The Wizard's Daughter, and Other Stories

Her son jerked the lines impatiently, and the colt gave a nervous start.

"I suppose you know this farm really came to you from your paw, don't you, Jason?" she asked humbly.

"Don't know as I did," answered the man, without enthusiasm.

"Well, you see, after we was married, your grandfather Weaver offered your paw this quarter-section if he'd stay here in Ioway; but he had his heart set on going to Californay, and didn't want it; so after it turned out the way it did, and you was born, your grandfather gave me this farm, and I done very well with it. That's the reason your step-paw insisted on you having it when we was dividing things up before he died."

"Seems to me father worked pretty hard on this place himself."

The man said the word "father" half defiantly.

"Mr. Moxom? Oh, yes, he was a first-rate manager, and the kindest man that ever drew breath. I remember when your sister Angie was born – oh, dear me!" – the old woman felt her voice giving way, and stopped an instant, – "it seems so kind of strange. Well, I guess we'd better just drop it, Jason. I must go back to the house. Emma didn't like my coming for lettuce. She'll think I've planted some, and am waitin' for it to come up."

She gave her son a quivering smile as she turned away. He stood still and watched her until she had crossed the plowed ground. It seemed to him she walked more feebly than when she came out.

"That's awful queer," he said, shaking his head, "calling her own daughters 'the Moxom girls.'"

III

Ethel Weaver had been to Ashland for the mail, and was driving home in the summer dusk. A dash of rain had fallen while she was in the village, and the air was full of the odor of moist earth and the sweetness of growing corn. The colt she was driving held his head high, glancing from side to side with youthful eagerness for a sensation, and shying at nothing now and then in sheer excess of emotion over the demand of his monotonous life.

The girl held a letter in her lap, turning the pages with one unincumbered hand, and lifting her flushed face with a contemptuous "Oh, Barney, you goose!" as the colt drew himself into attitudes of quivering fright, which dissolved suddenly at the sound of her voice and the knowledge that another young creature viewed his coquettish terrors with the disrespect born of comprehension. As they turned into the lane west of the house, Ethel folded her letter and thrust it hastily into her pocket, and the colt darted through the open gate and drew up at the side door with a transparent assumption of serious purpose suggested by the proximity of oats.

"Ed!" called the girl, "the next time you hitch up Barney for me, I wish you'd put a kicking-strap on him. I had a picnic with him coming down the hill by Arbuckle's."

Ed maintained the gruff silence of the half-grown rural male as he climbed into the buggy beside his sister and cramped the wheel for her to dismount.

"They haven't any quart jars over at the store, mother," said Ethel, entering the house and walking across to the mirror to remove her hat. "They're expecting some every day. Well, I do look like the Witch of Endor!" she exclaimed, twisting her loosened rope of hair and skewering it in place with a white celluloid pin. "That colt acted as if he was possessed."

"Oh, I'm sorry about the jars," said Mrs. Weaver regretfully. "I wanted to finish putting up the curr'n's to-morrow."

"Did you get any mail?" quavered grandmother Moxom.

"I got a letter from Rob."

There was a little hush in the room. The girl stood still before the mirror, with a sense of support in the dim reflection of her own face.

"Is he well?" ventured the old woman feebly, glancing toward her daughter-in-law.

"Yes, he's well; he's got steady work on some road up the mountain. He writes as if people keep going up, but he never tells what they go up for. He said something about a lot of burros, and at first I thought he was in a furniture store, but I found out he meant mules. An old man keeps them, and hires them out to people. Rob calls him 'old Mosey.' They're keeping bach together. Rob tried to make biscuits, and he says they tasted like castor oil."

As her granddaughter talked, Mrs. Moxom seemed to shrink deeper and deeper into the patchwork cushion of her chair.

"Rob wants me to come out there and be married," pursued the girl, bending nearer to the mirror and returning her own gaze with sympathy.

"Why, Ethel!" Mrs. Weaver's voice was full of astonished disapproval. "I should think you'd be ashamed to say such a thing."

"I didn't say it; Rob said it," returned the girl, making a little grimace at herself in the glass.

"Well, I have my opinion of a young man that will say such a thing to a girl. If a girl's worth having, she's worth coming after."

Mrs. Weaver made this latter announcement with an air of triumph in its triteness. Her daughter gave a little sniff of contempt.

"Well, if a fellow's worth having, isn't he worth going to?" she asked with would-be flippancy.

"Why, Ethel Imogen Weaver!" Mrs. Weaver repeated her daughter's name slowly, as if she hoped its length might arouse in the owner some sense of her worth. "I never did hear the like."

The girl left the mirror, and seated herself in a chair in front of her mother.

"It'll cost Rob a hundred dollars to come here and go back to California, and a hundred dollars goes a long way toward fixing up. Besides, he'll lose his job. I'd just as soon go out there as have him come here. If people don't like it they – they needn't."

The girl's fresh young voice began to thicken, and she glanced about in restless search of diversion from impending tears.

"Well, girls do act awful strange these days."

Mrs. Weaver took warning from her daughter's tone and divided her disapproval by multiplying its denominator.

"Yes, they do. They act sometimes as if they had a little sense," retorted Ethel huskily.

"Well, I don't know as I call it sense to pick up and run after a man, even if you're engaged to him; do you, mother?"

Old Mrs. Moxom started nervously at her daughter-in-law's appeal.

"Well, it does seem a long way to go on – on an uncertainty, Ethel," she faltered.

The girl turned a flushed, indignant face upon her grandmother.

"Well, I hope you don't mean to call Rob an uncertainty?" she demanded angrily.

"Oh, no; I don't mean that," pleaded the old woman. "I haven't got anything agen' Rob. I don't suppose he's any more uncertain than – than the rest of them. I" —

"Why, grandmother Moxom," interrupted the girl, "how you talk! I'm sure father isn't an uncertainty, and there wasn't anything uncertain about grandfather Moxom. To tell the honest truth, I think they're just about as certain as we are."

The old woman got up and began to move the chairs about with purposeless industry.

"It's awful hard to know what to do sometimes," she said, indulging in a generality that might be mollifying, but was scarcely glittering.

"Well, it isn't hard for me to know this time," said Mrs. Weaver, her features drawn into a look of pudgy determination. "No girl of mine shall ever go traipsing off to California alone on any such wild-goose chase."

Ethel got up and moved toward the stairway, her tawny head thrown back, and an eloquent accentuation of heel in her tread.

"I just believe old folks like for young folks to be foolish and wasteful," she said over her shoulder, "so they can have something to nag them about. I'm sure I" – She slammed the door upon her voice, which seemed to be carried upward in a little whirlwind of indignation.

Mrs. Weaver glanced at her mother-in-law for sympathy, but the old woman refused to meet her gaze.

"I'm just real mad at Rob Kendall for suggesting such a thing and getting Ethel all worked up," clucked the younger woman anxiously.

Mrs. Moxom came back to her chair as aimlessly as she had left it.