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ROSE OF DUTCHER'S COOLLY

by

HAMLIN GARLAND







Chicago
Stone & Kimball
MDCCCXCV

Copyright, 1895, by
Hamlin Garland




CONTENTS
   CHAPTER I.     HER CHILDHOOD
   CHAPTER II.    CHILD-LIFE, PAGAN FREE
   CHAPTER III.   DANGEROUS DAYS
   CHAPTER IV.    AN OPENING CLOVER-BLOOM
   CHAPTER V.     HER FIRST PERIL
   CHAPTER VI.    HER FIRST IDEAL
   CHAPTER VII.   ROSE MEETS DR. THATCHER
   CHAPTER VIII.  LEAVING HOME
   CHAPTER IX.    ROSE ENTERS MADISON
   CHAPTER X.     QUIET YEARS OF GROWTH
   CHAPTER XI.    STUDY OF THE STARS
   CHAPTER XII.   THE GATES OPEN WIDE
   CHAPTER XIII.  THE WOMAN'S PART
   CHAPTER XIV.   AGAIN THE QUESTION OF HOME-LEAVING
   CHAPTER XV.    CHICAGO
   CHAPTER XVI.   HER FIRST CONQUEST
   CHAPTER XVII.  HER FIRST DINNER OUT
   CHAPTER XVIII. MASON TALKS ON MARRIAGE
   CHAPTER XIX.   ROSE SITS IN THE BLAZE OF A THOUSAND EYES
   CHAPTER XX.    ROSE SETS FACE TOWARD THE OPEN ROAD
   CHAPTER XXI.   MASON TALKS AGAIN
   CHAPTER XXII.  SOCIAL QUESTIONS
   CHAPTER XXIII. A STORM AND A HELMSMAN
   CHAPTER XXIV.  MASON TAKES A VACATION
   CHAPTER XXV.   ROSE RECEIVES A LETTER
   CHAPTER XXVI.  MASON AS A LOVER
   CONCLUSION




ROSE OF DUTCHER'S COOLLY




CHAPTER I

HER CHILDHOOD


Rose was an unaccountable child from the start. She learned to speak
early and while she did not use "baby-talk" she had strange words of her
own. She called hard money "tow" and a picture "tac," names which had
nothing to do with onomatopoeia though it seemed so in some cases.
Bread and milk she called "plop."

She began to read of her own accord when four years old, picking out the
letters from the advertisements of the newspapers, and running to her
mother at the sink or bread-board to learn what each word meant. Her
demand for stories grew to be a burden. She was insatiate, nothing but
sleep subdued her eager brain.

As she grew older she read and re-read her picture books when alone, but
when older people were talking she listened as attentively as if she
understood every word. She had the power of amusing herself and visited
very little with other children. It was deeply moving to see her with
her poor playthings out under the poplar tree, talking to herself,
arranging and rearranging her chairs and tables, the sunlight flecking
her hair, and the birds singing overhead.

She seemed only a larger sort of insect, and her prattle mixed easily
with the chirp of crickets and the rustle of leaves.

She was only five years old when her mother suddenly withdrew her hands
from pans and kettles, gave up all thought of bread and butter making,
and took rest in death. Only a few hours of waiting on her bed near the
kitchen fire and Ann Dutcher was through with toil and troubled
dreaming, and lay in the dim best-room, taking no account of anything in
the light of day.

Rose got up the next morning after her mother's last kiss and went into
the room where the body lay. A gnomish little figure the child was, for
at that time her head was large and her cropped hair bristled till she
seemed a sort of brownie. Also, her lonely child-life had given her
quaint, grave ways.

She knew her mother was dead, and that death was a kind of sleep which
lasted longer than common sleep, that was all the difference, so she
went in and stood by the bed and tried to see her mother's face. It was
early in the morning and the curtains being drawn it was dark in the
room, but Rose had no fear, for mother was there.

She talked softly to herself a little while, then went over to the
window and pulled on the string of the curtain till it rolled up. Then
she went back and looked at her mother. She grew tired of waiting at
last.

"Mamma," she called, "wake up. Can't you wake up, mamma?"

She patted the cold, rigid cheeks with her rough brown little palms.
Then she blew in the dead face, gravely. Then she thought if she could
only open mamma's eyes she'd be awake. So she took her finger and thumb
and tried to lift the lashes, and when she did she was frightened by the
look of the set faded gray eyes. Then the terrible vague shadow of the
Unknown settled upon her and she cried convulsively: "Mamma! mamma, I
want you!" Thus she met death, early in her life.

After her mother's burial Rose turned to her father more hungrily than
before. She rode into the fields with him in the spring, when he went
out to sow, sitting on the seeder box with the pockets of her little
pink apron filled with wheat, and her sweet, piping little voice calling
to the horses or laughing in glee at the swarms of sparrows. When he was
plowing corn she rode on the horses, clinging like a blue-jay to the
rings in the back-pad, her yellow-brown hair blowing.

