USA > Pennsylvania > Schuylkill County > Old Schuylkill tales, a history of interesting events, traditions and anecdotes of the early settlers of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania > Part 20
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"I am his wife," said Anna, drawing herself up to her full height. "It is but a short distance. I have no doubt but that my husband will be pleased to see you."
The evening was pleasantly spent, with cards, music and conversation. Banker Angell was making a tour of that part of the country to look after the bank's investments in mortgages on the farms. "It is a poor country, hereabouts, sir," he said. "I advise you to get out of it as soon as possible, you are outside of the rain belt, Mr. Davidson," and he looked pityingly at the unconscious ladies. David merely shook his head.
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Kate was re-trimming an old hat. "Let me trim it for you," said the banker.
"As if a man knew anything about trimming a hat," joked Kate.
In the morning there were hasty "good-byes" and a "warm invitation to come again." Kate took up the hat and in the velvet bow found a erisp ten dollar bill deftly knotted in. Anna was inelined to be indignant but Kate said, "Not at all. We will use it. We will send to Chicago for a whole ready made wardrobe and we need worry no more. But do not tell David."
Kate did not add that she feared he might want the money for some of the urgent needs of the farm.
Spring eame and with it the new born babe, a girl. Fragile and quiet, with a gravity on her tiny, puekered features that augured that the anxieties of the situation were not unknown to her, but that they were inculeated in her little being from her very eoneeption.
"Let us eall her Marguerite, for she is like unto a flower," said Anna, and Davidson assented.
Already the spring turmoil was in full blast. He had little time to think of anything else. Anna was very delieate and Kate assumed all her eares but the infant. Cooking, milking, baking, feeding the poultry, gathering the eggs, butter making, and the ehores that the men could not perform. It still rained occasionally, and the draws relieved her from watering the cattle.
The grind went on; Davidson felt they must make a sue- cess of it this year. They rose with the first shadow of dawn, working until dusk, when they erawled into bed, exhausted, seldom lighting a lamp. There was little time to read. Anna
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sometimes would try to aloud, when she nursed the puny baby and Kate ehurned.
David became moody and morose. He would talk of nothing but "the exorbitant rates of freight, grasping corpora- tions, and the necessity of the Government purchasing the rail- roads. The farmer would then get living prices for his farm products, without the leeherous monopolies sucking the life's blood out of the fruits of his toil." He talked well, and men eame miles to hear him after their day's work. But the girls. were beginning to dread these rampant flights, verging as they were with some of the most unruly, toward socialism and anarchy. They were on the eve of a national election and party feeling ran high.
"The reapers will be here day after tomorrow," he said: one morning.
"So soon," said Anna. "I believe the torrid wave will eome- before they do. I ean see it in the baby. She searcely seems to breathe."
Davidson muttered something that sounded very like a. smothered eurse and went out slamming the door.
How the girls hated the coming of that ill-kempt gang, honest toilers of the soil though they were. One of them, even a college professor, who had settled there, partly for his health,. and came filled with enthusiasm for the irrigation of the south- west. There were no rivers in that seetion to draw the supply of water from, for the sluiees which the settlers laid and after exhausting all his and some of his neighbor's available funds, and some too of Davidson's seanty dollars in the vain endeavor- to turn a small stream, thirty miles away, thitherward and in building dams to hold the rainwater, that never fell, he gave up.
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the vain attempt. The girls had never seen him, but heard that he fed the steam thresher as well in the fierce heat, as if he had never heard of anything else.
These men worked hard and were voracious eaters. Bread must be baked in quantities, and unless they wanted to sizzle fried pork for hours they must boil off several shoulders to eat cold.
" If you can attend to the bread, Anna, after I am through churning, I will go for some wild plums and we will make a batch of pies, it will save us other cooking," said Kate.
She was gone some time, the bread was ready for the stove, the pie crust being deftly turned in Anna's nimble fingers.
How did it all happen ? Kate heard a slight scream and then a moan ; she ran and then stood spellbound at the door.
Anna stood motionless before her babe, one hand still full of the dough uplifted before her face, the other holding the babe as far from her in her cradle as she could. Suspended from the ceiling, from between the muslin folds, hung a huge rattlesnake. It had given the ominous rattle and the work was done. The poor woman stood as if entranced, gazing at the beady eyes and basilisk head of the swaying reptile.
