A Yankee from the West: A NovelRead, Opie Percival
General
A Yankee from the West: A Novel
Read, Opie Percival
Farm life -- Fiction; Illinois -- Fiction
"Well, I guess you've come to the right place." He turned and pointed
far across a meadow to a windmill above tree tops on the brow of a hill.
"Mrs. Stuvic, a widow woman, that lives over yonder, has an adjoinin'
farm to rent. Get in, and I'll drive you over--goin' that way anyhow,
and it shan't cost you a cent. Throw your carpet-bag in there, it won't
fall out. Whoa, boys! They won't run away. Yes, sir, as good a little
place as there is in the county," he added, turning down a lane. "But
the old woman has had all sorts of bad luck with it. That horse would
have a fit if he couldn't clap his tail over that line every five
minutes. But he won't run away."
"I don't care if he does," said the stranger.
"Well, you would if you had to pick up milk cans for half a mile. He
scattered them from that house up yonder down to that piece of timber
day before yesterday."
"Did he run away?"
"Well, he wasn't walkin'."
"Then how do you know he won't run away again?"
"Well, I think I've sorter Christian scienced him."
The stranger laughed, and the farmer clucked an applause of his own
wisdom. They had reached a corner where a large white house stood
surrounded by blooming cherry trees. Bees hummed, and the air was heavy
with sweetness. The stranger took off his hat, and straightening up
breathed long. "Delicious," he said. The farmer turned to the right,
into another road. "I'm almost glad I'm alive," said the stranger.
"You must have paid your taxes and got it over with," the farmer
replied. The stranger did not rejoin. His mind and his eye had gone
forth to roam in a piece of woods gently sloping toward the road. He saw
the mandrake's low canopy, shading the sod, the crimson flash of a
woodpecker through the blue of the air beneath the green of the trees,
like a spurt of blood. The farmer's eye, cloyed with the feasts that
nature spreads, followed a horse that galloped through the rank tangle
of a marsh-dip in a meadow.
"Over on that other hill is where the old lady lives," he said.
"What did you say her name was?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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