Teeftallow/Chapter 7

WHEN Mr. Ditmas caught up with Abner, he explained to the youth that he had suggested a delay of the sale to the bank until the exact title Abner possessed could be ascertained. Abner agreed that this was good business but said the sight of so much money nearly had him going.

"I want you to feel," explained Mr. Ditmas carefully, "that I am not criticizing Mr. Northcutt or Mr. Sharp, but you were entering the sale in the spirit of a gamble, and it struck me that you were not in a financial position to indulge in that sort of thing."

Abner glanced at the engineer and listened to his sharply cut Northern sentences with a recurrence of that chronic suspicion with which all hill folk regard outlanders.

"Do you board here in town?" pursued Mr. Ditmas interestedly.

"Yes, sir," drawled Abner.

"Where?"

"At the Scovell House."

"What will you do to-morrow?"

"I—dunno," hesitated Abner, who nevertheless had a fair idea of the alternatives which would occupy him Sunday.

"I was thinking," went on Mr. Ditmas with his interested and helpful air, "that we might get up a game of baseball for to-morrow afternoon. We have plenty of men to make two teams, or even four or six. I don't see why we shouldn't get together a railroad league and play for a pennant this summer; it would be a lot of fun." Mr. Ditmas's voice warmed with the interest of an outdoor man in games.

Abner stared at the engineer. "Play on Sunday!"

​Mr. Ditmas laughed. "Certainly, for a couple of years I was the physical director of the Y.M.C.A. in Akron, and I coached a 'Y' nine every Sunday afternoon."

The idea somehow shocked Abner, but perhaps for that very reason it attracted him; he agreed half-heartedly to the plan.

Mr. Ditmas was accustomed to half-hearted acquiescences so he said with the somewhat mechanical enthusiasm of all men who have been professional organizers of sports, "All right, you tell all the fellows you see to come out. I want our railroad boys to have as good a time as possible. We will organize to-morrow afternoon and will probably be able to get in a game or two."

"I'll tell 'em," agreed Abner dubiously.

Mr. Ditmas had a few more words for the boy, asked him how he was getting on, how he liked his job—the usual list of queries he had used in his "Y" organization work and was meant to found a friendly feeling between himself and his boys.

Abner Teeftallow was entirely unused to this mechanistic benevolence. He felt the spiritual automatism of it and could not make heads or tails of Mr. Ditmas. The two parted company at the intersection of the village streets, and Abner pursued his way to the Scovell House alone, his head filled with all sorts of suspicions as to what Mr. Ditmas might be up to.

The place where Abner boarded was a shabby two-story building with a spraddling mulberry tree in front of it, and nailed up to a limb projecting over the sidewalk was the sign. "Scovell House. Rates, $1.00 per day."

The Scovell House was the second-rate hostelry in Irontown and its patronage came from farmers, lumbermen, book agents, and ordinary labourers. This hotel suited its patrons precisely. No farmer who put up at the Scovell House was ever embarrassed by the conventions of its dining room or its lobby. He could eat in coat, waistcoat, or shirt sleeves; he could convey food to his mouth with spoon, knife, fork, or ​fingers, and no quiet zones were enforced for soup. It was a very homelike place to persons who lived in that sort of home. Physically it was as bare as a barn from cellar to attic; the floors were uncarpeted and unpainted; the wall paper in various stages of discolouration. The furniture instead of appearing to furnish the rooms gave an impression of further desolation. Two or three of the rooms leaked.

Abner Teeftallow was a boarder at the Scovell House and Mr. Tug Beavers was another. These two young men occupied the same room and the same bed. Neither had exactly wanted the other for a room mate, but the mere fact that they had entered Irontown together had caught them in the threads of a social entanglement which neither had the deftness to escape. Unable to separate, they went to the same hotel together, asked simultaneously for a room; the landlady, a lank, grease-spotted woman, showed them upstairs to a room containing one bed under the impression they were boon companions. She did suggest feebly that she put in another bed, but hill courtesy demanded that the boys protest, which they did, and the subject was dropped.

Abner was privately dismayed at the bedfellow whom circumstance had thrust upon him, and Mr. Beavers was privately disgusted.

On this particular afternoon when Abner entered his room he found Mr. Beavers just preparing to go out. It was to be a social call—Abner knew that, because Tug was oiling his automatic pistol and occasionally he paused to whip it up and snap it at some object in the mean room.

Tug glanced up from this work and asked with a certain mockery in his drawl, "Did je git yore money, Abner?"

The youth silently drew out his three bills and two quarters and displayed them.

"Didn't deposit none!" ejaculated Mr. Beavers, genuinely surprised. Then, after a moment with a hopeful grin, "What did you say to him?"

"Nothin’; he jest handed me the money right off an’—an’ offered me five hunderd more."

​Mr. Beavers stared at Abner, then saw he was telling the truth.

"Godfrey's Cordial—didn't you take it!"

"Nope."

"Why didn't you?"

"Mr. Ditmas give me the wink."

"Fuh God's sake!" gasped Mr. Beavers, lowering his pistol laxly. "Did you let a man wink you out of five hunderd dollars! Why, Abner, with five hunderd dollars you could uh broke any crap game that gits started t'-morrer."

Mention of a game recalled to Abner the engineer's request.

"By the way, Tug, he told me to tell all you fellers that he was goin' to git up a big game of baseball to-morrer."

