The Wizard's Daughter, and Other Stories

The visitor watched him as he hurried about with the short, uncertain steps of hospitable old age.

"By gum, Mosey, I'd marry a grass-widow with a second-hand family before I'd do my own cooking."

The young fellow gave a self-conscious laugh that made the old man glance at him from under his weather-beaten straw hat.

"Your mind seems to run on marryin'," he said; "guess you're hungry. Set up and have some breakfast."

The visitor drew up a wooden chair, and the old man poured two cups of black coffee from the smoke-begrimed coffee-pot and returned it to the stove. Then he took off his hat and seated himself opposite his guest. The latter stirred three heaping teaspoonfuls of sugar into his cup, muddied the resulting syrup with condensed milk, and drank it with the relish of abnormal health.

"I tell you what, Mosey," he said, reaching for a slice of bacon and dripping the grease across the table, "there ain't any flies on the women when it comes to housekeeping. Now, a woman would turn on the soapsuds and float you clean out of this house; then she'd mop up, and put scalloped noospapers on all the shelves, and little white aprons on the windows, and pillow-shams on your bunk, and she'd work a doily for you to lay your six-shooter on, with 'God bless our home' in the corner of it; and she'd make you so comfortable you wouldn't know what to do with yourself."

"I'm comfortable enough by myself," said the old man uneasily. "When you work for yourself, you know who's boss."

"Naw, you don't, Mosey, not by a long shot; you don't know whether you're boss or the cookin'. I tried bachin' once" – the speaker made a grimace of reminiscent disgust; "the taste hasn't gone out of my mouth yet. You're a pretty fair cook, Mosey, but you'd ought to see my girl's biscuits; she makes 'em so light she has to put a napkin over 'em to keep 'em from floating around like feathers. Fact!" He reached over and speared a slice of bread with his fork. "If I keep this job on the trail, maybe you'll have a chance to sample them biscuits. I'm goin' to send East for that girl."

"Where you goin' to live?"

"Well, I didn't know but we could rent this ranch and board you, Mosey. Seems to me you ought to retire. It ain't human to live this way. If you was to die here all by yourself, you'd regret it. Well, I must toddle."

The visitor stood a moment on the step, sweeping the valley with his fresh young glance; then he set his hat on the back of his head and went whistling down the road, waving his stick at old Mosey as he disappeared among the sycamores in the wash. The old man gathered the dishes into a rusty pan, and scalded them with boiling water from the kettle.

"I believe I'll do it," he said, as he fished the hot saucers out by their edges and turned them down on the table; "it can't do no harm to write to her, no way."

II

Mrs. Moxom put on her slat sunbonnet, took a tin pan from the pantry shelf, and hurried across the kitchen toward the door. Her daughter-in-law looked up from the corner where she was kneading bread. She was a short, plump woman, and all of her convexities seemed emphasized by flour. She put up the back of her hand to adjust a loosened lock of hair, and added another high light to her forehead.

"Where you going, mother?" she called anxiously.

The old woman did not turn her head.

"Oh, just out to see how the lettuce is coming on. I had a notion I'd like some for dinner, wilted with ham gravy."

"Can't one of the children get it?"

There was no response. Mrs. Weaver turned back to her bread.

"Your grandmother seems kind of fidgety this morning," she fretted to her eldest daughter, who was decorating the cupboard shelves with tissue paper of an enervating magenta hue, and indulging at intervals in vocal reminiscences of a ship that never returned.

"Oh, well, mother," said that young person comfortably, "let her alone. I think we all tag her too much. I hate to be tagged myself."

"Well, I'm sure I don't want to tag her, Ethel; I just don't want her to overdo."

Mrs. Weaver spoke in a tone of mingled injury and self-justification.

"Oh, well, mother, she isn't likely to put her shoulder out of joint pulling a few heads of lettuce."

The girl broke out again into cheerful interrogations concerning the disaster at sea: —

"Did she neverr returren?

No, she neverr returrened."

Mrs. Weaver gave a little sigh, as if she feared her daughter's words might prove prophetic, and buried her plump fists in the puffy dough.

Old Mrs. Moxom turned when she reached the garden gate and glanced back at the house. Then she clasped the pan to her breast and skurried along the fence toward the orchard. Once under the trees, she did not look behind her, but went rapidly toward the field where she knew her son was plowing. The reflection of the sun on the tin pan made him look up, and when he saw her he stopped his team. She came across the soft brown furrows to his side.

"I'd have come to the fence when I saw you, if I hadn't had the colt," he said kindly. "What's wanted?"

The old woman's face twitched. She pushed her sunbonnet back with one trembling hand.

"Jason," she said, with a little jerk in her voice, "your paw's alive."

The man arranged the lines carefully along the colt's back; then he took off his hat and wiped the top of his head on his sleeve, looking away from his mother with heavy, dull embarrassment.

"I expect you'd 'most forgot all about him," pursued the old woman, with a vague reproach in her tone.

"I hadn't much to forget," answered the man, resentment rising in his voice. "He hasn't troubled himself about me."

"Well, he didn't know anything about you, Jason, he went away so soon after we was married. It's a dreadful position to be placed in. It 'u'd be awfully embarrassing to – to the Moxom girls."

The man gave her a quick, curious glance. He had never heard her speak of his half-sisters in that way before.

"They're so kind of high-toned," she went on, "just as like as not they'd blame me. I'm sure I don't know what to do."

Jason kicked the soft earth with his sunburnt boot.

"Where is he?" he asked sullenly.

"In Californay."

"How'd you hear?"

"I got a letter. He wrote to Burtonville and directed it to Mrs. Angeline Weaver, and the postmaster give it to some of your uncle Samuel's folks, and they put it in another envelope and backed it to me here. I thought at first I wouldn't say anything about it, but it seemed as if I'd ought to tell you; it doesn't hurt you any, but it's awful hard on the – the Moxom girls."

The man shifted his weight, and kicked awhile with his other foot.

"Well, I'd just give him the go-by," he announced resolutely. "You're a decent man's widow, and that's enough. He's never" —

"Oh, I ain't saying anything against your step-paw, Jason," the old woman broke in anxiously. "He was an awful good man. It seems queer to think it was the way it was. Dear me, it's all so kind of confusing!"

The poor woman looked down with much the same embarrassment over her matrimonial redundance that a man might feel when suddenly confronted by twins.

"I'm sure I don't see how I could help thinking he was dead," she went on after a little silence, "when he wrote he was going off on that trip and might never come back, and the man that was with him wrote that they got lost from each other, and water was so scarce and all that. And then, you know, I didn't get married again till you was 'most ten years old, Jason. I'm sure I don't know what to do. I don't want to mortify anybody, but I'd like to know just what's my dooty."

"Well, I can tell you easy enough." The man's voice was getting beyond control, but he drew it in with a quick, angry breath. "Just drop the whole thing. If he's got on for forty years, mother, I guess he can manage for the rest of the time."

"But it ain't so easy managin' when you begin to get old, Jason. I know how that is."