It was but a moment, but that moment seemed a lifetime to Kate, who grasped the forked stick that stood at the door and brought the snake to the floor, his head between the prongs and dispatched it. . In that moment it flashed through her mind that Anna had said "there were rattlers about again, she had heard them." They had lodged in the roof of the sod house.
Anna had fainted and Tommy in response to Kate's cries ran for his mother, who was working in one of their fields with-
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in hailing distance. They carried her to bed and discovered a tiny puncture in the dough covered hand which they tenderly washed. The poison was already spreading and Kate cauterized the wound under Anna's own direction. They had often to- gether studied the treatment from medical works. Tommy was dispatched for her husband, on their best farm horse, and Kate not knowing where the reapers were at work, was doubt- ful as to whether she should go to Pueblo for the Doctor or wait for her brother-in-law. She could not leave. Mrs. Grim- shaw, who essayed the baking and boiling to completion, in- sisted on dosing the patient with whiskey until, as Anna her- self said, " She could no longer see."
The long day wore on, she grew no better, the poison had spread to her arm and was affecting her system. The opportune arrival of the "cheeseman" on his rounds, seemed providen- tial to the half-crazed watcher. He inspected the arm of the patient and suggested remedies that were at once applied, but privately told Mrs. Grimshaw that "she was too weakly to fight blood poisoning." He went back at once to the Professor, who owned the best horse in the neighborhood, and happened to be at home that day nursing his eyes, burned in the fierce heat of threshing the day before. The Professor went to Hayes, a nearer point, for the Doctor, but neither he nor Davidson arrived before night fall.
The Doctor, a dissolute fellow, an excellent. practitioner when sober, was just finishing off a hard case of drink and seemed helpless. He ordered a few simple applications for the poor patient, who was suffering intensely, and then retired to the kitchen to gorge his abnormal appetite on the cold meat and pies prepared for the threshers on the morrow, and slept.
" If he was only sober enough to take off her arm," sobbed Kate, " perhaps it would save her life."
All night they kept their lone vigil with the dying woman. At intervals she was conscious. She spoke of home, Father, Mother, and friends of her childhood. Then visions of the
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"dear, dear " old Pennsylvania mountains pictured themselves in her disordered fancy. How beautiful the green trees looked, how fresh the air and how sweet the dew. Ever and anon shc dipped her hot hands in the imaginary silvery mountain brook and tried to lave her parched temples with the cooling waters.
Her husband sat as one dazed at the foot of the bed. The babe wailed in its feeble way as though it was conseious of the loss it was about to sustain. Mrs. Grimshaw reeited the prayers for the dying, while the Professor kept watch in the doorway.
Suddenly at midnight she sat up; Kate held her head on her shoulder.
"Bring my babe, poor waif, you will not be long after me," she said. "I am glad I ean go home. I could not live here. Bury me with my face toward the East, from whence the Son of God will eome in all His glory, when the last trump shall sound and the grave give up its dead."
"Good-bye". "God Bless !-
"My wife! Say that you forgive me for this," eried the sorrow-strieken husband.
But the voice had ecased, the tired hands were folded aeross her bosom, the pure spirit had fled to its Maker.
Davidson drove to Pueblo in the carly dawn for the easket. "Bring a large plain pine box," said Kate.
"Thim ready made caskets is too small for a grown per- son," said Mother Grimshaw. "I've helped to lay out a good many in thim sinee I've been here, and the crowdin' of thim is awful. The coffin makers must think we belong to them 'pigmies,' the little fairy people of Arizony."
Together they dressed her in her pretty grey eashmere gown with the neat white collar and cuffs. Her face was not mueh diseolored, her never-failing smile ealm and peaceful.
Davidson returned about four in the afternoon with the large plain pine box in the wagon, while beside it on horse- baek rode the Priest, who came to pay his last tribute to a loved friend and ofttime hostess.
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It was summer; there were no preserving influences at hand for the poor body. She must be buried at nightfall. They took her soft, white, blue-bordered blankets to line the box, and gently layed hier between them, eovering her with the fleeey folds.
