The Jack-Knife Man

III. PETER LODGES OUT

AS Peter crossed the icy plank that led from his boat to the railway embankment he tried to whistle, but the wind was too strong and sharp, and he drew his head between his shoulders and closed his mouth tightly. He had understated the distance to Widow Potter’s when he had said it was “just across.” In fair weather and daylight he often cut across the corn-field, but on such a night as this the trip meant a long plod up the railway track until he came to the crossing, and then a longer tramp back the slushy road, a good half mile in all. When he turned in at Widow Potter’s open gate a great yellow dog came rushing at him, barking, but a word from Peter silenced him and the dog fell behind obediently but watchfully, and followed Peter to where the light shone through the widow’s kitchen window. Peter rapped on the door.

“Who’s out there?” Mrs. Potter called sharply. “I got a gun in here, and I ain’t afraid to use it If you ‘re a tramp, you’d better git!”

“It’s Peter Lane,” Peter called, loud enough to be heard above the wind. “I want to buy a couple of eggs off you, Mrs. Potter.”

The door opened the merest crack and Mrs. Potter peered out. She did not have a gun, but she held a stove poker. When she saw Peter she opened the door wide. It was a brusk welcome.

“Of all the shiftlessness I ever heard of, Peter Lane,” she said angrily, “you beat all! Cormin’ for eggs this time of night when your boat’s been in the cove nobody knows how long. I suppose it never come into your head to get eggs until you got hungry for them, did it?”

Peter closed the door and stood with his back to it. At all times he feared Mrs. Potter, but especially when he gave her some cause for reproof.

“I had some company drop in on me unexpected, Mrs. Potter,” he said apologetically. “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered you. I hate it worse’n you do.”

“Tramps, I dare say,” said the widow. “You ‘re that shiftless you’d give the shoes off your feet and the food out of your mouth to feed any good-for-nothing that come camping on you. You don’t get my good eggs to feed such trash, Peter Lane! Winter eggs are worth money.”

“I thought to pay for them,” said Peter meekly. “I wouldn’t ask them of you any other way, Mrs. Potter.”

“Well, if you ‘ve got the money I suppose I’ve got to let you have them,” said the widow grudgingly. “Eggs is worth three cents apiece, and I hate to have ‘em fed to tramps. How many do you want to buy?” Peter shifted from one foot to another uncomfortably. “Well, now, I’m what you might call a little short of ready money tonight,” he said. “I thought maybe I might come over and saw some wood for you tomorrow – ”

“And so you can,” said Mrs. Potter promptly, “and when the wood is sawed they will be paid for, in eggs or money, and not until it is sawed. I’m not going to encourage you to run into debt. You ‘re shiftless enough now, goodness knows.”

Peter tried to smile and ignored the accusation.

“There couldn’t be anything fairer than that,” he said. “Nobody ought to object to that sort of arrangement at all. That’s real business-like. Only, there’s a small boy amongst the company that dropped in on me and he’s only about so high – ” Peter showed a height that would have been small for an infant dwarf. “He’s a real nice little fellow, and if you was ever a boy that high, and crying because you wanted something to eat – ”

“I don’t believe a word of it!” snapped Mrs. Potter. “If there is a child down there he ought to be in bed long ago.”

“Yes’m,” agreed Peter meekly. “That’s so. You wouldn’t put even a dog that size to bed hungry. So, if you could let me have about half-a-dozen eggs, I’ll go right back.”

“Six eggs at three cents is eighteen cents,” said Mrs. Potter firmly, looking Peter directly in the eye. She was not bad looking. Her cheek bones were rather high and prominent and her cheeks hollow, and she had a strong chin for a woman, but the downward twist of discouragement that had marked her mouth during her later married years had already disappeared, giving place to a firmness that told she was well able to manage her own affairs. Peter drew his alarm-clock from beneath his coat and stood it on the kitchen table.

“I brought along this alarm-clock,” he said, “so you’d know I’d come back like I say I will. She’s a real good clock. I paid eighty cents for her when she was new, and I just fixed her up fresh to-day. She’s running quite – quite a little, since I fixed her.”

Mrs. Potter did not look at the clock. She looked at Peter.

“So!” she exclaimed. “So that’s what you’ve come to, Peter Lane! Pawnin’ your goods and chattels! That’s what shiftless folks always come to in the end.”

“And so, if you’ll let me have half-a-dozen eggs, and maybe some pieces of bread and butter and a handful of coffee,” said Peter, “I’ll leave the clock right here as security that I’ll come up first thing in the morning and saw wood ‘til you tell me I’ve sawed enough.”

Mrs. Potter took the clock in her hand and looked at Peter.

“How old did you say that boy is?” she asked.

