The Able McLaughlins

to turn her mind away from such wild ideas by ridicule. They hooted at her in disgust. How was she to go to a new place⁠—where there were no houses⁠—nor any doctors⁠—nor any beds! Her brothers wrote her, sternly forbidding her to think of such a thing. But were the children of others to lord it over Utopian acres in a new world, while hers, because she had married somewhat poorly, slaved along in an old one⁠—apprentices of some half-fed mechanic? Her husband resisted with all his might. He was no farmer. He felt no drawings toward pioneer hardships. But his lack of them was in vain. She rose and took him and her three, and journeyed stoutly to her brother’s house in Iowa, where she was received with an awe that would have been greater if he could have known she was to die at the fairly mature age of ninety-two.

She had come thus for her children’s sake to the new world. Her oldest son, her Davie, a lad well liked by all, was the first of those who fell before the plague of typhoid. That bowed her down. She was nothing but a mother, a woman who nowadays would be called rotten with tenderness. Maternity was her whole life. Then her one daughter married, her Flora, and shortly died in childbirth. These things ought not to be.⁠ ⁠… Then Peter, who was all she had left to spend her love on, disappeared, leaving in his place a scribbled paper. No wonder, after all, that she sought him through cold cities.

When she came into the McLaughlin kitchen, she bent over and patted Chirstie on the shoulder commiseratingly, sighing a sigh that recalled to the girl all the agony of Flora’s death in labor. She was a large woman, heavily built, without grace, and with the long upper lip and heavy face that John McLaughlin and his children had, and keen, deep-set, very dark blue eyes, like theirs. Since that long illness of hers, her heavy cheeks hung pale and flabby.

“So you’re back, Libby!” Isobel was constrained to speak to her softly, as one speaks to a mourner. She deserted her spinning wheel, and took her knitting, for a visit.

“I’m back.”

“You’ve no word of him?”

“No word.” Each of her answers was accompanied by a sigh most long and deep.

“I suppose you looked everywhere?”

“I went about the whole city asking for him.”

“How could you know how to go, Libby?”

“That was no trouble. Men in barns is that kind to a body. I asked them in every one where the next one was, and they told me. Sometimes they drove me in some carriage. And there was the cars. I just said I was looking for my Peter who was sick in some stable. James McWhee went to the police and to the hospitals. There’s none better than the McWhees, Isobel. They have a fine painted house with trees about it. They would have me stay longer. James said he would be always looking for him.” She gave another great sigh.

“Ah, weel, Libby, some day he’ll find him. Some day you’ll get word from him, no doubt. It’s a fine place, Chicago. The sick’ll be well cared for there. It wouldn’t be like New Orleans, now. Wully says the lake is just like the ocean. Did you see the lake, Libby?”

“I did’na see the lake. I was aye seeking Peter.”

Isobel was determined to have a change of subject.

“They say it beats all the great buildings they have now in Chicago. It’ll be changed since we saw it.”

“I saw no buildings but the barns. It passes me why they have so many. There was a real old gentleman standing by the door in one, waiting for something done to his carriage. His son went to California in ’49, and he still seeks him. He said he would be looking for my Peter. Yon was a fine old man.”

Isobel tried to talk about the train, which was nothing common yet. Libby told her in reply what each man and woman in her car had answered when she asked if any had seen her poor sick laddie. Isobel was constrained to tell what one and another of the neighbors hoped about the lost. The Squire had said that he would be coming back in the spring. The boy could never stay in the city when the spring came, he prophesied. Whereupon his mother replied that he wouldn’t stay away now if he could by any means get back to his home. And then she wailed, through a moment of silence;

“If I but knew he was dead, Isobel! Not wanting, some place! Not grieving!”

“That’s true, Libby. I know that well. I felt that way when I knew Allen was dead. There was⁠—rest, then. No fear, then.”

They sat silent. Chirstie bestirred herself guiltily to offer her bit of hope. She felt always in a way responsible for Peter’s departure, however much Wully scouted the idea. Wully hadn’t told him not to write to his silly mother, had he? Hadn’t Peter always been whining about going west? He would have gone, Chirstie or no Chirstie. Wully told her she naturally blamed herself for everything that happened. And she acknowledged that in some moods it did seem to her that she was the cause of most of the pain she saw about her. She began now about the uncertainty of the mails. Didn’t her auntie know that Wully never got but a few of the letters that had been sent him during the war? It was Chirstie’s opinion that Peter had written home, maybe many times, and the letters had miscarried. Maybe he had written what a good place he had to work, and how much wages he was getting. They considered this probability from all sides.

And Libby’s attention was diverted to the girl. Isobel McLaughlin was not one of those, by any means, who saw in Libby’s search something half ridiculous. Her boys had been away too many months