The eheesman had spread the sad story on his rounds, and the settlers eame from far and near. As far north as the ereek, forty miles away, to Hayes, thirty miles south. People they had never seen, but felt united to through the common bond of neighborhood and sympathy. They eame afoot, on horse- baek and in the prairie vehiele, the high-baeked wagon. The men with their swarthy unshaven faees, with great beards, their skins burned a bronze red that stamped them with as dis- tinet a type as the Arabians of the desert. The women, their huge sunbonnets flapping in the wind, the same influenee that dried their baked and parehment-like skins, seemed to have warped their lives.
All wore the same listless, dejeeted air as if death to them was "but the parting of a breath," a laying down of the burden.
Tommy, who had killed the mate of the dread reptile, draw- ing it from a ereviee in the roof and exhibited the rattlers and skins, was listened to eagerly as he told and retold the horrible story. Kate brought the infant to the Priest who performed the simple rite of baptism at the side of the mother's eoffin, be- fore they wended their way to the cemetery.
The eortege proceeded to the hillside, as the sun went down, Davidson driving and Kate, Mother Grimshaw and the Priest steadying the box, while the mournful procession fol- lowed.
"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in ine, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die," read the Priest from the ritual. But the beautiful serviee fell, like the eold elods on hearts that were dead to its influenee.
The beloved remains were lowered into the ground. They
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heard a shout. A wagon approached over the prairie. It was the Professor waving his hat to attract attention. He asked the assistance of the men to unload some stone slabs which he had quarried himself, some twenty miles away.
"The gophers and coyotes will dig into any grave without these," he said.
They placed the small stones upright about the coffin, and covered the walls thus made with the slabs. Then they united in the Lord's Prayer, the Priest and Mother Grimshaw kneel- ing beside the grave, and all was over.
The next day the reapers came, and Kate followed the beaten path with a blurring in her ears and a mist before her eyes. Davidson was taciturn, avoiding her and the child, seem- ing to find his only solace in the work and the men.
The sultryness increased. The sun for days seemed to rise out of the baked earth like a huge ball of fire, shedding scintil- lating sparks from the disc of its lurid globe as it rose high in the heavens. Rainstorms came up all about them, they could see them at every point on the blank horizon, some mirages, no doubt, but not a drop of water fell on the "Dead Man's Foot." One morning it seemed as if neither men nor cattle could live if the hot wind did not soon subside.
Marguerite lay in her cradle. She had not moaned since the simoon came. Her eyelids fluttered a little when Kate urged her to take her milk. There was a faint tremor and then deathly quiet. She lifted the little form and carried her to the door. It was vain; she was dead. Laying her gently on the bed and covering her over, she went about the work saying again and again, "It is better so. She is with her mother. But oh ! my little darling," amid the sobs she could not restrain.
No one would be home until evening. The chores finished, she washed and dressed the tiny mite in her prettiest white dress. She took her mandolin box, lined it with an old white and blue dress of her own, making of it a bassinet in which she laid the babe in her waxen-like purity, an angel now indeed. In the evening they buried her in the same grave with her mother.
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The next day Kate told Davidson he must attend to the chores. She took Tommy to Pueblo with the team, returning with a large plain white marble slab with the names of mother and child inscribed on it. The grave was dug into a foot or two and filled with stones as a farther precaution against wild beasts and the headstone set. Kate told the bereaved husband "her work here was complete. She would leave for home the week following."
A team, one morning, drove up to the door and from it emerged Professor Merton, cleanly shaven and with more at- tention than usual bestowed on his rough-and-ready attire.
What ! Are you going too?" asked Davidson, looking dazed. A blush overspread the professor's tan-beaten features, but there was a merry twinkle in the eyes behind the blue goggles.
"Yes, but not to the Keystone State, where Kate tells me she has secured her old school again, but somewhere never to get out of sight of water again. Driving a street sprinkling cart may satisfy me.
"I have tried for years to sell my place. No one has the money to buy. I had the cattle driven over here and closed the door of the ranch. If there is anything over there you want, help yourself. I will never come back."
The lonely grief stricken man leaned on the gate post, his eyes so blinded with tears he could not see their extended hands.
"I will never leave her," he said pointing to the cemetery. "I brought her here against her will. I will never leave until they lay me beside her."
A professor's chair in mathematics, in a college near Chicago. A pretty vine-covered cottage in full view of Lake Michigan, the professor's home; his wife a cheery faced woman ; Merton and Kate with whom the reader is well acquainted ; is the sequel of the story of the "Dead Man's Foot."
[THE END.]
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