“Oh, dearie, you don’t understand me!
I’m sure she’s a good girl. I mean
she’s green, and I hope that none of these horrid
young men that there are around town will get her
into trouble! It’s their parents’
fault, letting them run wild and hear evil things.
If I had my way there wouldn’t be none of them,
not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know anything
about—about things till they was married.
It’s terrible the bald way that some folks talk.
It just shows and gives away what awful thoughts they
got inside them, and there’s nothing can cure
them except coming right to God and kneeling down
like I do at prayer-meeting every Wednesday evening,
and saying, ’O God, I would be a miserable sinner
except for thy grace.’
“I’d make every last one of these brats
go to Sunday School and learn to think about nice
things ’stead of about cigarettes and goings-on—and
these dances they have at the lodges are the worst
thing that ever happened to this town, lot of young
men squeezing girls and finding out——Oh,
it’s dreadful. I’ve told the mayor
he ought to put a stop to them and——There
was one boy in this town, I don’t want to be
suspicious or uncharitable but——”
It was half an hour before Carol escaped.
She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously:
“If that woman is on the side of the angels,
then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the
devil. But—isn’t she like me?
She too wants to ‘reform the town’!
She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the
men are vulgar and limited! Am I likeher? This is ghastly!”
That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage
with Kennicott; she urged him to play; and she worked
up a hectic interest in land-deals and Sam Clark.
VIII
In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph
of Nels Erdstrom’s baby and log cabin, but she
had never seen the Erdstroms. They had become
merely “patients of the doctor.” Kennicott
telephoned her on a mid-December afternoon, “Want
to throw your coat on and drive out to Erdstrom’s
with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice.”
“Oh yes!” She hastened to put on woolen
stockings, high boots, sweater, muffler, cap, mittens.
The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard
for the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high
carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen
cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo
robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used ever since the
bison herds had streaked the prairie a few miles to
the west.
The scattered houses between which they passed in
town were small and desolate in contrast to the expanse
of huge snowy yards and wide street. They crossed
the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm
country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds
of steam, and started to trot. The carriage squeaked
in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of “There
boy, take it easy!” He was thinking. He
paid no attention to Carol. Yet it was he who
commented, “Pretty nice, over there,” as
they approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight
quivered in the hollow between two snow-drifts.