"Baseball—to-morrer?"

"Yeh."

"Why, to-morrer's Sunday."

"That's what I tol' him," declared Abner in a reinforced tone.

"Abner, he kain't keep as big a thing as a baseball game hid—where did he say he was goin' to pull it off?"

"In that open field by the railroad dump."

"Great Scots, ever'body'll see us!"

"He talked like he meant to jest come right out before ever'body an' let 'em see!" declared Abner roundly.

"My God, Abner, that wouldn't be right—desecratin' the Sabbath wide open like that. Why, hell far—" Mr. Beavers's observations dwindled away to murmured oaths and blasphemies and finally to silence as he pondered the right and wrong of it. Finally out of his reflections he declared with genuine conviction, "By God, I'm not that bad, Abner. I know I'm goin' to hell, but damn my riggin' if I'll go out an' play ball open on Sunday! I may have some influence in this world, Abner, an' I'm goin' to throw her for good no matter what I do myself." He paused and looked Abner belligerently in the eye. "Do you blame me?"

"No, I don't," admitted Abner, curiously moved.

​A silence fell between the two room mates. Abner experienced a warm feeling toward Tug at this strong moral stand which his companion had developed so unexpectedly. To get away from the emotional topic he asked, "Where you goin' to-night, Tug?"

"Oh—out ramblin'."

A certain reticence in this expression told Abner that his room mate was going to Squire Meredith's for the evening. Tug began working at his automatic again.

Abner looked at the weapon and presently asked delicately, "D'reckon you'll need yore gun, Tug?"

"Never can tell, the boy may take a notion to rock me in," answered Mr. Beavers indifferently.

This referred to a custom in Lane County of the young men of the neighbourhood waylaying a suitor and chasing him away from his sweetheart's home with stones. The customary retort to this demonstration was for the swain to draw a pistol and fire it into the darkness. The assailants then ran away. If the suitor had no pistol, all he could do was to run and trust Providence to protect him from the stones.

Mr. Tug Beavers cleaned and loaded his pistol; then, having performed what one might call the drudgery of social life in the hill country, he brought up water and tub and bathed. He put on his Sunday suit, and for a moment hesitated between his green tie and his red one. Through some new-born reticence aroused in him by the charms of Miss Meredith he finally selected the green one and had Abner tie it. Mr. Beavers never could tie his own four-in-hand because he was used to tying hame-strings, which is like tying a four-in-hand from the front. His own tie was a four-in-hand as tied from behind. This reversed position always threw Mr. Beavers into the greatest confusion, and tying his own tie became an impossibility. By the same token he tied an extremely neat scarf around Abner's neck. The two young men exchanged these little services regularly.

When Mr. Beavers was gone Abner continued in the hot ​shabby room filled with a faint loneliness and despondency. He wondered again about Mr. Ditmas and the five hundred dollars; whether he had done right in refusing the money. This theme barely bordered his thoughts and drifted away again. The motif which persisted was Tug Beavers going to see the Meredith girl. Why this should persist, why it should fill him with this faint undefined melancholy, Abner had not the least idea. Nevertheless, it did.

Abner arose, raised the torn red window shade which Tug had lowered when he took his bath, and then sat down on the edge of his bed looking out over the shabby village street. The hardness, the dirtiness of the scene recalled the soft vistas of the poorhouse farm. At about this time Beatrice Belle would start after the cows. He thought wistfully of the Sandages; then he recalled Railroad Jones; then Squire Meredith again. He remembered with a certain sharpness that the Squire had said Nessie Sutton lived in Irontown. This fact apparently had been the magnetic centre about which revolved the vague whorl of his mood. Nessie Sutton lived in Irontown. He looked out the window with an irrational feeling that he ought to see her. But the stores still faced him with their tobacco signs, with a few ancient circus posters weathering from their sides; with a loiterer or two moving across the lumpy street; and it seemed to Abner that he had come to where Nessie Sutton lived, and she had faded into thin air. He would never see her again. And that was the poignant thing hidden in tying Tug Beavers's tie and sending him off to see the Meredith girl—it was the vanished Nessie Sutton.

Abner drew a deep breath, stretched out his legs, jumped over, and stared fixedly into the squalid street. At that moment a voice below at the Scovell House gate called his name. An absurd hope twitched through him that it was Nessie Sutton herself who, in walking past, had seen him in the window. He thrust his head out hurriedly and looked down. Leaning against the gate under the hotel sign stood the tall angular form of Zed Parrum.

​"Hey oh, Zed," called Abner rather blankly.

Mr. Parrum looked up with a grin on his rudely carved face.

"Jim Sandage is elected," he said.

"What?" Abner tried to straighten this news out in his mind.

"Jim's elected trustee of the county."

"He is!"

Abner was quite stirred at this change in the fortunes of his foster-father.

"Yeh, an' he's goin' to move to Lanesburg."

"Well, I declare!" exclaimed Abner.

"Yeh, an' Perfesser Overall has got the school down here in Arntown to teach."

Abner sat staring at Zed at this remarkable news. Presently he reacted hill-wise and repeated the stereotype which was being used from one end of the county to the other in describing Professor Overall and his new place.

"Well, they shore have got a smart man in books, Zed, even if he is a plum fool in all other respecks."

Zed shut one eye and winked solemnly and approvingly at Abner.

"Now they didn't skip it."