The Golden Bird | Page 7

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 of Uncle Cradd's, poured out of the wide door of the business building before described, and they acted very much as I have seen the boys at Yale or Princeton act after a success or defeat on the foot-ball field. They hugged father and they slapped him on the back and they shook his hand as if it were not of human, sixty-year-old flesh and blood. Then they