Poor White: Chapter 8

Chapter 8

When Clara Butterworth, the daughter of Tom Butterworth, was eighteen years
old she graduated from the town high school. Until the summer of her
seventeenth year, she was a tall, strong, hard-muscled girl, shy in the
presence of strangers and bold with people she knew well. Her eyes were
extraordinarily gentle.

The Butterworth house on Medina Road stood back of an apple orchard and
there was a second orchard beside the house. The Medina Road ran south from
Bidwell and climbed gradually upward toward a country of low hills, and
from the side porch of the Butterworth house the view was magnificent.
The house itself was a large brick affair with a cupola on top and was
considered at that time the most pretentious place in the county.

Behind the house were several great barns for the horses and cattle. Most
of Tom Butterworth's farm land lay north of Bidwell, and some of his fields
were five miles from his home; but as he did not himself work the land it
did not matter. The farms were rented to men who worked them on shares.
Beside the business of farming Tom carried on other affairs. He owned two
hundred acres of hillside land near his house and, with the exception of
a few fields and a strip of forest land, it was devoted to the grazing
of sheep and cattle. Milk and cream were delivered each morning to the
householders of Bidwell by two wagons driven by his employees. A half mile
to the west of his residence there was a slaughter house on a side road and
at the edge of a field where cattle were killed for the Bidwell market. Tom
owned it and employed the men who did the killing. A creek that came down
out of the hills through one of the fields past his house had been dammed,
and south of the pond there was an ice house. He also supplied the town
with ice. In his orchards beneath the trees stood more than a hundred
beehives and every year he shipped honey to Cleveland. The farmer himself
was a man who appeared to do nothing, but his shrewd mind was always at
work. In the summer throughout the long sleepy afternoons, he drove about
over the county buying sheep and cattle, stopping to trade horses with some
farmer, dickering for new pieces of land, everlastingly busy. He had one
passion. He loved fast trotting horses, but would not humor himself by
owning one. "It's a game that only gets you into trouble and debt," he said
to his friend John Clark, the banker. "Let other men own the horses and go
broke racing them. I'll go to the races. Every fall I can go to Cleveland
to the grand circuit. If I go crazy about a horse I can bet ten dollars
he'll win. If he doesn't I'm out ten dollars. If I owned him I would maybe
be out hundreds for the expense of training and all that." The farmer was
a tall man with a white beard, broad shoulders, and rather small slender
white hands. He chewed tobacco, but in spite of the habit kept both himself
and his white beard scrupulously clean. His wife had died while he was yet
in the full vigor of life, but he had no eye for women. His mind, he once
told one of his friends, was too much occupied with his own affairs and
with thoughts of the fine horses he had seen to concern itself with any
such nonsense.

For many years the farmer did not appear to pay much attention to his
daughter Clara, who was his only child. Throughout her childhood she was
under the care of one of his five sisters, all of whom except the one who
lived with him and managed his household being comfortably married. His own
wife had been a somewhat frail woman, but his daughter had inherited his
own physical strength.

When Clara was seventeen, she and her father had a quarrel that eventually
destroyed their relationship. The quarrel began late in July. It was a busy
summer on the farms and more than a dozen men were employed about the
barns, in the delivery of ice and milk to the town, and at the slaughtering
pens a half mile away. During that summer something happened to the girl.
For hours she sat in her own room in the house reading books, or lay in
a hammock in the orchard and looked up through the fluttering leaves of
the apple trees at the summer sky. A light, strangely soft and enticing,
sometimes came into her eyes. Her figure that had been boyish and strong
began to change. As she went about the house she sometimes smiled at
nothing. Her aunt hardly noticed what was happening to her, but her father,
who all her life had seemed hardly to take account of her existence, was
interested. In her presence he began to feel like a young man. As in the
days of his courtship of her mother and before the possessive passion in
him destroyed his ability to love, he began to feel vaguely that life about
him was full of significance. Sometimes in the afternoon when he went
for one of his long drives through the country he asked his daughter to
accompany him, and although he had little to say a kind of gallantry crept
into his attitude toward the awakening girl. While she was in the buggy
with him, he did not chew tobacco, and after one or two attempts to indulge
in the habit without having the smoke blow in her face, he gave up smoking
his pipe during the drives.

Always before that summer Clara had spent the months when there was no
school in the company of the farm hands. She rode on wagons, visited the
barns, and when she grew weary of the company of older people, went into
town to spend an afternoon with one of her friends among the town girls.

