New Chronicles of Rebecca

Mrs. Baxter was looking at the sun one evening as it dropped like a ball of red fire into Wilkins’s woods, when the Little Prophet passed.

“It’s the twenty-ninth night,” he called joyously.

“I am so glad,” she answered, for she had often feared some accident might prevent his claiming the promised reward. “Then tomorrow Buttercup will be your own cow?”

“I guess so. That’s what Mr. Came said. He’s off to Acreville now, but he’ll be home tonight, and father’s going to send my new hat by him. When Buttercup’s my own cow I wish I could change her name and call her Red Rover, but p’r’aps her mother wouldn’t like it. When she b’longs to me, mebbe I won’t be so fraid of gettin’ hooked and scrunched, because she’ll know she’s mine, and she’ll go better. I haven’t let her get snarled up in the rope one single time, and I don’t show I’m afraid, do I?”

“I should never suspect it for an instant,” said Mrs. Baxter encouragingly. “I’ve often envied you your bold, brave look!”

Elisha appeared distinctly pleased. “I haven’t cried, either, when she’s dragged me over the pasture bars and peeled my legs. Bill Petes’s little brother Charlie says he ain’t afraid of anything, not even bears. He says he would walk right up close and cuff em if they dared to yip; but I ain’t like that! He ain’t scared of elephants or tigers or lions either; he says they’re all the same as frogs or chickens to him!”

Rebecca told her Aunt Miranda that evening that it was the Prophet’s twenty-ninth night, and that the big red cow was to be his on the morrow.

“Well, I hope it’ll turn out that way,” she said. “But I ain’t a mite sure that Cassius Came will give up that cow when it comes to the point. It won’t be the first time he’s tried to crawl out of a bargain with folks a good deal bigger than Lisha, for he’s terrible close, Cassius is. To be sure he’s stiff in his joints and he’s glad enough to have a boy to take the cow to the pasture in summer time, but he always has hired help when it comes harvestin’. So Lisha’ll be no use from this on; and I dare say the cow is Abner Simpson’s anyway. If you want a walk tonight, I wish you’d go up there and ask Mis’ Came if she’ll lend me an’ your Aunt Jane half her yeast-cake. Tell her we’ll pay it back when we get ours a Saturday. Don’t you want to take Thirza Meserve with you? She’s alone as usual while Huldy’s entertainin’ beaux on the side porch. Don’t stay too long at the parsonage!”

III

Rebecca was used to this sort of errand, for the whole village of Riverboro would sometimes be rocked to the very centre of its being by simultaneous desire for a yeast-cake. As the nearest repository was a mile and a half distant, as the yeast-cake was valued at two cents and wouldn’t keep, as the demand was uncertain, being dependent entirely on a fluctuating desire for “riz bread,” the storekeeper refused to order more than three yeast-cakes a day at his own risk. Sometimes they remained on his hands a dead loss; sometimes eight or ten persons would “hitch up” and drive from distant farms for the coveted article, only to be met with the flat, “No, I’m all out o’ yeast-cake; Mis’ Simmons took the last; mebbe you can borry half o’ hern, she hain’t much of a bread-eater.”

So Rebecca climbed the hills to Mrs. Came’s, knowing that her daily bread depended on the successful issue of the call.

Thirza was barefooted, and tough as her little feet were, the long walk over the stubble fields tired her. When they came within sight of the Came barn, she coaxed Rebecca to take a short cut through the turnips growing in long, beautifully weeded rows.

“You know Mr. Came is awfully cross, Thirza, and can’t bear anybody to tread on his crops or touch a tree or a bush that belongs to him. I’m kind of afraid, but come along and mind you step softly in between the rows and hold up your petticoat, so you can’t possibly touch the turnip plants. I’ll do the same. Skip along fast, because then we won’t leave any deep footprints.”

The children passed safely and noiselessly along, their pleasure a trifle enhanced by the felt dangers of their progress. Rebecca knew that they were doing no harm, but that did not prevent her hoping to escape the gimlet eye of Mr. Came.

As they neared the outer edge of the turnip patch they paused suddenly, petticoats in air.

A great clump of elderberry bushes hid them from the barn, but from the other side of the clump came the sound of conversation: the timid voice of the Little Prophet and the gruff tones of Cassius Came.

Rebecca was afraid to interrupt, and too honest to wish to overhear. She could only hope the man and the boy would pass on to the house as they talked, so she motioned to the paralyzed Thirza to take two more steps and stand with her behind the elderberry bushes. But no! In a moment they heard Mr. Came drag a stool over beside the grindstone as he said:

“Well, now Elisha Jeremiah, we’ll talk about the red cow. You say you’ve drove her a month, do ye? And the trade between us was that if you could drive her a month, without her getting the rope over her foot and without bein’ afraid, you was to have her. That’s straight, ain’t it?”

The Prophet’s face burned with excitement, his gingham shirt rose and fell as if he were breathing hard, but he only nodded assent and said nothing.

“Now,” continued Mr. Came, “have you made out to keep the rope from under her feet?”

“She ain’t got t-t-tangled up one s-single time,” said Elisha, stuttering in his excitement, but looking up with some courage from his bare toes, with which he was assiduously threading the grass.