“Goin’ on three, I should judge. He’s a real nice little feller,” said Peter eagerly.

Mrs. Potter put the clock on her kitchen table.

“Fiddlesticks! I don’t believe a word of it. Who else have you got down there?”

“Just his – his parent,” said Peter, blushing. “I wisht you could see that little feller. Maybe I’ll bring him up here to-morrow and let you see him.”

“Maybe you won’t!” said the widow. “If you ‘re hungry you can set down and I’ll fry you as many eggs as you want to eat, but you can’t come over me with no story about visitors bringin’ you children on a night like this! No, sir! You don’t get none of my eggs for your worthless tramps. Shall I fry you some?”

Peter looked down and frowned. Then he raised his head and looked full in the widow’s eyes and smiled. Nothing but the direct need could have induced him to smile thus at the widow for he knew and feared the result. When, once or twice before, he had looked into her eyes and smiled in this way – unthinkingly – she had fluttered and trembled like a bird in the presence of an overmastering fascination, and Peter did not like that. Such power frightened him. The widow, scolding and condemning, he could escape, but the widow fluttering and trembling, was a thing to be afraid of. It made him flutter and tremble, too.

When Peter smiled the widow drew in her breath sharply.

“Six – six eggs – will six eggs be all you want?” she asked hurriedly.

“Yes’m,” said Peter, still smiling, “unless you could spare some bread and butter. He ‘specially asked for butter,” and then he looked down. The widow drew another long breath.

“I don’t believe you’ve got a boy down there, and I don’t believe you’ve got a visitor that deserves nothing,” she said crossly. She was herself again. “I know you from hair to sole-leather, Peter Lane, and if any worthless scamp came and camped on you, you’d lie your head off to get food for him, and that’s what I think you ‘re doing now, but there ain’t no way of telling. If so be you have got a boy down there I don’t want him to go hungry, but if it’s just some worthless tramp, I hope these eggs choke him. You ain’t got a mite of common sense in you. You ‘re too soft, and that’s why you don’t get on. You’d come up here to-morrow and do a dollar’s worth of wood sawing for eighteen cents’ worth of eggs, and then give the eggs to the first tramp that asked you. What you ought to have is a wife. You ought to have a wife with a mind like a hatchet and a tongue like a black-snake whip, and you might be worth shucks, anyway. You just provoke me beyond patience.”

“Yes’m,” said Peter nervously.

Mrs. Potter was cutting thick, enticing slices from a big loaf and spreading them with golden butter.

“I reckon you want jam on this bread?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes, thank you!” said Peter.

“Well, maybe you have got a boy down there,” said Mrs. Potter reluctantly. “You’d be ashamed to ask for jam if you hadn’t. If you had a wife and she was any account you’d have bread and jam when boys come to see you. But I do pity the woman that gets you, Peter Lane! No woman on this earth but a widow that has had experience with men-folks could ever make anything out of you.”

Peter put his hand on the door-knob, ready for instant flight. When he smiled on Mrs. Potter something like this usually resulted and that was why he tried it so seldom. It was he, now, who trembled and fluttered.

“I’m not thinking of getting married at all,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to, anyway.”

“You needn’t think, just because you are no-account, some fool woman wouldn’t take you,” snapped Mrs. Potter. “Look at what my first husband was. Women marry all sorts of trash.”

Peter watched the progress of the bread and jam, trusting its preparation would not be delayed long.

“If they’re asked,” said Mrs. Potter. She seemed very cross about something. She wrapped the slices of bread in a clean sheet of paper from her table drawer, folding in the ends of the paper angrily. “But they don’t do the asking,” she added.

Peter took the parcel, and slipped the six clean white eggs into his pocket. He wanted to get away, but Mrs. Potter stopped him.

“I suppose, if there is a boy down there, I’ve got to give you what’s left of my roast chicken,” she grumbled, “or you’ll be coming up here about the time I get into bed, routing me out for more victuals. If I had a husband, and he was like you, and he had a mind to feed all the tramps in the county, he wouldn’t have to rout me out of bed to do it. He could go to the cupboard himself, and feed them.”

“Now, that clock,” said Peter hastily, “if I was you I wouldn’t depend too much on her alarm to get you up. I can’t say she’s regulated just the way I’d like to have her yet. And I’m much obliged to you.”

“I don’t want your clock!” said Mrs. Potter, but Peter had slipped out of the door, closing it behind him. The widow held the clock in her hand for a full minute, and then set it gently beside her own opulent Seth Thomas.

“I dare say you ‘re about as well regulated as he is,” she said, “and that ain’t saying much for either of you. He ain’t got the eyes to see through a grindstone!”

