_ BOOK III. THE DAY OF THE CATTLE
CHAPTER XX. THE HALFWAY HOUSE
"Miss Ma'y Ellen," cried Aunt Lucy, thrusting her head in at the door, "oh, Miss Ma'y Ellen, I wish't you'd come out yer right quick. They's two o' them prai' dogs out yer a-chasin' ouah hens agin--nasty, dirty things!"
"Very well, Lucy," called out a voice in answer. Mary Ellen arose from her seat near the window, whence she had been gazing out over the wide, flat prairie lands and at the blue, unwinking sky. Her step was free and strong, but had no hurry of anxiety. It was no new thing for these "prairie dogs," as Aunt Lucy persisted in calling the coyotes, to chase the chickens boldly up to the very door. These marauding wolves had at first terrified her, but in her life on the prairies she had learned to know them better. Gathering each a bit of stick, she and Aunt Lucy drove away the two grinning daylight thieves, as they had done dozens of times before their kin, all eager for a taste of this new feathered game that had come in upon the range. With plenteous words of admonition, the two corralled the excited but terror-stricken speckled hen, which had been the occasion of the trouble, driving her back within the gates of the inclosure they had found a necessity for the preservation of the fowls of their "hen ranch." Once inside the protecting walls, the erring one raised her feathers in great anger and stalked away in high dudgeon, clucking out anathemas against a country where a law-abiding hen could not venture a quarter of a mile from home, even at the season when bugs were juiciest.
"It's that same Domineck, isn't it, Lucy?" said Mary Ellen, leaning over the fence and gazing at the fowls.
"Yess'm, that same ole hen, blame her fool soul! She's mo' bother'n she's wuf. I 'clare, ever' time I takes them er' chickens out fer a walk that ole Sar' Ann hen, she boun' fer to go off by herse'f somewheres, she's that briggotty; an' first thing I knows, dar she is in trouble again--low down, no 'count thing, I say!"
"Poor old Sarah!" said Mary Ellen. "Why, Aunt Lucy, she's raised more chickens than any hen we've got."
"Thass all right, Miss Ma'y Ellen, thass all right, so she have, but she made twict as much trouble as any hen we got, too. We kin git two dollahs fer her cooked, an' seems like long's she's erlive she boun' fer ter keep me chasin' 'roun' after her. I 'clare, she jest keep the whole lot o' ouah chickens wore down to a frazzle, she traipsin 'roun' all the time, an' them a-follerin' her. Jess like some womenfolks. They gad 'roun' so much they kain't git no flesh ontoe 'em. An', of co'se," she added argumentatively, "we all got to keep up the reppytation o' ouah cookin'. I kain't ask these yer men a dollah a meal--not fer no lean ole hen wif no meat ontoe her bones--no, ma'am."
Aunt Lucy spoke with professional pride and with a certain right to authority. The reputation of the Halfway House ran from the Double Forks of the Brazos north to Abilene, and much of the virtue of the table was dependent upon the resources of this "hen ranch," whose fame was spread abroad throughout the land. Saved by the surpassing grace of pie and "chicken fixings," the halting place chosen for so slight reason by Buford and his family had become a permanent abode, known gratefully to many travellers and productive of more than a living for those who had established it. It was, after all, the financial genius of Aunt Lucy, accustomed all her life to culinary problems, that had foreseen profit in eggs and chickens when she noted the exalted joy with which the hungry cow-punchers fell upon a meal of this sort after a season of salt pork, tough beef, and Dutch-oven bread.
At first Major Buford rebelled at the thought of innkeeping. His family had kept open house before the war, and he came from a land where the thoughts of hospitality and of price were not to be mentioned in the same day. Yet all about him lay the crude conditions of a raw, new country. At best he could get no product from the land for many months, and then but a problematical one. He was in a region where each man did many things, and first that thing which seemed nearest at hand to be done. It was the common sense of old Aunt Lucy which discovered the truth of the commercial proposition that what a man will pay for a given benefit is what he ought to pay. Had Aunt Lucy asked the cow-punchers even twice her tariff for a pie they would have paid it gladly. Had Mary Ellen asked them for their spurs and saddles, the latter would have been laid down.
