Chapter 6 - A VISION OF ROMANCE

When Betty Stacey married at seventeen, and went away back in the woods to live on a little creek that ran singing to the Scioto, Johnny planted his first orchard near the Indian border about the new home.

The year before he had arrived at Marietta early in March, when the red maples were dropping their crimson blossoms on the last patches of snow. Along the Muskingum he had found some of his nurseries overrun by deer or choked by weeds. In none of them, indeed, except at Zanesville and Big Bottom, were there more than a few trees worth transplanting. But those few, set out by cabin doors, and Johnny's undaunted spirit, stimulated hope and stiffened determina- tion in the sparsely settled districts. He cleared the plantations again, strengthened the broken barriers, replanted the plots, and gave them to the care of the best men to be found. And he told people not to be dis- couraged. This was just a beginning, and he was young and life long. Better luck next time.

But here in Marietta, with a town full of vigilant people on guard, and Dr. True in authority over Kitt Putnam, everything had prospered. The happy day of toil that he spent in the hollow above the shipyard be- gan with a rush of wings. From long jour- neys little bundles of feathers and bursts of song fell from the sky. On the morrow he meant to have here a gathering of the heads of households for the first distribution of trees, and for instruction in the setting out and care of them.

First he thinned the rows, with a swift cer- tainty of eye and hand discarding all plants of feeble growth. A few tough little twisted witches, that could be trusted to put out defensive thorns and hold their own in the wilds he planted among the hawthorns, dog- wood and Judas -trees in the edges of the forest, for their beauty of blossom. Thenhe carefully lifted the trees that had shot up almost to his own height, with stout, straight trunks, bright bark, healthy buds and low, symmetrical branching. These he pruned back, trimmed the roots neatly, and banked in a trench all ready for transplanting. Stock of good trunk and root growth, but with un- promising tops, he cut off to a point near the ground and replanted in one row for grafting with buds from Dr. True's Summer Sweet- ing. He meant to rob that noble tree of more buds, wrap them in wet moss and carry them down to Belpre and Isle le Beau, even to Galliopolis, if possible, where bewildered exiles mourned the lost orchards and gar- dens of their dear France.

It was late in the afternoon before the plantation was denuded. He had begun to prepare the ground for new seeds when a little boy appeared from the shipyard, where four vessels lay on the ways and there was much thrilling adventure to be had scrambling over the rigging. To any child it was fas- cinating play to help Johnny in his work, and he was never too busy to listen to shy confidences or to answer endless questions. This boy asked if it was true, as Dominic

Blennerhasset said, that the littlest thread- roots of trees were hollow and had mouths for drinking water.

Johnny did not know, but he thought it very likely. Sugar maples must drink like river pike. Children with sharp ears could hear the sap run up. He would look through the microscope at Isle le Beau, and find out about that. And here his thought was off on the wings of wonder and joy, that the world was so ordered in use and beauty that rain from the sky was miraculously turned to winey juice in the glowing chalices of apples.

The child had been in the cove an hour before he began to tell the news of the town: "Dr. True stays at Aunt Mary Lake's nearly all the time, and Betty comes to our house when she wants to cry."

Johnny dropped his hoe and stared. "Why does the doctor Why does Betty want to cry?"

"I guess it's because Aunt Mary's been aw- ful sick a long time. She don't get out of bed at all."

Mary Lake dying! No, nothing died! For Johnny not a flower drooped on its stalk,nor a sparrow fell, whose perfume and song had not their lovelier counterparts on the other shore. But Mary Lake fading from the eyes that dwelt on her, the hearts that loved her, on earth ! And this was not a time of death, but of resurrection. Countless pale but pulsing things were coming up out of winter tombs. The bluebird trilled to his mate; and Johnny had been conscious of strange stirrings in himself, an eagerness of foot and eye, a bubbling up of all the springs of youth.