She talked sagely about the crops and the weather, and asked innumerable
questions. Often John could not hear her questions, which were like soft
soliloquies, but she babbled on just the same.

"See the little birds, pappa John. They's 'bout a million of 'um, ain't
they? They're glad spring has come, ain't they, pappa? They can
understand each other just the same as we can, can't they, pappa John?"

John Dutcher was not a talker, and he seldom answered her unless she
turned her eager face to him, and her bird-like voice repeated her
question. But it mattered very little to Rose. She had her father's
power of self-amusement. In case she got tired of riding about with him
she brought her playthings out and established them in a corner of the
fence. Her favorite game was playing horses.

Her horses were sticks of the size of canes, and of all sorts and
colors. Each one had a name. How she selected them, and why she selected
them out of the vast world of sticks, was a mystery to John Dutcher.

The brown stick she called Dan, the fork handle, Nellie, and the crooked
stick with the big knot was Barney. She had from six to ten and she
never forgot their names. Each had a string for a bridle and they all
were placed in stalls, which she built with infinite labor and
calculation out of twigs. She led each stick by its halter up to the
manger (a rail) on which she had placed oats and grass. She talked to
them.

"Now, Barney, whoa-whoa there now! Don't you kick Kit again--now sir!
Kit, you better stand over here by Pete--Barney, you need exercise,
that's what you need--yessir."

She exercised them by riding them in plunging circles about the fields,
forgetting, with the quick imagination of a child, that she was doing
all the hard work of the riding with her own stout, brown legs. It was a
pleasure to John to have her there though he said little to her.

Often at night as he saw her lying asleep, her long lashes upon her
roughened sun-burned skin, his heart went out to her in a great gush of
tenderness. His throat ached and his eyes grew wet as he thought how
unresponsive he had been that day. His remorseful memory went back over
her eager questions to which he had not replied. Dear, sweet, restless
little heart! And then he vowed never to lose patience with her again.
And sometimes standing there beside her bed his arms closed about the
little mound under the quilts, and his lips touched the round,
sleep-enraptured face. At such times his needy soul went out in a cry to
his dead wife for help to care for his child.

He grew afraid of the mystery and danger of coming womanhood. Her needs
came to him more powerfully each day.

When she began going to school with the other children the effects of
her lonely life and of her companionship with her father set her apart
from the boys and girls of her own age and placed her among those
several years older, whom she dominated by her gravity and her audacity.
She was not mischievous or quarrelsome, but she was a fearless
investigator. She tested their childish superstitions at once.

When they told her that if she swore at God and shook her fist at the
sky she would certainly drop dead, she calmly stepped forward and shook
her little fist up at the sun and swore, while the awe-stricken children
cowered like a covey of partridges.

"There! you see _that's_ a lie," she said scornfully. "God can't kill
me--or else he don't care."

She went on exploding these strange superstitious fancies, which are
only the survivals in civilized children of savage ancestry. She stood
erect in the door of the school-house when she was eight years old, and
pointed her hand at the lightning while the teacher sat cowed and
weeping at her desk.

"You said I dassn't," the little elf cried, "But I dass't, and nothing
ain't struck me yet."

Her absolute fearlessness of the things which children shrank from, the
dark, and things of the dark, made her a marked figure. The women of the
Coolly thought it due to the lack of a mother's care. They spoke to the
minister about it and urged him to see Dutcher and ask him to try and do
something for the child's good.

But Dutcher simply said, "Oh, don't bother the child about her soul.
She's all right. I don't bother myself about those things, and what's
the use o' spoilin' the child's fun. If she wants to go to
Sunday-school, why all right. She'll go where she's interested."

"But, Brother Dutcher, the child is doing outrageous things--heathenish,
defying her God."

"I don't s'pose what she does will make any particular difference to
God. We understand each other, Rosie and me. Don't worry. If she does
anything real bad she'll come an' tell me of it. _Chk! Chk!_ G' wan,
Barney!" He cut the matter short by driving away into the field of corn.

He saw rushing upon him the most solemn and severe trials of a parent.
Rose was a sturdy girl and promised to develop into a maiden early, and
there were a hundred things which ought to be said to her which must be
said by some one. He was not philosopher enough to know that she held in
her expanding brain the germs of self-knowledge.

He had been passing through a running fire of questions from the child
for two years, but these questions now took hold of deeper things, and
they could no longer be put aside by saying, "Wait a few years and then
I'll tell you." She would learn them elsewhere, if not from him. He
braced himself for the trial, which increased in severity.

The child's horizon was limited, but within its circle her searching
eyes let nothing escape. She came to Dutcher with appalling questions.

