Broken to the Plow

Broken to the Plow

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Broken to the Plow, by Charles
Caldwell Dobie This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no
cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give
it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Broken to the Plow
Author: Charles Caldwell Dobie
Release Date: August 14, 2004 [EBook #13178]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROKEN
TO THE PLOW ***

Produced by Keith M. Eckrich and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreaders Team

BROKEN TO THE PLOW
A Novel by
CHARLES CALDWELL DOBIE
Author of "THE BLOOD RED DAWN"

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

* * * * *
Printed in the United States of America
TO MY BROTHER Who Helped Make My Literary Career Possible.

BROKEN TO THE PLOW

CHAPTER I
Toward four o'clock in the afternoon Fred Starratt remembered that he
had been commissioned by his wife to bring home oyster cocktails for
dinner. Of course, it went without saying that he was expected to attend
to the cigars. That meant he must touch old Wetherbee for money. Five
dollars would do the trick, but, while he was about it, he decided that
he might as well ask for twenty-five. There were bound to be other
demands before the first of the month, and the hard-fisted cashier of
Ford, Wetherbee & Co. seemed to grow more and more crusty over
drafts against the salary account. If one caught him in a good humor it
was all right. Usually a _risqué_ story was the safest road to geniality.
Starratt raked his brains for a new one, to no purpose. Every moment of
delay added greater certainty to the conviction that he was in for a
disagreeable encounter. At four o'clock Wetherbee always began to
balance his cash for the day and he was particularly vicious at any
interruptions during this precise performance. What in the world had
possessed Helen to give this absurd dinner party to two people Starratt
had never met? At least she might have put the thing off until pay day,
when money was more plentiful.
How did others manage? Starratt asked himself. Because there was a
small minority in the office who received their full month's salary
without a break during the entire year. Take young Brauer, for instance.
He got a little over a hundred a month and yet he never seemed short.
He dressed well, too--or neatly, to be nearer the truth; there was no
great style to his make-up. Of course, Brauer was not married, but
Starratt could never remember a time, even before he took the plunge
into matrimony, when he was not going through the motions of
smoothing old Wetherbee into a good-humored acceptance of an IOU
tag. Starratt did not think himself extravagant, and it always had

puzzled him to observe how free some of his salaried friends were with
their coin. Only that morning his wife had reflected his own mood with
exaggerated petulancy when she had said:
"I'm sure I don't know where all the money goes! We don't spend it on
cafés, and we haven't a car, and goodness knows I only buy what I have
to when it comes down to clothes."
What she had to! He thought over the phrase not with any desire to put
Helen in the pillory, but merely to uncover, if possible, the source of
their economic ills.
In days gone by, when his mother was alive, he had heard almost the
same remark leveled at his father:
"Well, I suppose some people could save on our income. But we've got
to be decent--we can't go about in rags!"
He knew from long experience just the sort his mother had meant by
the term "some people." Brauer was a case in point. Mrs. Starratt
always spoke of such as he with lofty tolerance.
"Oh, of course, foreigners always get on! They're accustomed to live
that way!"
Fred Starratt had not altogether accepted his mother's philosophy that
everybody lacking the grace of an Anglo-Saxon or Scotch name was a
foreigner. There were times when he was given to wonder vaguely why
the gift of "getting on" had been given to "foreigners" and denied him.
Once in a while he rebelled against the implied gentility which had
been wished on him. Were rags necessary to achieve economy?
Granting the premises, in moments of rare revolt he became hospitable
to any contingency that would free him from the ever-present
humiliation of an empty purse.
He soon had learned that the term "rags" was a mere figure of speech,
which stood for every