In the garrison inclosure of Campus Mar- tius it was so very still  only a group of silent women drawing water for the evening meal at the well, and children hushed at play  that he could hear the purple martins taking their last wheeling flights in the dusk. Dr. True sat outside the door, his hickory chair tilted against the wall, every line of his lank figure confessing sadness and defeat.

"I'd have had Mary Lake well in no time, Johnny, if she had been up to help me," he said, his humor whimsical even in his grief.

A neighbor woman was bending over the bed. She had had to fetch her young baby, and Betty was sitting with it in Johnny's lowrocking-chair, her bright hair burnished by the firelight. At sixteen she had grown tall and fair, and was now so tenderly maternal as she looked down upon the little bit of a darling thing in her arms. Johnny had come in so softly that she did not hear him, and his heart seemed to stop beating as memories of old dreams crowded back upon him. It was as if he had just come in from the orchard at Pittsburg, and the breeze from the opening door had set the little chair, with its haunting vision of all that was meant by love and home, in motion. The strangest thing about it was that he knew  When Betty lifted her eyes to his he saw the sweet, sweet face for which he had looked under the hoods of a thousand caravans.

He gripped the door-post and had himself in hand by the time she had laid the baby down and run to him. She stretched out her hands in glad welcome, but her lips were tremulous with trouble and her blue eyes were suddenly flooded.

"It's not for Aunt Mary, Johnny," she said. "She has no pain, now, and is so happy. It's just that, when she's gone, there will be no one in the world belonging to me."

Unconscious of the nature or the power of that appeal to him, she went away pres- ently with the neighbor, and remained to cry her heart out where it would not dis- tress Aunt Mary, while Johnny watched by the bed.

That wood-nest of a low-ceiled, quiet room seemed thronged with grateful spirits. How many lives had been ushered in there ! How often had death been turned from that door! Johnny waited until Mary Lake stirred at the note of a distant bugle, a sound that he never could hear without a thrill. Her dim eyes rested upon him with the vision of those who look back from the parting veil. Did she foresee the long journey of life that lay before him, and have the tender wish that it might not be uncompanioned?

"Dear lad  you would be  the core of the heart  of the woman  who loved you."

He thought only of Betty. "Aunt Mary," he asked, gently, not to call her too far back, "what is to become of Betty?"

There was the faintest, untroubled smile. "Do 'ee think  the pretty maid  will not marry?"

His voice choked on the answer: "Yes, shewill marry  early. But does  does she love any one now?"

It was moments before Mary Lake replied. She gazed at Johnny wistfully, and then around the dear, familiar room, as if she would see another family of her own heart's choosing sheltered there. "A young maid  does not love any one  enough  until she is asked. Do 'ee  "

At that moment Betty returned. A tiny girl in a linsey slip followed her and stood expectantly within the doorway. The shy little figure could have been no more than a shadow to those failing eyes, and the lisping "pleathe" could not have reached her ears, but Mary Lake knew. She was dying, but so busy doing things for the least of these little ones that she just forgot about it.

"Do 'ee  give her  a cooky  my dear."

The child was gone, sucking the sweet as blissfully, as unthinking of the source of that bounty, as a butterfly on a flower. Then on the closed room there fell such a silence that the swallows could be heard settling in their nests about the eaves. Johnny still knelt, and Betty was in a desolate heap at his feet, the cooky- jar tilted on her lap and spillingits treasure on the floor. The overflow was a part of the loving - kindness that now streamed down from the sky.

No one had gone out of the house, but in a moment it was as if a messenger had been abroad. The doctor was in the room, neigh- bors, and weeping young girls who had the dear privilege of putting their arms around and comforting Betty. But in an hour the face of death was covered and the routine of life taken up again. Some one mended the fire and hung the kettle. The doctor was called away, and one by one the women de- parted to attend to their own household duties. With that hourly responsibility for the physical needs of others which left pioneer women little time for grief, Betty laid the table and turned on Johnny a look of affectionate concern.

"You've had a long day's work. Won't you try to eat a little supper? Please, Johnny."

