendliness.

      This feeling had been fed, for a few days, by Ollie, who found odd minutes to talk with him as she had not talked before, and by small attentions and kindnesses. She had greeted him in the morning with smiles, where her face once wore the sad mask of misery; and she had touched his hand sometimes, with encouraging or commending caress.

      Joe had yielded to her immediately the unreserved loyalty of his unsophisticated soul. The lot of his bondage was lightened by this new tie, the prospect of the unserved term under Isom was not so forbidding now. And now this fellow Morgan had stepped between them, in some manner beyond his power to define. It was as one who beholds a shadow fall across his threshold, which he can neither pick up nor cast away.

      Ollie had no more little attentions for Joe, but endless solicitude for Morgan’s comfort; no more full smiles for him, but only the reflections of those which beamed for the chattering lounger who made a pretense of selling books while he made love to another man’s wife.

      It was this dim groping after the truth, and his half-conception of it, that rendered Joe miserable. He did not fully understand what Morgan was about, but it was plain to him that the man had no honest purpose there. He could not repeat his fears to Isom, for Isom’s wrath and correction 75 would fall on Ollie. Now he was left in charge of his master’s house, his lands, his livestock, and his honor.

      The vicarious responsibility rested on him with serious weight. Knowing what he knew, and seeing what he saw, should he allow things to proceed as they had been going? Would he be true to the trust that Isom had placed in him with his parting word in standing aside and knowingly permitting this man to slip in and poison the heart of Isom’s wife?

      She was lonely and oppressed, and hungry for kind words, but it was not this stranger’s office to make green the barrenness of her life. He was there, the bondboy, responsible to his master for his acts. She might come to him for sympathy, and go away with honor. But with this other, this man whose pale eyes shifted and darted like a botfly around a horse’s ear, could she drink his counsel and remain undefiled?

      Joe thought it up and down as he worked in the field near the house that morning, and his face grew hot and his eyes grew fevered, and his resentment against Morgan rose in his throat.

      He watched to see the man drive away on his canvassing round, but the sun passed nine o’clock and he did not go. He had no right there, alone in the house with that woman, putting, who could say, what evil into her heart.

      Ten o’clock and the agent’s buggy had not left the barn. Joe could contain himself no longer. He was at work in a little stony piece of late clover, so rough he did not like to risk the mower in it. For three hours he had been laying the tumbled swaths in winding tracks across the field, and he had a very good excuse for going to the well, indeed. Coupled with that was the need of a whet-rock, and behind it all the justification of his position. He was there in his master’s place; he must watch and guard the honor of his house. 76

      Joe could not set out on that little trip without a good deal of moral cudgeling when it came to the point, although СКАЧАТЬ