In the summer of her seventeenth year she did none of these things. At the
table she ate in silence. The Butterworth household was at that time run
on the old-fashioned American plan, and the farm hands, the men who drove
the ice and milk wagons and even the men who killed and dressed cattle and
sheep, ate at the same table with Tom Butterworth, his sister, who was the
housekeeper, and his daughter. Three hired girls were employed in the house
and after all had been served they also came and took their places at
table. The older men among the farmer's employees, many of whom had known
her from childhood, had got into the habit of teasing the daughter of the
house. They made comments concerning town boys, young fellows who clerked
in stores or who were apprenticed to some tradesman and one of whom had
perhaps brought the girl home at night from a school party or from one of
the affairs called "socials" that were held at the town churches. After
they had eaten in the peculiar silent intent way common to hungry laborers,
the farm hands leaned back in their chairs and winked at each other. Two
of them began an elaborate conversation touching on some incident in the
girl's life. One of the older men, who had been on the farm for many years
and who had a reputation among the others of being something of a wit,
chuckled softly. He began to talk, addressing no one in particular. The
man's name was Jim Priest, and although the Civil War had come upon the
country when he was past forty, he had been a soldier. In Bidwell he was
looked upon as something of a rascal, but his employer was very fond of
him. The two men often talked together for hours concerning the merits
of well known trotting horses. In the war Jim had been what was called
a bounty man, and it was whispered about town that he had also been a
deserter and a bounty jumper. He did not go to town with the other men
on Saturday afternoons, and had never attempted to get into the Bidwell
chapter of the G. A. R. On Saturdays when the other farm hands washed,
shaved and dressed themselves in their Sunday clothes preparatory to the
weekly flight to town, he called one of them into the barn, slipped a
quarter into his hand, and said, "Bring me a half pint and don't you forget
it." On Sunday afternoons he crawled into the hayloft of one of the barns,
drank his weekly portion of whisky, got drunk, and sometimes did not appear
again until time to go to work on Monday morning. In the fall Jim took his
savings and went to spend a week at the grand circuit trotting meeting at
Cleveland, where he bought a costly present for his employer's daughter and
then bet the rest of his money on the races. When he was lucky he stayed on
in Cleveland, drinking and carousing until his winnings were gone.

It was Jim Priest who always led the attacks of teasing at the table, and
in the summer of her seventeenth year, when she was no longer in the mood
for such horse-play, it was Jim who brought the practice to an end. At the
table Jim leaned back in his chair, stroked his red bristly beard, now
rapidly graying, looked out of a window over Clara's head, and told a tale
concerning an attempt at suicide on the part of a young man in love with
Clara. He said the young man, a clerk in a Bidwell store, had taken a pair
of trousers from a shelf, tied one leg about his neck and the other to a
bracket in the wall. Then he jumped off a counter and had only been saved
from death because a town girl, passing the store, had seen him and had
rushed in and cut him down. "Now what do you think of that?" he cried. "He
was in love with our Clara, I tell you."

After the telling of the tale, Clara got up from the table and ran out of
the room. The farm hands joined by her father laughed heartily. Her aunt
shook her finger at Jim Priest, the hero of the occasion. "Why don't you
let her alone?" she asked.

"She'll never get married if she stays here where you make fun of every
young man who pays her any attention." At the door Clara stopped and,
turning, put out her tongue at Jim Priest. Another roar of laughter arose.
Chairs were scraped along the floor and the men filed out of the house to
go back to the work in the barns and about the farm.

In the summer when the change came over her Clara sat at the table and did
not hear the tales told by Jim Priest. She thought the farm hands who ate
so greedily were vulgar, a notion she had never had before, and wished she
did not have to eat with them. One afternoon as she lay in the hammock in
the orchard, she heard several of the men in a nearby barn discussing the
change that had come over her. Jim Priest was explaining what had happened.
"Our fun's over with Clara," he said. "Now we'll have to treat her in a new
way. She's no longer a kid. We'll have to let her alone or pretty soon she
won't speak to any of us. It's a thing that happens when a girl begins to
think about being a woman. The sap has begun to run up the tree."