He patted her hand gently, and, sitting down with her in the intimacy of sorrow ate a bowl of mush and milk. But it was almost more than he could bear. When others came in to watch, and Betty slept, still sobbing in hersleep, Johnny went out into a night that glit- tered with frosty stars. Between the tall shafts of leafless trees he went up Sacra Via to the Big Mound, and lay among the scat- tered headboards of God's Acre, alone with his temptation.

From a heart that had long lain dormant love had quickened in the fires of spring to vivid and insistent life. Without seeking, and to his profound dismay, he had found her, and alone, bereft, unprotected. He must stay with her, win her, defend her in these perilous wilds that lay under the gathering clouds of war, wear her on his breast. He knew that he could protect her better than most men in that region. How would it be with him if he left her and she perished?

Even his work had shaped itself as if to this end of personal happiness. Only near the few large settlements did it seem prob- able that his nurseries could flourish, or any great number of people be served. To a dozen such places along the river westward to Vincennes he could make semi-annual journeys by the mail - packet and freight- pirogues. Enough money could be got for his trees to employ help to care for them andto pay men to wash out seeds at the cider- mills. Here in Marietta he could have the farm that had been offered him by the Ohio Company, build up such another home as he had had in Pittsburg, and provide for a family within the safe shelter of the guns of Fort Harmer. And by and by, when the wilder beasts were gone, and the Indians had become civilized or,  when the Indians, too, were gone, so that Betty would not be afraid, they could have a green little home in a bower- ing orchard in the forest.

He need only give up that part of his mission which took him into the backwoods  say that the task could not be done, and men would believe him. But he knew that he had been taking something more than the prom- ise of orchards into the wilds  himself, brotherly love, unselfish service, the hope of better days. And in a dozen years, a tree like Dr. True's here and there would begin to leaven the bare clearings. He would know that the task was not impossible, and that knowledge would poison all his relations with men, with wife and child and God. And the nurseries he had planted and abandoned would blush for him in thorny thickets everyspring, a reminder of one man's broken prom- ise undermining the faith of men.

He had made his covenant. The work to which he had consecrated himself would fill the measure of his years to the brim, and need all the passion that burned within him.

After the funeral and the distribution of trees Johnny went down to Belpre and Isle le Beau in the Blennerhassets' big canoe with six negro rowers, leaving Betty to make a home temporarily for Dr. True, heart-free and for another man's wooing. And this was the spring of the year and the mating season in his soul, when the courtship -caroling of blue- bird, wood-thrush, and oriole pierced the heart of youth with their sweetness.

That summer he went up through Cin- cinnati and Dayton to Piqua. There for a month he lay ill from a snake - bite, and was cared for in the good log house of Chief Logan. It was a heartening thing to find, on the bank of the Miami, even this one small band bravely struggling to learn the difficult habits and arts of a rude civilization. A num- ber of cabins, barns and corn-cribs had been built; fields were being tilled with wooden mold-board plows, and cattle tended in fenced pastures. Squaws heckled flax and worked at wheel and loom. In the autumn the trees of a flourishing nursery could be set out. Before he left the village Johnny planted a little apple-tree for the braves, and gave them brief instructions as to the proper care of an orchard to bring it to its greatest use and beauty.

When able to travel he was given a pony for the season, provided with food, and set upon the cross-country trail that ran from the Miami to the Scioto. It was on the moraine where the hills had been rounded and the valleys filled with fine drift by the ancient ice-cap. There were few boulders, but every crystal-clear stream rippled over a bed of pebbles, and enormous hardwood trees were rooted deep in clean, gravelly loam.

One evening late in August, as he topped a steep rise after fording a creek, he looked down into such a sylvan retreat as he had imagined for that green little home in the forest with Betty. Noble trees, set far apart and with little undergrowth, stepped down the turfed terraces of a natural amphitheater to an open glade where deer had long beenaccustomed to graze. Across the front of this the creek had turned and widened in peace- ful flow toward the Scioto. Willows fringed the banks, and from the grassy slopes wood- lilies lifted their chalices of flame and painted moccasin-flowers danced on every breeze.