When Peter returned to the boat, the boy was busily trying to work one of the trot-line hooks out of the sleeve of his jacket, but the woman had dropped back on the bunk and her eyes were closed. She opened them when the rush of cold air from the door struck her face, and looked at Peter listlessly.

“I guess you don’t feel like cooking a couple of eggs,” said Peter, “so if you’ll excuse me remaining here awhile, I’ll do it for you. I’m a fair to middling fried-egg cook. Son, you let me get that hook out of you, and then see if you can eat five or six of these pieces of bread and jam. I could when I was a boy, and then I could wind up with a piece of chicken like this.”

“I hooked myself,” the boy explained.

“I should say you did,” said Peter. “You want to look out for these hooks, they bite a boy like a cat-fish stinger, and that ain’t much fun. I’m right glad you dropped in,” he said to the woman, “because I’ve got such good neighbors. It’s almost impossible to keep them from forcing more eggs and butter and such things on me than I’d know what to do with. ‘Just come on up when you want anything,’ they are always saying, ‘and help yourself.’ So it’s quite nice to have somebody drop in and give me a chance to show my neighbors I ain’t too proud to take a few eggs and such. It would surprise you to see how eager they are that way.”

He scraped the butter from one of the pieces of bread, needing it to fry the eggs in, and he worked as he talked, breaking the eggs into the frying-pan and watching that they were cooked to a turn.

“I certainly am blessed with nice neighbors,” he said. “There’s a widow lady lives a step or two beyond the railroad, and seems as if she couldn’t do enough for me. She just lays herself out to see that I’m overfed. Do you feel like you could eat a small part of chicken?”

The woman let her eyes rest on Peter some time before she spoke.

“I ought to feel hungry, but I don’t,” she said.

“Well, maybe a soft-boiled egg would be better. I ought to have thought of that,” said Peter as if he had been reproved. “You’ll have to excuse me for boiling it in the coffee-pot, I’ve been so busy planning a trip I’m going to take I haven’t had time to lay in much tinware yet.”

“Where did you take the clock?” asked the boy suddenly.

Peter reddened under his tan.

“That clock?” he said hesitatingly. “Where did I take that clock? Well, the fact is – the fact is that clock is a nuisance. That’s it, she’s a nuisance.’ I been meaning to throw that clock into the river for I don’t know how long. Unless you are used to that clock you just can’t sleep where she is. ‘Rattelty bang!’ she goes just whenever she takes a notion, like a dish-pan falling downstairs, all times of the night. So I just thought, as long as I was going out anyway, ‘Now’s a good time to get rid of the old nuisance!’”

“Mama would steal the clock,” said the boy.

“Oh, you mustn’t say that!” said Peter. “You come here and eat these two nice eggs. I hope, ma’am, you don’t think I had any such notion as that. When I have visitors they can steal everything in the boat, and welcome. I mean – ”

“I know what you mean,” said the woman. “You ‘re the white kind.”

“I’m glad you look at it that way,” said

Peter. “The boy, he don’t understand such things, he’s so young yet. Maybe you’d feel better if I propped you up with the pillow a little better. I’ll lay this extry blanket on the foot of the bunk here in case it should get cold during the night. You look nice and warm now.”

“I’m burning up,” said the woman.

“I judge you’ve got a slight fever,” said Peter. “I often get them when I get overtook by the rain when I’m out for a stroll.”

“I’ll be all right if I can lie here for an hour or so,” said the woman listlessly. “Then Buddy and me will get on. Is it far to town?”

“Now, you and that boy ain’t going another step to-night,” said Peter firmly. “You ‘re going to stay right here. You won’t discommode me a bit for I’ve made arrangements to sleep elsewhere, like I often do.”

He gave the woman the egg in his tin cup, and while she ate he put his trot-lines outside on the small forward deck so the boy might get in no more trouble with the hooks. Then he removed the shells from his shotgun, put the remaining eggs and bread and butter and chicken in his tin box, and pinned his coat collar.

“I’m going up to the place I arranged to sleep at, now,” he said, “and I hope you’ll find everything comfortable and nice. There’s more wood there by the stove, and before I come in in the morning I’ll knock on the door, so I guess maybe you’d better take off as many of them wet clothes as you wish to. You’ll take a worse cold if you don’t.”

“I’m afraid I’m too weak,” said the woman. “If you will just give me some help with my dress – ”

But Peter fled. He was a strange mixture, was Peter, and he fled as a blushing boy would have fled, not to stop running until he was far up the railway track. Then he realized, by the chill of the sleety rain against his head where the hair was thinnest, that he had forgotten his hat, and he laughed at himself.

“Pshaw, I guess that woman scared me,” he said.

