People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1894 — THE TROUBLESOME LADY [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE TROUBLESOME LADY

BY PATIENCE STAPLETION

COVYKttK Ji ASAiWAtfSU. UXI

CHAPTER V.— Continued. Sne June day the doctor came into his friend’s office in a jaunty gray suit with immaculate creases and a general air of fashion and newness quite dazzling. “Yon must be going to be married,” laughed Oliver. “Why this state?” “A trip east, my boy. I want to (breathe the fogs of my native state. My lungs are shriveled up. You never suspected I was born in Skowhegan, Me.; 1 never told you, it would have been such a background for feeble jokes. Besides, what man would want to say he was born in a place called Skowhegan? I had to be born somewhere, though, and Colorado is too young for me. The Achorns are an old family in Maine, and, though some of us call it Ach-orns, I like the old Way. Please, your joke now—great oaks from little acorns grow.” I “I’m too startled, too dazed by your .decision. You haven’t been east in (fifteen years to my knowledge.” t “Never too late to mend. Besides, I’m going to Newcastle. I would like to see how the Troublesome lady is, and her aunt. I like the aunt —good old New England kind, honest as the day, narrow, perhaps, but solid worth. In another generation those old maids will be as extinct as the dodo.”

“It does not seem to me the proper thing to call on them when neither has ■ent us any word.” “That’s Aunt Hannah, bless her good •leart,” smiled the doctor. “She looks on you with suspicion, Craig, for Mrs. Minny is a married woman, and down in Maine a married woman goes into (her tomb when the service is over. Young girls may go to dances and ■other village jollifications, but a married woman’s place is at home, doing •the Napoleon act and raising citizens. I like that law, too; it saves lots of “trouble.” “Perhaps; but. remember, Maine is in divoice cases.” “Well, they live too shut in, folks do down there, and they are all opinionated and strong characters. I’ll write you from Newcastle, at all events.” This Dr. John did after a month. The letter brought a sense of uneasiness to Oliver, and the conviction that, with the best intentions in the world, he had done a great wrong. Mrs. Minny had never been heard from. Mrs. Patten had been at home some weeks at a time during the winter and spring, but would go off again, “wandering-like,” Mr. Perkins said, and seemed not right in her ’ mind. Mrs. Perkins took care of the cat and parrot, and she, too, affirmed thlt Miss Patten was queer and that she had remarked “it was wrong for dumb beasts and birds to be housed when her own dear niece—her >nly connection —was a homeless wanderer on the face of the earth.” Mr. De Restaud had also visited Newcastle and interviewed the depot-

■master, but he got no satisfaction, for Mr. Perkins told Dr. John “he’d knowed Minny Patten from the time she was a little girl, when she played with his little dead Janie Ann, and he wasn’t going to tell a black-looking foreigner where she was if he knowed,” and he took much pleasure In mystifying the infuriated husband. “Dear Craig,” the letter ended, “I think lam getting senile, for I begin to doubt my best-friend. Do you know where Mrs. Minny is, and have you known all the time? I believe you (until I know to the contrary) an honorable 'man. I shall think you a scoundrel if my suspicions should be verified. At least make Mrs. Restaud write to that poor distracted aunt wandering about the world looking for her. It is like uprooting a plant to tear an old woman away from her home.” Oliver wrote a few lines in reply: “You had better return before paresis sets in; you will be kindly cared for here. Soberly speaking, if I were the man you suggest, I ought to be in the penitentiary. I assure you I Atiow nothing of Mrs. De Restaud; I have never heard from her; and the fact that I assisted in sending such an 'irresponsible young person adrift in the world will always be a worriment to me.” So tnere were many hearts to be lightened by Mrs. Minny’s appearances but of this she had no knowledge. Her lightoat moment* would have been

saddened if she could have seen a gaunt old woman overcoming a shuddering horror in some great city and then venturing timidly to see a dead face in the morgue—an unknown, young and beautiful, found dead. Nor would Mrs. Minny have known herself as pictured by the trembling lips of that fast-aging old woman—“ The dearest, prettiest little thing, and as innocent as a‘ child." Truly to disappear in this world is to leave behind a trail of broken hearts and long days of worriment and pain. Sad enough in contrast is t» be among the missing with no human being left to care, to ask, and to be buried in the potter’s field —to have been a bright-eyed baby loved on its mother’s breast, hoped for by her fond Imagining, dreamed of in the great future, and to be the fulfillment, unclaimed clay.

CHAPTER VI When the train in which Dr. John was returning to Denver suddenly stopped at a place where there was only the small brown house of a switchman, the doctor looked out of the window with relief. He thought it very hard that on his first trip across the plains in so many years there should be only stupid people in the car, not a congenial soul to talk with and to compare the present times with the old. Dr. John had crossed the plains in an ox wagon, and he would so have liked to discuss that voyage with some pioneer or newcomer eager to hear about it. He supposed there was an accident: there had been two stops already about that hot box. A little crowd passed the window carrying something—he could not see what, for those standing around. He craned his neck, his professional instincts aroused. A worried-looking woman in the door of the brown house seemed to be denying the sufferer entrance with animated gestures and angry shakes of her frowzy head. Three whitehaired little children hung to her skirts, and she pointed to them in proof of her assertions. Dr. John half rose as the conductor came in the car. “Is there a doctor here?” the man said, eagerly. “There’s a woman very sick; just taken from the day coach. That hag out there wouldn't hardly give her shelter.” “What seems to be the matter?” asked Dr. John, briskly. The conductor hesitated. “Well, sir, she’s a young woman, hut I think she’s married.”