He stopped for no more than a moment to look down from the trail, and was riding on when he saw, at one side of the glade, a smoldering log in front of a new-comer's half- faced camp. Then he heard a hallooing from the woods, and was dragged from the pony by young David Varnum of Marietta.

"Whoopee, Johnny! If this isn't luck! I'm so almighty glad to see you I could sa- lute you like those fool parley vous at Gal- liopolis."

Johnny smiled. "If you did I would turn the other cheek, David. My name is Jona- than." There was healing for sick fancy in this warm comradeship with one of his own age and of the New England breed.

"Well, I'll admit it. I'm as pleased as pie. Been a hermit of the woods here for a month, and losing my wits and pride for lonesomeness."

To find him here alone, grubbing out brush,felling trees, and girdling the buckeye-trees that were used for cabin-building, could mean but one thing. It was thus that an edu- cated and God-fearing Puritan youth carved out a place to stand on in the backwoods of the Northwest Territory, brought his Bi- ble and his wife, defended his own, served his country in camp and court, and by and by built school-houses, churches, roads and bridges. Such men peopled and con- quered every American frontier, were loved by their families, honored by their neighbors, and held fast their broad acres for their chil- dren's rich inheritance. But from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate very few of them ever took the hand of a red man in friendship, spared a harmless animal, or a tree for its age and beauty, or stopped to listen to the song of a meadow-lark.

While stirring a pot of mush over the fire Johnny speculated on David's choice, hoping it might be some maid of Spartan courage who was coming to such a sparsely settled region so far up near the border. Then the soft whistling died on his lips as he re- membered David's tender concern for Betty at Mary Lake's funeral. He did not wait.

When David came up from the creek with a fish Johnny laid on the searing-iron that was to cure the wound in his heart.

"Is it Betty Stacey, David?"

"It's Betty. The Lord has been mighty good to me."

Johnny held out his hand in yearning friend- ship to Betty's lover. "When?"

"Next spring. It will take me all winter here to get ready for her."

"She  she must love you a great deal. You know about her mother? Betty is afraid of the Indians."

David's smile was grim. "I'll take par- ticularly good care that the Indians are afraid of me."

"Oh, make friends with them. It would be safer and happier for Betty."

David shrugged his broad shoulders. "You can't make friends with wildcats and rat- tlesnakes." Something in Johnny's troubled look made him add: "Why, bless your good heart, Johnny, I'll take care of Betty!"

His self-confidence was pathetic. His un- compromising and contemptuous attitude tow- ard the ten thousand warriors whom he would have as neighbors could not but increase the peril of everything that belonged to him. Johnny remembered the pallid face and wide eyes that Betty had turned on him in the cove, and her apprehension on the bluff below Campus Martius. Then he had re- assured her: "The Indians are friendly with me. I'll look after those babies, Betty." David must listen to him, must let him help take care of Betty.

After an unhappy night which was dis- turbed by wild alarms, he woke to an August morning that was one vast bubble of blue and gold. At the bottom of that dazzling im- mensity lay this dewy glade, bordered by brown water and guarded by such kind brothers of great trees as must shade the banks of the River of Life.

And here was this conqueror of the wilder- ness, in the flush of his youthful strength and successful love, talking eagerly of his plans. He meant to put the cabin here, in this natural opening, and then clear the land about it up to the curving trail.

As if he had not heard, Johnny continued to gaze out across the creek and over miles of softly rolling wooded hills and flashes of bright water.

"Your home will be as beautiful as Isle le Beau."

David smiled. "It takes money to live like that. The house is a mansion, as fine as any on the Potomac."

"But they have left the out-of-doors much as God made it. Every pioneer, just by leav- ing some things alone, could have his own little island of beauty, comfort and safety for his family and domestic animals."

