The Harvester. Stratton-Porter Gene
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do to sell. I have an idea that when this is done it is going to appear first rate. Anyway, it will be solid enough to last a thousand years, and with every day of use natural wood grows more beautiful. When we get some tables, couches, and chairs made from the same timber as the casings and the floors, I think it will be fine. I want money, but I don't want it bad enough to part with the BEST of anything I have for it. Go carefully and neatly there; it will have to be changed if you don't.”
So the work progressed rapidly. When the carpenters had finished the last stroke on the big veranda they remained a day more and made flower boxes, and a swinging couch, and then the greedy Harvester kept the best man with him a week longer to help on the furniture.
“Ain't you going to say a word about her, Langston?” asked this man as they put a mirror-like surface on a curly maple dressing table top.
“Her!” ejaculated the Harvester. “What do you mean?”
“I haven't seen you bathe anywhere except in the lake since I have been here,” said the carpenter. “Do you want me to think that a porcelain tub, this big closet, and chest of drawers are for you?”
A wave of crimson swept over the Harvester.
“No, they are not for me,” he said simply. “I don't want to be any more different from other men than I can help, although I know that life in the woods, the rigid training of my mother, and the reading of only the books that would aid in my work have made me individual in many of my thoughts and ways. I suppose most men, just now, would tell you anything you want to know. There is only one thing I can say: The best of my soul and brain, the best of my woods and store-house, the best I can buy with money is not good enough for her. That's all. For myself, I am getting ready to marry, of course. I think all normal men do and that it is a matter of plain common-sense that they should. Life with the right woman must be infinitely broader and better than alone. Are you married?”
“Yes. Got a wife and four children.”
“Are you sorry?”
“Sorry!” the carpenter shrilled the word. “Sorry! Well that's the best I ever heard! Am I sorry I married Nell and got the kids? Do I look sorry?”
“I am not expecting to be, either,” said the Harvester calmly. “I think I have done fairly well to stick to my work and live alone until I am twenty-six. I have thought the thing all over and made up my mind. As soon as I get this house far enough along that I feel I can proceed alone I am going to rush the marrying business just as fast as I can, and let her finish the remainder to her liking.”
“Well this ought to please her.”
“That's because you find your own work good,” laughed the Harvester.
“Not altogether!” The carpenter polished the board and stood it on end to examine the surface as he talked. “Not altogether! Nothing but good work would suit you. I was thinking of the little creek splashing down the hill to the lake; and that old log hewer said that in a few more days things here would be a blaze of colour until fall.”
“Almost all the drug plants and bushes leaf beautifully and flower brilliantly,” explained the Harvester. “I studied the location suitable to each variety before I set the beds and planned how to grow plants for continuity of bloom, and as much harmony of colour as possible. Of course a landscape gardener would tear up some of it, but seen as a whole it isn't so bad. Did you ever notice that in the open, with God's blue overhead and His green for a background, He can place purple and yellow, pink, magenta, red, and blue in masses or any combination you can mention and the brighter the colour the more you like it? You don't seem to see or feel that any grouping clashes; you revel in each wonderful growth, and luxuriate in the brilliancy of the whole. Anyway, this suits me.”
“I guess it will please her, too,” said the carpenter. “After all the pains you've taken, she is a good one if it doesn't.”
“I'll always have the consolation of having done my best,” replied the Harvester. “One can't do more! Whether she likes it or not depends greatly on the way she has been reared.”
“You talk as if you didn't know,” commented the carpenter.
“You go on with this now,” said the Harvester hastily. “I've got to uncover some beds and dig my year's supply of skunk cabbage, else folk with asthma and dropsy who depend on me will be short on relief. I ought to take my sweet flag, too, but I'm so hurried now I think I'll leave it until fall; I do when I can, because the bloom is so pretty around the lake and the bees simply go wild over the pollen. Sometimes I almost think I can detect it in their honey. Do you know I've wondered often if the honey my bees make has medicinal properties and should be kept separate in different seasons. In early spring when the plants and bushes that furnish the roots and barks of most of the tonics are in bloom, and the bees gather the pollen, that honey should partake in a degree of the same properties and be good medicine. In the summer it should aid digestion, and in the fall cure rheumatism and blood disorders.”
“Say you try it!” urged the carpenter. “I want a lot of the fall kind. I'm always full of rheumatism by October. Exposure, no doubt.”
“Over eating of too much rich food, you mean,” laughed the Harvester. “I'd like to see any man expose his body to more differing extremes of weather than I do, and I'm never sick. It's because I am my own cook and so I live mostly on fruits, vegetables, bread, milk, and eggs, a few fish from the lake, a little game once in a great while or a chicken, and no hot drinks; plenty of fresh water, air, and continuous work out of doors. That's the prescription! I'd be ashamed to have rheumatism at your age. There's food in the cupboard if you grow hungry. I am going past one of the neighbours on my way to see about some work I want her to do.”
The Harvester stopped for lunch, carried food to Belshazzar, and started straight across country, his mattock, with a bag rolled around the handle, on his shoulder. His feet sank in the damp earth at the foot of the hill, and he laughed as he leaped across Singing Water.
“You noisy chatterbox!” cried the man. “The impetus of coming down the curves of the hill keeps you talking all the way across this muck bed to the lake. With small work I can make you a thing of beauty. A few bushes grubbed, a little deepening where you spread too much, and some more mallows along the banks will do the trick. I must attend to you soon.”
“Now what does the boy want?” laughed a white-haired old woman, as the Harvester entered the door. “Mebby you think I don't know what you're up to! I even can hear the hammering and the voices of the men when the wind is in the south. I've been wondering how soon you'd need me. Out with it!”
“I want you to get a woman and come over and spend a day with me. I'll come after you and bring you back. I want you to go over mother's bedding and have what needs it washed. All I want you to do is to superintend, and tell me now what I will want from town for your work.”
“I put away all your mother's bedding that you were not using, clean as a ribbon.”
“But it has been packed in moth preventives ever since and out only four times a year to air, as you told me. It must smell musty and be yellow. I want it fresh and clean.”
“So what I been hearing is true, David?”
“Quite true!” said the Harvester.
“Whose girl is she, and when are you going to jine hands?”
The Harvester lifted his clear eyes and hesitated.
“Doc Carey laid you in my arms when you was born, David. I tended you 'fore ever your ma did. All your life you've been my boy, and I love you same as my own blood; it won't go no farther if you say so. I'll never tell a living soul. But I'm old and 'til better weather comes, house bound; and I get mighty lonely. I'd like to think about you and her, and plan for you, and love her as I always did you folks. Who is she, David? Do I know the family?”
“No. She is a stranger to these parts,” said the unhappy Harvester.
“David, is she