From the Halfway House south to the Red River there was nothing edible. And over this Red River there came now swarming uncounted thousands of broad-horned cattle, driven by many bodies of hardy, sunburned, beweaponed, hungry men. At Ellisville, now rapidly becoming an important cattle market, the hotel accommodations were more pretentious than comfortable, and many a cowman who had sat at the board of the Halfway House going up the trail, would mount his horse and ride back daily twenty-five miles for dinner. Such are the attractions of corn bread and chicken when prepared by the hands of a real genius gone astray on this much-miscooked world.
Many other guests were among those "locators," who came out to Ellisville and drove to the south in search of "claims." These usually travelled over the route of Sam, the stage-driver, who carried the mail to Plum Centre during its life, and who never failed to sound the praises of the Halfway House. Thus the little Southern family quickly found itself possessed of a definite, profitable, and growing business. Buford was soon able to employ aid in making his improvements. He constructed a large dugout, after the fashion of the dwelling most common in the country at that time, This manner of dwelling, practically a roofed-over cellar, its side-walls showing but a few feet above the level of the earth, had been discovered to be a very practical and comfortable form of living place by those settlers who found a region practically barren of timber, and as yet unsupplied with brick or boards. In addition to the main dugout there was a rude barn built of sods, and towering high above the squat buildings rose the frame of the first windmill on the cattle trail, a landmark for many miles. Seeing these things growing up about him, at the suggestion and partly through the aid of his widely scattered but kind-hearted neighbours, Major Buford began to take on heart of grace. He foresaw for his people an independence, rude and far below their former plane of life, it was true, yet infinitely better than a proud despair.
It was perhaps the women who suffered most in the transition from older lands to this new, wild region. The barren and monotonous prospect, the high-keyed air and the perpetual winds, thinned and wore out the fragile form of Mrs. Buford. This impetuous, nerve-wearing air was much different from the soft, warm winds of the flower-laden South. At night as she lay down to sleep she did not hear the tinkle of music nor the voice of night-singing birds, which in the scenes of her girlhood had been familiar sounds. The moan of the wind in the short, hard grass was different from its whisper in the peach trees, and the shrilling of the coyotes made but rude substitute for the trill of the love-bursting mocking bird that sang its myriad song far back in old Virginia.
Aunt Lucy's soliloquizing songs, when she ceased the hymns of her fervid Methodism, turned always to that far-off, gentle land where life had been so free from anxiety or care. Of Dixie, of the Potomac, of old Kentucky, of the "Mississip'," of the land of Tennessee--a score of songs of exile would flow unconscious from her lips, until at last, bethinking to herself, she would fall to weeping, covering her face with her apron and refusing to be comforted by any hand but that of Mary Ellen, the "young Miss Beecham," whose fortunes she had followed to the end of the world.
Sometimes at night Mrs. Buford and her niece sang together the songs of the old South, Mary Ellen furnishing accompaniment with her guitar. They sang together, here beneath the surface of this sweeping sea of land, out over which the red eye of their home looked wonderingly. And sometimes Mary Ellen sang to her guitar alone, too often songs which carried her back to a morbid, mental state, from which not even the high voice of this glad, new land could challenge her. Very far away to her seemed even the graves of Louisburg. Father, mother, brothers, lover, every kin of earth nearest to her, had not death claimed them all? What was there left, what was there to be hoped here, cast away on this sea of land, this country that could never be a land of homes? Sad doctrine, this, for a young woman in her early twenties, five feet five, with the peach on her cheek in spite of the burning wind, and hands that reached out for every little ailing chicken, for every kitten, or puppy that wanted comforting.
But when the morning came and the sun rose, and the blue sky smiled, and all the earth seemed to be vibrant with some high-keyed summoning note--how difficult then it was to be sad! How far away indeed seemed the once-familiar scenes! How hard it was not to hope, here in this land of self-reliance and belief! It was the horror of Mary Ellen's soul that when this sun shone she could not be sad. This land, this crude, forbidding, fascinating land--what was there about it that swept her along against her will? _