If he wanted something to do, would he ride over to Jeannie McNair’s for her? She wanted to know if Jeannie had any news yet from Alex. When would that man be back, she wondered indignantly. Who ever heard of a man harvesting a wheat crop, and starting back to Scotland, leaving his family alone with the snakes—she always added the snakes because the McNair cabin was on low land which those reptiles rather affected—and all to prevent his half brothers from getting a bit more of a poor inheritance than they were entitled to! If Wully went on her errand, he was to take poor Jeannie a few prairie chickens, and those three young ducks she had raised for her, alone there with her bairns!
And if he was going, he must put on his uniform. He demurred. She insisted. Why, Jeannie had never seen him in his uniform! He smiled to hear her imply that not to have seen him so arrayed was the greatest of her deplorable privations. Yet he went and put it on, nevertheless, for it was the most handsome suit he had ever had, always before having been clothed in the handiwork of his mother and sisters. When he was ready to go, the ducks caught and tied, a bit of jelly safely wrapped, as he stood by the horse, in his mother’s sight the most beautiful soldier in the American armies, she said:
“Jeannie’s Jimmie was just your age, you mind, Wully.”
She watched him riding away, the fondness of her face ministering to the joyous sense of well-being that swept over him. How unspeakably lovely the country was! How magnificent its richness! He had never felt it so keenly before. He must be getting like his father. Or perhaps it looked so much more impressive because he had seen so much swampy desolation in the South. The grass he rode through seemed to bend under the sparkling of the golden sunshine. He came to the creek, and as he crossed it he remembered with a pang the time his companions had staggered thankfully and hastily to drink out of a pool covered with green slime. He turned with disgust from the memory. He wouldn’t even think of those things to spoil his few days at home. He gave himself up to the persuasive peace around him. He rode along, completely, unreasonably happy. He began to sing. Singing, he remembered Allen. How was it that he was here singing, and Allen, the singer, was dead! But the afternoon’s glow took away soon even the bitterness of that question.
He came presently in sight of the McNairs’ cabin. Though every other man of the neighborhood had been able, thanks to the wartime price of wheat, to build for his family a more decent shelter than the first one, that Alex McNair, fairly crazy with land-hunger, added acre to acre, regardless of his family’s needs. Such a man Wully scorned with all the arrogance of youth. He had, moreover, understood and shared something of his mother’s pity for her beloved friend, McNair’s wife. He remembered distinctly that when his parents had been leaving the Ayrshire home for America, Jeannie had put into his hand a poke of sweeties to be divided by him among the other children during the journey. That had been a happy farewell, because Jeannie and her five were soon to follow. But when the ten flourishing McLaughlins again saw Jeannie on this side of the water, of her five there remained only her little Chirstie, and a baby boy. The bodies of the other three she had seen thrown out of the smallpox-smitten ship which the feasting sharks were following. Since then she had been a silent woman, though Wully’s mother spoke of her sometimes, sighing, as a girl of high spirits and wit. Now, however much other Ayrshire women might rejoice in a dawning nation, the memory of those bloody mouths stood always between her and hope. She endured the new solitude without comment or complaint. Homesick for a hint of old-country decency, she hung the walls of her cabin with the linen sheets of her dowry, sheets that must have come out of the poisonous ship. Wully’s mother admired that immaculate room without one sigh of envy. White sheets would keep clean a long time in that cabin, with only the two bairns. But she thanked God that in her crowded cabin there was not room for one sheet on the wall. Moreover, in the new land, Jeannie had lost two babies, so that now for her labor and travail, she had only the Scottish two, and a baby girl. With another baby imminent, her husband had “trapassed” away to Scotland! He was too “close” to have taken her with him. But not for the wealth of Iowa would she have exposed her children again to sea. She would stay and save them on dry land. She wouldn’t be left altogether alone. Her brother’s family lived but two miles away.
Wully rode up to the house unperceived, though not one tree, not one kindly bush protected it against the immensity of the solitude around it. He tied his horse, and was at the door before Jeannie saw him. Then she exclaimed:
“If it is’na Isobel’s Wully!” She shook his hand, and patted him on his shoulder, and reached up and kissed him. He didn’t mind that. She was