The puzzled girl lay in the hammock and looked up at the sky. She thought
about Jim Priest's words and tried to understand what he meant. Sadness
crept over her and tears came into her eyes. Although she did not know what
the old man meant by the words about the sap and the tree, she did, in a
detached subconscious way, understand something of the import of the words,
and she was grateful for the thoughtfulness that had led to his telling the
others to stop trying to tease her at the table. The half worn-out old farm
hand, with the bristly beard and the strong old body, became a figure full
of significance to her mind. She remembered with gratitude that, in spite
of all of his teasing, Jim Priest had never said anything that had in any
way hurt her. In the new mood that had come upon her that meant much. A
greater hunger for understanding, love, and friendliness took possession of
her. She did not think of turning to her father or to her aunt, with whom
she had never talked of anything intimate or close to herself, but turned
instead to the crude old man. A hundred minor points in the character of
Jim Priest she had never thought of before came sharply into her mind.
In the barns he had never mistreated the animals as the other farm hands
sometimes did. When on Sunday afternoons he was drunk and went staggering
through the barns, he did not strike the horses or swear at them. She
wondered if it would be possible for her to talk to Jim Priest, to ask him
questions about life and people and what he meant by his words regarding
the sap and the tree. The farm hand was old and unmarried. She wondered if
in his youth he had ever loved a woman. She decided he had. His words about
the sap were, she was sure, in some way connected with the idea of love.
How strong his hands were. They were gnarled and rough, but there was
something beautifully powerful about them. She half wished the old man had
been her father. In his youth, in the darkness at night or when he was
alone with a girl, perhaps in a quiet wood in the late afternoon when the
sun was going down, he had put his hands on her shoulders. He had drawn the
girl to him. He had kissed her.

Clara jumped quickly out of the hammock and walked about under the trees in
the orchard. Her thoughts of Jim Priest's youth startled her. It was as
though she had walked suddenly into a room where a man and woman were
making love. Her cheeks burned and her hands trembled. As she walked slowly
through the clumps of grass and weeds that grew between the trees where the
sunlight struggled through, bees coming home to the hives heavily laden
with honey flew in droves about her head. There was something heady and
purposeful about the song of labor that arose out of the beehives. It got
into her blood and her step quickened. The words of Jim Priest that kept
running through her mind seemed a part of the same song the bees were
singing. "The sap has begun to run up the tree," she repeated aloud. How
significant and strange the words seemed! They were the kind of words a
lover might use in speaking to his beloved. She had read many novels, but
they contained no such words. It was better so. It was better to hear them
from human lips. Again she thought of Jim Priest's youth and boldly wished
he were still young. She told herself that she would like to see him young
and married to a beautiful young woman. She stopped by a fence that looked
out upon a hillside meadow. The sun seemed extraordinarily bright, the
grass in the meadow greener than she had ever seen it before. Two birds in
a tree nearby made love to each other. The female flew madly about and was
pursued by the male bird. In his eagerness he was so intent that he flew
directly before the girl's face, his wing nearly touching her cheek. She
went back through the orchard to the barns and through one of them to the
open door of a long shed that was used for housing wagons and buggies, her
mind occupied with the idea of finding Jim Priest, of standing perhaps near
him. He was not about, but in the open space before the shed, John May, a
young man of twenty-two who had just come to work on the farm, was oiling
the wheels of a wagon. His back was turned and as he handled the heavy
wagon wheels the muscles could be seen playing beneath his thin cotton
shirt. "It is so Jim Priest must have looked in his youth," the girl
thought.

The farm girl wanted to approach the young man, to speak to him, to ask him
questions concerning many strange things in life she did not understand.
She knew that under no circumstances would she be able to do such a thing,
that it was but a meaningless dream that had come into her head, but the
dream was sweet. She did not, however, want to talk to John May. At the
moment she was in a girlish period of being disgusted at what she thought
of as the vulgarity of the men who worked on the place. At the table they
ate noisily and greedily like hungry animals. She wanted youth that was
like her own youth, crude and uncertain perhaps, but reaching eagerly out
into the unknown. She wanted to draw very near to something young, strong,
gentle, insistent, beautiful. When the farm hand looked up and saw her
standing and looking intently at him, she was embarrassed. For a moment the
two young animals, so unlike each other, stood staring at each other and
then, to relieve her embarrassment, Clara began to play a game. Among the
men employed on the farm she had always passed for something of a tomboy.
In the hayfields and in the barns she had wrestled and fought playfully
with both the old and the young men. To them she had always been a
privileged person. They liked her and she was the boss's daughter. One did
not get rough with her or say or do rough things. A basket of corn stood
just within the door of the shed, and running to it Clara took an ear of
the yellow corn and threw it at the farm hand. It struck a post of the barn
just above his head. Laughing shrilly Clara ran into the shed among the
wagons, and the farm hand pursued her.

