The Plum Tree | Page 2

fright--inside, for I'd never have dared to show fear before my mother. There's nothing else that makes you so brave as living with some one before whom you haven't the courage to let your cowardice show its feather. If we didn't keep each other up to the mark, what a spectacle of fright and flight this world-drama would be! Vanity, the greatest of vices, is also the greatest of virtues, or the source of the greatest virtues--which comes to the same thing.
"When will you do it?" she went on, and then I knew I was in for it, and how well-founded was the suspicion that had been keeping my lips tight-shut upon my dream of independence.
"I'll--I'll think about it," was my answer, in a tone which I hoped she would see was not hesitating, but reflective; "I mustn't go too far,--or too fast."
"Better go too far and too fast than not go at all," retorted my wise mother. "Once a tortoise beat a hare,--once. It never happened again, yet the whole timid world has been talking about it ever since." And she fell into a study from which she roused herself to say, "You'd better let me bargain for the office and the furniture,--and the big sign." She knew--but could not or would not teach me--how to get a dollar's worth for a dollar; would not, I suspect, for she despised parsimony, declaring it to be another virtue which is becoming only in a woman.
"Of course,--when--" I began.
"We've got to do something in the next six months," she warned. And now she made the six months seem six minutes.
I had at my tongue's end something about the danger of dragging her down into misfortune; but before speaking I looked at her, and, looking, refrained. To say it to her would have been too absurd,--to her who had been left a widow with nothing at all, who had educated me for college, and who had helped me through my first year there,--helped me with money, I mean. But for what she gave besides, more, immeasurably more,--but for her courage in me and round me and under me,--I'd never have got my degree or anything else, I fear. To call that courage help would be like saying the mainspring helps the watch to go. I looked at her. "They can't kill me, can they?" said I, with a laugh which sounded so brave that it straightway made me brave.
So it was settled.
But that was the first step in a fight I can't remember even now without a sinking at the heart. The farmers of Jackson County, of which Pulaski was the county seat, found in litigation their chief distraction from the stupefying dullness of farm life in those days of pause, after the Indian and nature had been conquered and before the big world's arteries of thought and action had penetrated. The farmers took eagerly to litigation to save themselves from stagnation. Still, a new lawyer, especially if he was young, had an agonizing time of it convincing their slow, stiff, suspicious natures that he could be trusted in such a crisis as "going to law."
To make matters worse I fell in love.
* * * * *
Once--it was years afterward, though not many years ago--Burbank, at the time governor, was with me, and we were going over the main points for his annual message. One of my suggestions--my orders to all my agents, high and low, have always been sugar-coated as "suggestions"--started a new train of thought in him, and he took pen and paper to fix it before it had a chance to escape. As he wrote, my glance wandered along the shelves of the book-cases. It paused on the farthest and lowest shelf. I rose and went there, and found my old school-books, those I used when I was in Public School Number Three, too near thirty years ago!
In the shelf one book stood higher than the others--tall and thin and ragged, its covers torn, its pages scribbled, stained and dog-eared. Looking through that old physical geography was like a first talk with a long-lost friend. It had, indeed, been my old friend. Behind its broad back I had eaten forbidden apples, I had aimed and discharged the blow-gun, I had reveled in blood-and-thunder tales that made the drowsy schoolroom fade before the vast wilderness, the scene of breathless struggles between Indian and settler, or open into the high seas where pirate, or worse-than-pirate Britisher, struck flag to American privateer or man-o'-war.
On an impulse shot up from the dustiest depths of memory, I turned the old geography sidewise and examined the edges of the cover. Yes, there was the cache I had made by splitting the pasteboard with my jack-knife. I thrust in my fingernail; out came a slip of