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THE DESERT AND THE SOWN


By Mary Hallock Foote




CONTENTS


I. A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS

II. INTRODUCING A SON-IN-LAW

III. THE INITIAL LOVE

IV. "A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT"

V. DISINHERITED

VI. AN APPEAL TO NATURE

VII. MARKING TIME

VIII. A HUNTER'S DIARY

IX. THE POWER OF WEAKNESS

X. THE WHITE PERIL

XI. A SEARCHING OF HEARTS

XII. THE BLOOD-WITE

XIII. CURTAIN

XIV. KIND INQUIRIES

XV. A BRIDEGROOM OF SNOW

XVI. THE NATURE OF AN OATH

XVII. THE HIDDEN TRAIL

XVIII.THE STAR IN THE EAST

XIX. PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS

XX. A STATION IN THE DESERT

XXI. INJURIOUS REPORTS CONCERNING AN OLD HOUSE

XXII. THE CASE STRIKES IN

XXIII.RESTIVENESS

XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER

XXV. THE FELL FROST

XXVI. PEACE TO THIS HOUSE




I


A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS

It was an evening of sudden mildness following a dry October gale.
The colonel had miscalculated the temperature by one log--only one, he
declared, but that had proved a pitchy one, and the chimney bellowed
with flame. From end to end the room was alight with it, as if the
stored-up energies of a whole pine-tree had been sacrificed in the
consumption of that four-foot stick.

The young persons of the house had escaped, laughing, into the fresh
night air, but the colonel was hemmed in on every side; deserted by
his daughter, mocked by the work of his own hands, and torn between the
duties of a host and the host's helpless craving for his after-dinner
cigar.

Across the hearth, filling with her silks all the visible room in his
own favorite settle corner, sat the one woman on earth it most behooved
him to be civil to,--the future mother-in-law of his only child. That
Moya was a willing, nay, a reckless hostage, did not lessen her father's
awe of the situation.

Mrs. Bogardus, according to her wont at this hour, was composedly doing
nothing. The colonel could not make his retreat under cover of her real
or feigned absorption in any of the small scattering pursuits which
distract the female mind. When she read she read--she never "looked at
books." When she sewed she sewed--presumably, but no one ever saw her
do it. Her mind was economic and practical, and she saved it whole, like
many men of force, for whatever she deemed her best paying sphere of
action.

It was a silence that crackled with heat! The colonel, wrathfully
perspiring in the glow of that impenitent stick, frowned at it like
an inquisitor. Presently Mrs. Bogardus looked up, and her expression
softened as she saw the energetic despair upon his face.

"Colonel, don't you always smoke after dinner?"

"That is my bad habit, madam. I belong to the generation that
smokes--after dinner and most other times--more than is good for us."
Colonel Middleton belonged also to the generation that can carry a
sentence through to the finish in handsome style, and he did it with a
suave Virginian accent as easy as his seat in the saddle. Mrs. Bogardus
always gave him her respectful attention during his best performances,
though she was a woman of short sentences herself.

"Don't you smoke in this room sometimes?" she asked, with a barely
perceptible sniff the merest contraction of her housewifely nostrils.

"Ah--h! Those rascally curtains and cushions! You ladies--women,
I should say--Moya won't let me say ladies--you bolster us up with
comforts on purpose to betray us!"

"You can say 'ladies' to me," smiled the very handsome one before him.
"That's the generation _I_ belong to."

The colonel bowed playfully. "Well, you know, I don't detect myself, but
there's no doubt I have infected the premises."

"Open fires are good ventilators. I wish you would smoke now. If you
don't, I shall have to go away, and I'm exceedingly comfortable."

"You are exceedingly charming to say so--on top of that last stick,
too!" The colonel had Irish as well as Virginian progenitors. "Well," he
sighed, proceeding to make himself conditionally happy, "Moya will never
forgive me! We spoil each other shamefully when we're alone, but of
course we try to jack each other up when company comes. It's a great
comfort to have some one to spoil, isn't it, now? I needn't ask which it
is in your family!"

"The spoiled one?" Mrs. Bogardus smiled rather coldly. "A woman we had
for governess, when Christine was a little thing, used to say: 'That
child is the stuff that tyrants are made of!' Tyrants are made by the
will of their subjects, don't you think, generally speaking?"

"Well, you couldn't have made a tyrant of your son, Mrs. Bogardus. He's
the Universal Spoiler! He'll ruin my striker, Jephson. I shall have to
send the fellow back to the ranks. I don't know how you keep a servant
good for anything with Paul around."

"Paul thinks he doesn't like to be waited on," Paul's mother observed
shrewdly. "He says that only invalids, old people, and children have any
claim on the personal service of others."

"By George! I found