“So far, so good. Now bout bein’ afraid. As you seem so certain of gettin’ the cow, I suppose you hain’t been a speck scared, hev you? Honor bright, now!”

“I—I—not but just a little mite. I”—

“Hold up a minute. Of course you didn’t SAY you was afraid, and didn’t SHOW you was afraid, and nobody knew you WAS afraid, but that ain’t the way we fixed it up. You was to call the cow your’n if you could drive her to the pasture for a month without BEIN’ afraid. Own up square now, hev you be’n afraid?”

A long pause, then a faint, “Yes.”

“Where’s your manners?”

“I mean yes, sir.”

“How often? If it hain’t be’n too many times mebbe I’ll let ye off, though you’re a reg’lar girl-boy, and’ll be runnin’ away from the cat bimeby. Has it be’n—twice?”

“Yes,” and the Little Prophet’s voice was very faint now, and had a decided tear in it.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Has it be’n four times?”

“Y-es, sir.” More heaving of the gingham shirt.

“Well, you AIR a thunderin’ coward! How many times? Speak up now.”

More digging of the bare toes in the earth, and one premonitory tear drop stealing from under the downcast lids, then,—

“A little, most every day, and you can keep the cow,” wailed the Prophet, as he turned abruptly and fled behind the shed, where he flung himself into the green depths of a tansy bed, and gave himself up to unmanly sobs.

Cassius Came gave a sort of shamefaced guffaw at the abrupt departure of the boy, and went on into the house, while Rebecca and Thirza made a stealthy circuit of the barn and a polite and circumspect entrance through the parsonage front gate.

Rebecca told the minister’s wife what she could remember of the interview between Cassius Came and Elisha Simpson, and tender-hearted Mrs. Baxter longed to seek and comfort her Little Prophet sobbing in the tansy bed, the brand of coward on his forehead, and what was much worse, the fear in his heart that he deserved it.

Rebecca could hardly be prevented from bearding Mr. Came and openly espousing the cause of Elisha, for she was an impetuous, reckless, valiant creature when a weaker vessel was attacked or threatened unjustly.

Mrs. Baxter acknowledged that Mr. Came had been true, in a way, to his word and bargain, but she confessed that she had never heard of so cruel and hard a bargain since the days of Shylock, and it was all the worse for being made with a child.

Rebecca hurried home, her visit quite spoiled and her errand quite forgotten till she reached the brick house door, where she told her aunts, with her customary picturesqueness of speech, that she would rather eat buttermilk bread till she died than partake of food mixed with one of Mr. Came’s yeast-cakes; that it would choke her, even in the shape of good raised bread.

“That’s all very fine, Rebecky,” said her Aunt Miranda, who had a pin-prick for almost every bubble; “but don’t forget there’s two other mouths to feed in this house, and you might at least give your aunt and me the privilege of chokin’ if we feel to want to!”

IV

Mrs. Baxter finally heard from Mrs. Came, through whom all information was sure to filter if you gave it time, that her husband despised a coward, that he considered Elisha a regular mother’s-apron-string boy, and that he was “learnin’” him to be brave.

Bill Peters, the hired man, now drove Buttercup to pasture, though whenever Mr. Came went to Moderation or Bonnie Eagle, as he often did, Mrs. Baxter noticed that Elisha took the hired man’s place. She often joined him on these anxious expeditions, and, a like terror in both their souls, they attempted to train the red cow and give her some idea of obedience.

“If she only wouldn’t look at us that way we would get along real nicely with her, wouldn’t we?” prattled the Prophet, straggling along by her side; “and she is a splendid cow; she gives twenty-one quarts a day, and Mr. Came says it’s more’n half cream.”

The minister’s wife assented to all this, thinking that if Buttercup would give up her habit of turning completely round in the road to roll her eyes and elevate her white-tipped eyebrow, she might indeed be an enjoyable companion; but in her present state of development her society was not agreeable, even did she give sixty-one quarts of milk a day. Furthermore, when Mrs. Baxter discovered that she never did any of these reprehensible things with Bill Peters, she began to believe cows more intelligent creatures than she had supposed them to be, and she was indignant to think Buttercup could count so confidently on the weakness of a small boy and a timid woman.

One evening, when Buttercup was more than usually exasperating, Mrs. Baxter said to the Prophet, who was bracing himself to keep from being pulled into a wayside brook where Buttercup loved to dabble, “Elisha, do you know anything about the superiority of mind over matter?”

No, he didn’t, though it was not a fair time to ask the question, for he had sat down in the road to get a better purchase on the rope.

“Well, it doesn’t signify. What I mean is that we can die but once, and it is a glorious thing to die for a great principle. Give me that rope. I can pull like an ox in my present frame of mind. You run down on the opposite side of the brook, take that big stick wade right in—you are barefooted,—brandish the stick, and, if necessary, do more than brandish. I would go myself, but it is better she should recognize you as her master, and I am in as much danger as you are, anyway. She may try to hook you, of course, but you must keep waving the stick,—die brandishing, Prophet, that’s the idea! She may turn and run for me, in which case I shall run too; but I shall die running, and the minister can bury us under our favorite sweet-apple tree!”