Johnny's look had rested on David wist- fully, but now his gray eyes darkened and blazed with indignation.

"The Lord has been good to you in giving you Betty Stacey, but how will you be good to her? I wonder that you dare bring her here at all. And you would turn her beauti- ful home into a scar on creation, and shut her in, a life prisoner in a hideous, snake-fenced corn-patch? She'll come to you singing like a thrush, and in a year she'll scream if a shadow falls across the door or a tree cracks in the frost."

"Like those  I've seen such women in the back clearings  thought they were bad- tempered or half crazy."

Johnny shook his head. "Just scared todeath, starved for beauty and company, broken-hearted. Men have errands  trust them for dropping work for a day and seeking the society of other men. You have been here alone for only a month, and 'losing your wits and pride for lonesomeness.' But wom- en must stay at home. Their task is never done; little clinging fingers never loose their hold. They are left, wherever and whenever it pleases men to leave them  world without end."

"I might have done that to Betty !" David listened in eagerness and humility to Johnny's plan to fence in this depression, except along the water-front, with puncheon pickets close- set and ten feet high, leaving the crest of the ridge and the trees on the sky-line. When that fence was screened with forest vines and shrubs there would be a little green and flower- walled world of several acres of lawn and gar- den, bowering orchard and pleasant pasture; and to the sunny south one lovely and limit- less view.

David threw up his hands in mock despair. "This is the best grain land of the whole section."

Then it's none too good for a home. If

Adam had been an American pioneer he'd have asked for an ax and a gun to improve on Eden. And make it your first business to get some neighbors, so Betty can 'see smoke by somebody's house."' And Johnny told that story.

Before noon he was gone to the tender nur- series that called to him all along the border, the upper reaches of the Scioto, and the lake shore from the Wyandot village at Sandusky to the struggling settlement at Cleveland. His was but the pause of a bird of passage in that wildwood glade, but because of its timeliness Betty found her island of refuge on the border.

After a rapid journey down the Muskingum and Ohio in the next spring, to distribute trees and put in new seed, Johnny went up to David's clearing. The cabin of logs was up, and the fence  a labor of Hercules, for every tall picket had been split by hand out of black walnut, and secured by hickory pegs driven in auger-holes. The chimney was a great bay of field stones on the gable end, and a low, rock spring-house dairy was snuggled under a sycamore above a pool on the creek bank. A clearing had been made and furrows turned for corn, wheat and flax down the water- way, and the bridegroom had gone away to Marietta.

Johnny had brought up young apple-trees in a canoe from his nursery at Chillicothe, and Betty was to fetch roots and shrubs, bulbs and seeds from the wonderful gardens at Isle le Beau. From rough hillsides and rich wood- land nooks he transplanted hawthorn, dog- wood, redbud, laurel, elderberry, hazel, wild- roses and brier - berries around the fence. Before the puncheon door he set up a tiny stoop of sassafras saplings, and planted wild honeysuckle to clamber over it. Up the gables of the log barn he trained fox-grapes and trumpet-vines. Then down the sloping lawn he made a gravel path to the spring- house, and opened bordering beds for flower- ing annuals.

Here and there he put in his apple-trees, without any regularity but with a view to effect that would have appeared to a landscape gardener. Not for a generation or more would there be a market for apples in this region, but a settler of the unusual resources and qualities of leadership of David Varnum must make generous provision for less fortu-nate neighbors, for Indians whose friendship was to be won by hospitality, and for the way- farers whose numbers would increase with the seasons. And in a region where land was cheap and life dear, it mattered not at all whether a tree paid for the room it occupied. Many of Johnny's trees were planted and cherished for their beauty.

A butternut-tree shaded the well. Across from it he put in a one-sided apple-tree that would unfurl a banner of bloom over the pent- house of white oak. Two trees he set near together to make a tent of boughs above a rustic seat. Separating the kitchen garden from the lawn was one straight row to shelter a colony of beehives. A tree with bent twigs that promised a low, roomy crotch he placed in full view of the front door, where the littlest baby could climb into it under the mother's watchful eye.