John May was a very determined man. He was the son of a laborer in Bidwell
and for two or three years had been employed about the stable of a doctor,
something had happened between him and the doctor's wife and he had left
the place because he had a notion that the doctor was becoming suspicious.
The experience had taught him the value of boldness in dealing with women.
Ever since he had come to work on the Butterworth farm, he had been having
thoughts regarding the girl who had now, he imagined, given him direct
challenge. He was a little amazed by her boldness but did not stop to ask
himself questions, she had openly invited him to pursue her. That was
enough. His accustomed awkwardness and clumsiness went away and he leaped
lightly over the extended tongues of wagons and buggies. He caught Clara
in dark corner of the shed. Without a word he took her tightly into his
arms and kissed her, first upon the neck and then on the mouth. She lay
trembling and weak in his arms and he took hold of the collar of her dress
and tore it open. Her brown neck and one of her hard, round breasts were
exposed. Clara's eyes grew big with fright. Strength came back into her
body. With her sharp hard little fist she struck John May in the face; and
when he stepped back she ran quickly out of the shed. John May did not
understand. He thought she had sought him out once and would return. "She's
a little green. I was too fast. I scared her. Next time I'll go a little
easy," he thought.

Clara ran through the barn and then walked slowly to the house and went
upstairs to her own room. A farm dog followed her up the stairs and stood
at her door wagging his tail. She shut the door in his face. For the moment
everything that lived and breathed seemed to her gross and ugly. Her cheeks
were pale and she pulled shut the blinds to the window and sat down on the
bed, overcome with the strange new fear of life. She did not want even the
sunlight to come into her presence. John May had followed her through the
barn and now stood in the barnyard staring at the house. She could see him
through the cracks of the blinds and wished it were possible to kill him
with a gesture of her hand.

The farm hand, full of male confidence, waited for her to come to the
window and look down at him. He wondered if there were any one else in the
house. Perhaps she would beckon to him. Something of the kind had happened
between him and the doctor's wife and it had turned out that way. When
after five or ten minutes he did not see her, he went back to the work of
oiling the wagon wheels. "It's going to be a slower thing. She's shy, a
green girl," he told himself.

One evening a week later Clara sat on the side porch of the house with her
father when John May came into the barnyard. It was a Wednesday evening and
the farm hands were not in the habit of going into town until Saturday, but
he was dressed in his Sunday clothes and had shaved and oiled his hair. On
the occasion of a wedding or a funeral the laborers put oil in their hair.
It was indicative of something very important about to happen. Clara looked
at him, and in spite of the feeling of repugnance that swept over her, her
eyes glistened. Ever since the affair in the barn she had managed to avoid
meeting him but she was not afraid. He had in fact taught her something.
There was a power within her with which she could conquer men. The touch
of her father's shrewdness, that was a part of her nature, had come to her
rescue. She wanted to laugh at the silly pretensions of the man, to make a
fool of him. Her cheeks flushed with pride in her mastery of the situation.

John May walked almost to the house and then turned along the path that
led to the road. He made a gesture with his hand and by chance Tom
Butterworth, who had been looking off across the open country toward
Bidwell, turned and saw both the movement and the leering confident smile
on the farm hand's face. He arose and followed John May into the road,
astonishment and anger fighting for possession of him. The two men stood
talking for three minutes in the road before the house and then returned.
The farm hand went to the barn and then came back along the path to the
road carrying under his arm a grain bag containing his work clothes. He did
not look up as he went past. The farmer returned to the porch.

The misunderstanding that was to wreck the tender relationship that had
begun to grow up between father and daughter began on that evening. Tom
Butterworth was furious. He muttered and clinched his fists. Clara's heart
beat heavily. For some reason she felt guilty, as though she had been
caught in an intrigue with the man. For a long time her father remained
silent and then he, like the farm hand, made a furious and brutal attack on
her. "Where have you been with that fellow? What you been up to?" he asked
harshly.

For a time Clara did not answer her father's question. She wanted to
scream, to strike him in the face with her fist as she had struck the man
in the shed. Then her mind struggled to take hold of the new situation. The
fact that her father had accused her of seeking the thing that had happened
made her hate John May less heartily. She had some one else to hate.

Clara did not think the matter out clearly on that first evening but, after
denying that she had ever been anywhere with John May, burst into tears and
ran into the house. In the darkness of her own room she began to think of
her father's words. For some reason she could not understand, the attack
made on her spirit seemed more terrible and unforgivable than the attack
upon her body made by the farm hand in the shed. She began to understand
vaguely that the young man had been confused by her presence on that warm
sunshiny afternoon as she had been confused by the words uttered by Jim
Priest, by the song of the bees in the orchard, by the love-making of the
birds, and by her own uncertain thoughts. He had been confused and he
was stupid and young. There had been an excuse for his confusion. It was
understandable and could be dealt with. She had now no doubt of her own
ability to deal with John May. As for her father--it was all right for him
to be suspicious regarding the farm hand, but why had he been suspicious of
her?

