One of Ours | Page 5

wouldn't want to go in a saloon."
"Oh, forget it!" Claude muttered, ripping the cover off a jar of pickles.
He was nineteen years old, and he was afraid to go into a saloon, and
his friend knew he was afraid.
After lunch, Claude took out a handful of good cigars he had bought at
the drugstore. Ernest, who couldn't afford cigars, was pleased. He lit
one, and as he smoked he kept looking at it with an air of pride and
turning it around between his fingers.
The horses stood with their heads over the wagon-box, munching their
oats. The stream trickled by under the willow roots with a cool,
persuasive sound. Claude and Ernest lay in the shade, their coats under
their heads, talking very little. Occasionally a motor dashed along the
road toward town, and a cloud of dust and a smell of gasoline blew in
over the creek bottom; but for the most part the silence of the warm,
lazy summer noon was undisturbed. Claude could usually forget his
own vexations and chagrins when he was with Ernest. The Bohemian
boy was never uncertain, was not pulled in two or three ways at once.
He was simple and direct. He had a number of impersonal
preoccupations; was interested in politics and history and in new
inventions. Claude felt that his friend lived in an atmosphere of mental
liberty to which he himself could never hope to attain. After he had
talked with Ernest for awhile, the things that did not go right on the
farm seemed less important. Claude's mother was almost as fond of

Ernest as he was himself. When the two boys were going to high school,
Ernest often came over in the evening to study with Claude, and while
they worked at the long kitchen table Mrs. Wheeler brought her darning
and sat near them, helping them with their Latin and algebra. Even old
Mahailey was enlightened by their words of wisdom.
Mrs. Wheeler said she would never forget the night Ernest arrived from
the Old Country. His brother, Joe Havel, had gone to Frankfort to meet
him, and was to stop on the way home and leave some groceries for the
Wheelers. The train from the east was late; it was ten o'clock that night
when Mrs. Wheeler, waiting in the kitchen, heard Havel's wagon
rumble across the little bridge over Lovely Creek. She opened the
outside door, and presently Joe came in with a bucket of salt fish in one
hand and a sack of flour on his shoulder. While he took the fish down
to the cellar for her, another figure appeared in the doorway; a young
boy, short, stooped, with a flat cap on his head and a great oilcloth
valise, such as pedlars carry, strapped to his back. He had fallen asleep
in the wagon, and on waking and finding his brother gone, he had
supposed they were at home and scrambled for his pack. He stood in
the doorway, blinking his eyes at the light, looking astonished but eager
to do whatever was required of him. What if one of her own boys, Mrs.
Wheeler thought.... She went up to him and put her arm around him,
laughing a little and saying in her quiet voice, just as if he could
understand her, "Why, you're only a little boy after all, aren't you?"
Ernest said afterwards that it was his first welcome to this country,
though he had travelled so far, and had been pushed and hauled and
shouted at for so many days, he had lost count of them. That night he
and Claude only shook hands and looked at each other suspiciously, but
ever since they had been good friends.
After their picnic the two boys went to the circus in a happy frame of
mind. In the animal tent they met big Leonard Dawson, the oldest son
of one of the Wheelers' near neighbours, and the three sat together for
the performance. Leonard said he had come to town alone in his car;
wouldn't Claude ride out with him? Claude was glad enough to turn the
mules over to Ralph, who didn't mind the hired men as much as he did.

Leonard was a strapping brown fellow of twenty-five, with big hands
and big feet, white teeth, and flashing eyes full of energy. He and his
father and two brothers not only worked their own big farm, but rented
a quarter section from Nat Wheeler. They were master farmers. If there
was a dry summer and a failure, Leonard only laughed and stretched his
long arms, and put in a bigger crop next year. Claude was always a
little reserved with Leonard; he felt that the young man was rather
contemptuous of the hap-hazard way in