In that porous forest soil apple-trees needed no fertilizer and but little cultivation. To plant a tree Johnny dug a big hole and spread the trimmed roots in it. Then he sifted in the moist earth, and pressed it down into a firm bed without using any water. Frequent showers could be depended upon. He tuckedthe grass and clover sod snugly about the trunk to protect the roots, removed every sucker, pruned the branches back to lower and spread the head, and presently this tame foster-child of the wilderness was putting out new branches and fuzzy bunches of foliage.

Johnny was aware that news of what he was doing would soon be abroad. The place lay on the trail to Piqua, and near a great junction of those "threads of the soil" that met at the terminal of the Scioto - Beaver trail from the east. And he kept a plume of smoke curling up by day and flames glow- ing by night so that many travelers, white and red, found him out. He meant Betty's home to be the little leaven that should leaven the solitude, hostility and privation of the wilds, a place of physical, social and spiritual refreshment.

He would not have had the house better than it was. The poorest pioneer could have such a shelter. The door was hung on leather hinges; the hearth would be swept with a corn-husk broom. The puncheon floor was so rough that the task of keeping it scoured might well prove discouraging, so Johnny smoothed that as best he might with hatchetand draw-knife. Then he laid the fire back-log, front-log, dry sticks, pine knots, splinters  ready for lighting with flint and steel and bit of tow-string. The empty shell of a place was as rustic as one of the bark nests he had cunningly set like a knot-hole in the butternut-tree for bluebirds to move into. But Betty was one of those gifted women who could make a cozy home in a cave.

All the birds were nesting, and night after sleepless April night Johnny followed that migrating human pair in tortured fancy from the gay and tender wedding in Marietta. They would come to Chillicothe by freight- pirogue. There David had left his horses and bought a cow, and there he would hire a covered wagon for the journey up the river trail.

That wedding journey through this un- spoiled wilderness! By night they would camp in the caravan, for Betty would be afraid of prowling beasts. She would snuggle closer to her brave man if but a little owl hooted. Always alone, watched over by moon and stars, canopied by new-leafing trees, waking to all the sweet, stirring life of the woods and to the wonder of having each other, moving on in shade and shine and shower, they would come by slow, blissful stages to the new life in the new home.

One evening he heard the tramp of horses, the jolting of the clumsy caravan, and the lowing of the weary, homesick cow on the trail. He ran up the grassy terraces and set the wagon-gate ajar; then ran down to light the fire on the hearth. But when David pulled the horses up before the door Johnny was gone.

Night was falling, and David and Betty hurried to get Mary Lake's good furniture in place. Soon the four-poster bed was up and spread with the hand- woven, blue-and- white coverlid. Flax- wheel and loom were set against the wall, and on the cherry dresser was displayed the scant array of pewter and blue Canton ware, with the cooky- jar of brown crockery in the place of honor. An oak settle filled one chimney-corner, and the little rocking-chair stood in the other. Black bear skins warmed the floor. The kettle was bub- bling merrily when Betty came to the door to call Johnny to supper.

She had disappeared in a linsey-curtainedcorner for a few moments, and there had been gay, teasing laughter in the single big room that was all in a splendid glow of firelight. Then in the May-queen gown and veil that Mrs. Blennerhasset had given her she stood in the doorway, peering into the odorous dusk.

"He can't be far away. I thought he'd like to see me in my wedding finery. It's so sweet here, David; so dear and safe and happy. The night is full of flowers and stars and dew and sleepy little birds. Where are you, Johnny? Won't you come in? Please, Johnny!"

She went into the cabin at last, disappointed and thoughtful, and put on a girlish frock of blue linsey. Supper was eaten and cleared away. By and by David shut the door. When the fire was covered there was but the faintest glow at the small, oiled-paper win- dows. The latch-string was pulled in. A whippoorwill cried in the willows.