The Golden Bird | Page 7

time since the landslide of our fortune, began to take real
thought of the morrow.
"Yes, landslide is a good name for what is happening to us, and I hope
we'll slide or land on the home base, whatever is the correct term in the
national game that Matthew has given up trying to teach me to enjoy," I
said to myself as I settled down to look into our situation.
I found that it was not at all astonishing that father had lost all the
fortune that my mother had left him and me when she died three years
ago. It was astonishing that the old dreamer had kept it as long as he
had, and it was only because most of it had been in land and he had
from the first lived serenely and comfortably on nice flat slices of town
property cut off whenever he needed it. He had been a dreamer when
he came out of the University of Virginia ten years after the war, and it
had been the tragedy of Uncle Cradd's life that he had not settled down
with him on the very broad, but very poor, ancestral acres of Elmnest,
to slice away with him at that wealth instead of letting himself be
captured in all his poetic beauty at a dance in Hayesville by a girl
whose father had made her half a million dollars in town land deals.
Uncle Cradd's resentment had been bitter, and as he was the senior of
his twin brother by several hours, he demanded that father sell him his
half of Elmnest, and for it had paid his entire fortune outside of the bare
acres. In poetic pride father had acceded to his demand, lent the money
thrust upon him to the first speculator who got to him, and the two
brothers had settled themselves down twenty miles apart in the depths
of a feud, to eat their hearts out for each other. The rich man sought a
path to the heart of the poor man, but was repulsed until the day after
the spectacular failure of his phosphate company had penetrated into
the wilds of little Riverfield, and immediately Uncle Cradd had hitched

up the moth-eaten string in his old stables and come into town for us,
and in father's sweet old heart there was never an idea of not, as he put
it, "going home." I had never seen Elmnest, but I knew something of
the situation, and that is where the Golden Bird arrived on the situation.
The morning after our decision to return to the land--a decision in
which I had borne no part but a sympathetic one after I had listened
half the night to father's raptures over Uncle Cradd as a Greek scholar
with whom one would wish to spend one's last days--the February copy
of "The Woman's Review" arrived, and on the first page was an article
from a woman who earns five thousand dollars a year with the
industrious hen on a little farm of ten acres. There were lovely pictures
of her with her feathered family, and I decided that what a woman with
the limited experience of a head stenographer in a railroad office could
do, I, with my wider scope of travel and culture, could more than
double on three hundred acres of land in the Harpeth Valley. Some day
I'm going to see that woman and I'm going to stop by and speak sternly
to the editor of "The Woman's Review" on my way.
"Mr. G. Bird," I began as I reached this point and I saw that we were
arriving in the heart of civilization, which was the square of a quaint
little old town. From a motor-car acquaintance, I knew this to be
Riverfield, but I had never even stopped because of the family pride
involved in the feud now dead. "Mr. Bird," I repeated, "I am afraid I am
up against it, and I hope you'll stand by me." He answered me by
preening a breast feather and winking one of his bright eyes as Uncle
Cradd stopped the ancient steeds in the center of the square, before a
little old brick building that bore three signs over its tumble-down
porch. They were: "Silas Beesley, Grocer," "U.S. Post-Office," and
"Riverfield Bank and Trust Co."
"Hey, Si, here's William come home!" called Uncle Cradd, as a negro
boy with a broad grin stood at the heads of the slow old horses, who, I
felt sure, wouldn't have moved except under necessity before the
judgment day. In less time than I can take to tell it father descended
literally into the arms of his friends. About half a dozen old farmers,
some in overalls and some in rusty black broadcloth the color