The perplexed girl sat down in the darkness on the edge of the bed, and a
hard look came into her eyes. After a time her father came up the stairs
and knocked at her door. He did not come in but stood in the hallway
outside and talked. She remained calm while the conversation lasted, and
that confused the man who had expected to find her in tears. That she was
not seemed to him an evidence of guilt.

Tom Butterworth, in many ways a shrewd, observing man, never understood the
quality of his own daughter. He was an intensely possessive man and once,
when he was newly married, there had been a suspicion in his mind that
there was something between his wife and a young man who had worked on the
farm where he then lived. The suspicion was unfounded, but he discharged
the man and one evening, when his wife had gone into town to do some
shopping and did not return at the accustomed time, he followed, and when
he saw her on the street stepped into a store to avoid a meeting. She was
in trouble. Her horse had become suddenly lame and she had to walk home.
Without letting her see him the husband followed along the road. It was
dark and she heard the footsteps in the road behind her and becoming
frightened ran the last half mile to her own house. He waited until she
had entered and then followed her in, pretending he had just come from the
barns. When he heard her story of the accident to the horse and of her
fright in the road he was ashamed; but as the horse, that had been left in
a livery stable, seemed all right when he went for it the next day he
became suspicious again.

As he stood outside the door of his daughter's room, the farmer felt as he
had felt that evening long before when he followed his wife along the road.
When on the porch downstairs he had looked up suddenly and had seen the
gesture made by the farm hand, he had also looked quickly at his daughter.
She looked confused and, he thought, guilty. "Well, it is the same thing
over again," he thought bitterly, "like mother, like daughter--they are
both of the same stripe." Getting quickly out of his chair he had followed
the young man into the road and had discharged him. "Go, to-night. I don't
want to see you on the place again," he said. In the darkness before the
girl's room he thought of many bitter things he wanted to say. He forgot
she was a girl and talked to her as he might have talked to a mature,
sophisticated, and guilty woman. "Come," he said, "I want to know the
truth. If you have been with that farm hand you are starting young. Has
anything happened between you?"

Clara walked to the door and confronted her father. The hatred of him, born
in that hour and that never left her, gave her strength. She did not know
what he was talking about, but had a keen sense of the fact that he, like
the stupid, young man in the shed, was trying to violate something very
precious in her nature. "I don't know what you are talking about," she said
calmly, "but I know this. I am no longer a child. Within the last week I've
become a woman. If you don't want me in your house, if you don't like me
any more, say so and I'll go away."

The two people stood in the darkness and tried to look at each other. Clara
was amazed by her own strength and by the words that had come to her. The
words had clarified something. She felt that if her father would but take
her into his arms or say some kindly understanding word, all could be
forgotten. Life could be started over again. In the future she would
understand much that she had not understood. She and her father could draw
close to each other. Tears came into her eyes and a sob trembled in her
throat. As her father, however, did not answer her words and turned to go
silently away, she shut the door with a loud bang and afterward lay awake
all night, white and furious with anger and disappointment.

Clara left home to become a college student that fall, but before she left
had another passage at arms with her father. In August a young man who was
to teach in the town schools came to Bidwell, and she met him at a supper
given in the basement of the church. He walked home with her and came on
the following Sunday afternoon to call. She introduced the young man, a
slender fellow with black hair, brown eyes, and a serious face, to her
father who answered by nodding his head and walking away. She and the young
man walked along a country road and went into a wood. He was five years
older than herself and had been to college, but she felt much the older and
wiser. The thing that happens to so many women had happened to her. She
felt older and wiser than all the men she had ever seen. She had decided,
as most women finally decide, that there are two kinds of men in the world,
those who are kindly, gentle, well-intentioned children, and those who,
while they remain children, are obsessed with stupid, male vanity and
imagine themselves born to be masters of life. Clara's thoughts on the
matter were not very clear. She was young and her thoughts were indefinite.
She had, however, been shocked into an acceptance of life and she was made
of the kind of stuff that survives the blows life gives.