He did not follow the path to Mrs. Potter’s kitchen door this time, but skirted the orchard and climbed a rail fence into the cow pasture. He made a wide circle through the pasture and climbed another fence into the yard behind the barn, where a haystack stood. He was trembling with cold by this time, and wet through, and the water froze stiff in his coat cuffs, but he dug deep into the base of the haystack and crawled into its shelter, drawing the sweet hay close around him. For awhile he lay with chattering teeth, his knees close under his chin, and then he felt warmer, and straightened his knees. The next moment he was asleep.

IV. THE SCARLET WOMAN

WHEN Peter crawled out of his haystack the next morning the weather was intensely cold and the wind was gone. Every twig and weed sparkled with the ice frozen upon it. He had needed no alarm-clock to awaken him, for an uneasy sense of discomfort gradually opened his eyes, and he found his knees aching and his whole body chilled and stiff. He climbed the fence into the farm-house yard. He had no doubt now that he was hungry, and he was well aware that his head was cold where the hair was thin. Indeed, his hands and feet were cold too. But he tightened his belt another hole and made for Mrs. Potter’s woodshed. Among the chips and sawdust he found a piece of white cloth which, had he known it was the remains of one of Mrs. Potter’s petticoats, he would have left where it lay, but not knowing this he made a makeshift turban by knotting the corners, and drew it well down over his ears, like a nightcap. It was more comfortable than the raw morning air, and Peter had no more pride than a tramp.

He found the wood saw hanging in the shed, a piece of bacon-rind on the windowsill, and the ice-covered sawbuck in the yard, and he set to work on the pile of pin-oak as if he meant to earn his clock, his breakfast and a full day’s wages before Mrs. Potter got out of bed. The exercise warmed him, but he kept one eye on the top of Mrs. Potter’s kitchen chimney, looking for the thin smoke signal telling that breakfast was under way. The pile of stove-wood grew and grew under his saw but still the house gave no sign of life. The sun climbed, making the icy coating of trees and fences glow with color, and still Mrs. Potter’s kitchen chimney remained hopelessly smokeless.

“That woman must have a good, clear conscience or she couldn’t sleep like that,” said the hungry Peter, “but I’ve got folks on my hands, and I’ve got to see to them. If this ain’t enough wood to satisfy her I’ll saw some more when I come back.”

He was worried, for no smoke was coming from the stovepipe that protruded from the roof of his shanty-boat. When he reached the boat he knocked three times without answer before he opened the door cautiously and peered in, ready to retreat should his entrance be inopportune. The woman was lying where he had left her, still in her wet clothes, and the cabin was icy cold. The boy, when Peter opened the door, was standing on the table trying to lift the shot-gun from its pegs. His face showed he had made a trip to the bread and jam. He looked down at Peter as the door opened.

“Mama’s funny,” he said, and reached for the gun again.

The woman was indeed “funny.” She was in the grip of a raging fever. Her cheeks were violently red and against them the green dye from her hat made hideous streaks. Her hair had fallen and lay in a tangle over the pillow, with the rain-soaked hat still clinging to a strand. As she moved her head the hat moved with it, giving her a drunken, disreputable appearance. She talked rapidly and angrily, repeating the names of men, of “Susie” and “Buddy,” stopping to sing a verse of a popular song, breaking into profanity and laughing loudly. All human emotions except tears flowed from her, and Peter stood with his back against the door, uncertain what to do. The table, tipping suddenly and throwing the boy to the floor, decided him.

“There, now, you little rascal!” he said, gathering the weeping boy in his arms.

“You might have broke your arm, or your leg. You oughtn’t to stand on a table you ain’t acquainted with, that way.”

“I wanted to fall down,” said the boy, ceasing his tears at once. “I like to fall off tables I ain’t ‘quainted with.”

“Well, I just bet you do!” said Peter. “You look like that sort of a boy to me. Does your ma act funny like this often? You poor young ‘un, I hope not!”

“No,” said Buddy.

Peter looked at the woman, studying her. It might have been possible that she was insane, but the vivid red of her cheeks convinced him she was delirious with fever. Her hat, askew over one ear, gave Peter a feeling of shame for her, and he put Buddy down and walked to the bunk. He saw that the hat pin had made a cruel scratch along her cheek.

“Now, ma’am,” he said, “I’m just going to help you off with this hat, because it’s getting all mashed up, and it ain’t needed in the house.”

He put out his hand to take the hat, but the woman raised herself on one arm, and with the other fist struck Peter full in the face, so that he staggered back against the table, while she swore at him viciously.

“You hadn’t ought to do that,” he said reprovingly; “I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

“I know you!” shouted the woman in a rage. “I know you! You can’t come any of that over me! You took Susie, you beast, but you don’t get Buddy. Let me get at you!”

She tried to clamber from the bunk, but fell back coughing.