She not only asked him, "Who made God?" but she wanted to know how she
came to be born, and a thousand other questions of the same searching
nature. He saw that the day of petty fictions had gone by. The child
knew that little lambs, and calves, and kittens did not grow down in the
woods. She knew that babies were not brought by the doctor, and that
they did not come from heaven.

"Good Lord!" groaned her father one day, after an unusually persistent
attack from her, caused by the appearance of a little colt out in the
barn, "I wish your mother was here, or some woman. You do make it hard
for me, Rosie."

"How do I make it hard for you, pappa?" was her quick new question. "O,
Lord, what a young un," he said, in deeper despair. "Come, ain't it
about time for you to be leggin' it toward school? Give me a rest,
Rosie. But I'll answer all your questions--don't ask about them things
of the children--come right to me always--only don't pile 'em all on me
to once."

"All right, pappa, I won't."

"That's a good old soul!" he said, patting her on the back. After she
had gone he sat down on the feed-box and wiped his face. "I wonder how
women do explain things like that to girls," he thought. "I'll ask the
preacher's wife to explain it--no, I won't. I'll do it myself, and I'll
get her books to read about it--good books."

It was evidence of the girl's innate strength and purity of soul that
the long succession of hired hands had not poisoned her mind. They soon
discovered, however, the complete confidence between the father and
child, and knew that their words and actions would be taken straight to
John as soon as night came and Rose climbed into his lap. This made them
careful before her, and the shame of their words and stories came to the
child's ears only in fragments.

Dutcher concluded that he should have a woman in the house, and so sent
back to Pennsylvania for his sister, lately widowed. Rose looked forward
to seeing her aunt with the wildest delight. She went with her father
down the valley to Bluff Siding to meet her. Bluff Siding was the only
town the child knew, and it was a wonderful thing to go to town.

As they stood on the platform, waiting, her eyes swept along the great
curve of the rails to the east, and suddenly, like a pain in the heart,
came her first realization of distance, of the infinity of the world.

"Where does it go to, pappa?"

"O, a long way off. To Madison, Chicago, and Pennsylvany."

"How far is it? Could we go there with old Barney and Nell?"

"O, no. If we drove there it would take us days and days, and the wheat
would grow up and get yellow, an' the snow come, almost, before we'd get
there."

"O, dear!" she sighed. "I don't like to have it so big. Do people live
all along the whole way?"

"Yes, the whole way, and lots of big cities."

"Big as Madison?" Madison was her unseen measure of greatness.

"O, yes. A hundred times bigger."

She sighed again and looked away to the east with a strange, unchildish,
set stare in her eyes. She was trying to realize it.

"It makes me ache, pappa," she sighed, putting her little brown hand to
her throat.

When the engine came in with its thunder and whizz, she shrank back
against the station wall, white and breathless, not so much with fear as
with awe. She had never stood so close to this monster before. It
attracted all her attention so that for the moment she forgot about the
coming of her aunt.

When she looked into the large dull face of Mrs. Diehl she was deeply
disappointed. She liked her but she not love her!

She had looked forward to her coming almost as if to the return of her
mother. She had imagined her looking strange and beautiful because she
came out of the mystical, far-off land her father often spoke of.
Instead of these things Mrs. Diehl was a strong-featured, mild-voiced
woman, rather large and ungraceful, who looked upon the motherless child
and clicked her tongue--tch!

"You poor chick!"

But the thing which had happened was this: Rose had conceived of
distance and great cities.

The next day she said: "Pappa John, I want to go way up on the bluffs. I
want to go up to Table Rock where I can see way, way off."

"It's a long climb up there, Rosie. You'll get tired."

But Rosie insisted and together they climbed the hill. Up beyond the
pasture--beyond the black-berry patch--beyond the clinging birches in
their white jackets--up where the rocks cropped out of the ground and
where curious little wave-worn pebbles lay scattered on the scant grass.

Once a glittering rattle-snake lying in the sun awoke, and slipped under
a stone like a stream of golden oil, and the child shrank against her
father's thigh in horror.

They climbed slowly up the steep grassy <DW72> and stood at last on the
flat rock which topped the bluff. Rose stood there, dizzy, out of
breath, with her hair blown across her cheek and looked away, at the
curving valley and its river gleaming here and there through the willows
and elders. It was like looking over an unexplored world to the child.
Her eyes expanded and her heart filled with the same ache which came
into it when she looked down along the curving railway track. She turned
suddenly and fell sobbing against her father.

"Why, Rosie, what's the matter? Poor little girl--she's all tired out,
climbin' up here." He sat down and took her on his lap and talked to her
of the valley below and where the river went--but she would not look up
again.

"I want to go home," she said with hidden face.

On the way down, John rolled a big stone down the hill and as it went
bounding, crashing into the forest below, a deer drifted out like a gray
shadow and swept along the hillside and over the ridge.

Rose saw it as if in a dream.