In the wood with the young school teacher, Clara began an experiment.
Evening came on and it grew dark. She knew her father would be furious that
she did not come home but she did not care. She led the school teacher
to talk of love and the relationships of men and women. She pretended an
innocence that was not hers. School girls know many things that they do not
apply to themselves until something happens to them such as had happened to
Clara. The farmer's daughter became conscious. She knew a thousand things
she had not known a month before and began to take her revenge upon men for
their betrayal of her. In the darkness as they walked home together, she
tempted the young man into kissing her, and later lay in his arms for two
hours, entirely sure of herself, striving to find out, without risk to
herself, the things she wanted to know about life.

That night she again quarreled with her father. He tried to scold her for
remaining out late with a man, and she shut the door in his face. On
another evening she walked boldly out of the house with the school teacher.
The two walked along a road to where a bridge went over a small stream.
John May, who was still determined that the farmer's daughter was in
love with him, had on that evening followed the school teacher to the
Butterworth house and had been waiting outside intending to frighten his
rival with his fists. On the bridge something happened that drove the
school teacher away. John May came up to the two people and began to make
threats. The bridge had just been repaired and a pile of small, sharp-edged
stones lay close at hand. Clara picked one of them up and handed it to the
school teacher. "Hit him," she said. "Don't be afraid. He's only a coward.
Hit him on the head with the stone."

The three people stood in silence waiting for something to happen. John May
was disconcerted by Clara's words. He had thought she wanted him to pursue
her. He stepped toward the school teacher, who dropped the stone that had
been put into his hand and ran away. Clara went back along the road toward
her own house followed by the muttering farm hand who, after her speech at
the bridge, did not dare approach. "Maybe she was making a bluff. Maybe
she didn't want that young fellow to get on to what is between us," he
muttered, as he stumbled along in the darkness.

In the house Clara sat for a half hour at a table in the lighted living
room beside her father, pretending to read a book. She half hoped he would
say something that would permit her to attack him. When nothing happened
she went upstairs and to bed, only again to spend the night awake and white
with anger at the thought of the cruel and unexplainable things life seemed
trying to do to her.

In September Clara left the farm to attend the State University at
Columbus. She was sent there because Tom Butterworth had a sister who was
married to a manufacturer of plows and lived at the State Capital. After
the incident with the farm hand and the misunderstanding that had sprung
up between himself and his daughter, he was uncomfortable with her in the
house and was glad to have her away. He did not want to frighten his sister
by telling of what had happened, and when he wrote, tried to be diplomatic.
"Clara has been too much among the rough men who work on my farms and had
become a little rough," he wrote. "Take her in hand. I want her to become
more of a lady. Get her acquainted with the right kind of people." In
secret he hoped she would meet and marry some young man while she was away.
Two of his sisters had gone away to school and it had turned out that way.

During the month before his daughter left home the farmer tried to be
somewhat more human and gentle in his attitude toward her, but did not
succeed in dispelling the dislike of himself that had taken deep root
in her nature. At table he made jokes at which the farm hands laughed
boisterously. Then he looked at his daughter who did not appear to have
been listening. Clara ate quickly and hurried out of the room. She did not
go to visit her girl friends in town and the young school teacher came
no more to see her. During the long summer afternoons she walked in the
orchard among the beehives or climbed over fences and went into a wood,
where she sat for hours on a fallen log staring at the trees and the sky.
Tom Butterworth also hurried out of his house. He pretended to be busy and
every day drove far and wide over the country. Sometimes he thought he had
been brutal and crude in his treatment of his daughter, and decided he
would speak to her regarding the matter and ask her to forgive him. Then
his suspicion returned. He struck the horse with the whip and drove
furiously along the lonely roads. "Well, there's something wrong," he
muttered aloud. "Men don't just look at women and approach them boldly, as
that young fellow did with Clara. He did it before my very eyes. He's been
given some encouragement." An old suspicion awoke in him. "There was
something wrong with her mother, and there's something wrong with her. I'll
be glad when the time comes for her to marry and settle down, so I can get
her off my hands," he thought bitterly.

On the evening when Clara left the farm to go to the train that was to
take her away, her father said he had a headache, a thing he had never
been known to complain of before, and told Jim Priest to drive her to the
station. Jim took the girl to the station, saw to the checking of her
baggage, and waited about until her train came in. Then he boldly kissed
her on the cheek. "Good-by, little girl," he said gruffly. Clara was so
grateful she could not reply. On the train she spent an hour weeping
softly. The rough gentleness of the old farm hand had done much to take the
growing bitterness out of her heart. She felt that she was ready to begin
life anew, and wished she had not left the farm without coming to a better
understanding with her father.

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