The ladies in the car took up their books in disgust. An elderly, portly man in front of Dr. John buried himself behind his newspaper. Dr. John knew him to be a physician. “I’m a doctor,” said Dr. John, gathering up his belongings. “I shall be glad to see what I can do.” “You may be detained over a train,” hesitated the official; “and she’s evidently poor—hasn’t any baggage.” “I am, fortunately, able to attend to the suffering without having my pay dangled before my eyes to spur me on,” growled Dr. John, passing the lady readers with looks of disgust. “Not one of ’em offered even a shawl, and the sick creature I suppose is destitute.” He pushed through the crowd gathered about the house and dispersed them with very vigorous English. A pleasant-faced young man handed him a roll of bills. “I collected that in our Pullman. We’re not all so heartless as you say.” “So that’s you, Jimmy Watson,” smiled the doctor. “I ask your pardon; before this I thought you were just a dude. 1 shall tell your mother there is hope for you.” “Thanks,” laughed the younger man. “There’s twenty-five dollars. I suppose, though, your fees will gobble it all up.” “To the last cent, Jimmy; that’s why I got off the car.” He shut the door smartly in the face of the crowd, and, finding the switchman’s wife in the small hall, said, severely: “I suppose you call yourself a Christian woman, ma’am.”

“There hain’t no meeting-house in this forsaken country not for forty miles, jest plains,” she said, sourly, “and, having a family of my own, I ain’t obliged, if my man do work on the railroad, to take into my house strangers with complaints as may be catching.’* “Well, this is, I take it,” grinned the doctor, “to your sex.” She smiled a little grimly, and took up her youngest child in a motherly sort of way that pleased the keen observer. “You’ve got a kind heart; your tongue rijns away with you, that’s all. And now do your best for the sick woman. I have plenty of money to pay you.” “I—l put her in my bed,” said the woman, shyly. “She’s a pretty little thing, and is clean out of her head, but she hain’t no wedding-ring.” “Well, she is punished now, poor girl, for her share in the wrong-doing without you and me saying anything.’’ “All aboard!” sounded outside. As the train rattled away, Dr. John went softly to the little room where the emigrant woman lay unconscious of this world, so nearly on the threshold of the next.

In the chill gray of early dawn Dr. John came out in the kitchen, where Jonas Macon, the switchman, sat over the fire; he had been forced to sleep in his chair the long night after t, day’s work. The hospitality of the poor often means personal deprivation. “Is she goin’ to live?” asked the man. “I hope so. The baby is a fine boy.” “Both of ’em better dead, if what wife thinks of her is true,” sighed the man. “As for the boy, if he must grow up and work as I’ve done, never gittin’ no further, he won’t thank you for a-savin’ of him.” “He may turn out a great man some day; and then,” said Dr. John, half to himself—“she is not a common or uneducated woman, the mother—he may be the better for the story of his birth, strive to rise the higher for it” “Likely not he won’t. Them ’sylnm children don’t amount to much in general. Takes a mighty smart man to eemo nvt of toe mud.*

“Your wife has dona nobly by her," ■aid the doctor. “She has the beat heart.” “She is kind,” muttered the man, “an’ she have stoed about everythin’ a woman can stan’. I’ll git my own breakfust. You tell her to turn in an* aieep with the kids awhile.” The doctor went back to his patient, and Mrs. Macon brought the little flannel bundle out by the stove. Later the children were wild about it. Did the train leave the baby? were they going to have it always? and could they see in the windows of the trains, as they passed, lots of baby faces looking out for mothers to take them? At night Mrs. Macon woke the doctor, who was taking a nap in the chil dren’s bed. “I think, sir,” she said, worriedly, “the little lady is gone out of her head. She’s feeling round in the bedclothes for a dog, and calling one pitiful-like.” “I have been a blind fool!” cried the doctor. “I felt all the time I’d ought to know her.” He ran to the sickroom, and, luckily, had some quieting medicine in his case. The sufferer, however, resisted long, as she slept sighed, and one tiny hand felt around nervously, while the other, clinched hard in the sheet, resisted all pressure to open it. The next morning the white-haired children were very quiet; they played a long way from the house, and towards evening Dr. John kept them by him in the kitchen, telling stories. To this day the youngest one looks in vain for a baby to come by train that shall be his own property, an illusion created by the doctor’s stories. “She’s asleep,” said Mrs. Macon, coming out, “and here’s a little purse I found in her pocket. I couldn’t get it before, for, loony as she’s been all day, she watched me if I went near her things.” A shabby little purse, containing only a five-dollar bill and a card—Craig Oliver’s, with his office address. “I didn’t need this to tell me.” said the doctor. “She is a married woman all right, Mrs. Macon; her name is Minny de Restaud, and her people are well-to-do. How she came here I

haven’t the faintest idea; she disappeared last fall, and her aunt has searched all over the country for her.” In the morning when the doctor went to see his patient he found her conscious, looking with ineffable disdain on the red-faced bundle beside her. “You’re the kind doctor who stayed off the train on account of me,” she said, faintly. “You were ever so good; but I’d much rather have just died. She” (with a weak glance at Mrs. Macon) “told me about you.” “Most women would be pleased with that nice little baby." “Would they?” indifferently. “It has black eyes, and is so ugly. Besides, it has no sense. My dog knew everything.” “Tut! tut!” scolded the doctor; “that is not pretty talk.” “You act like my old maid aunt.” “Weren’t your dog’s eyes black, too, Mrs. Minny?” “How did you find my name?” she cried, piteously. “And you can’t call me that; for some one I love dearly has that name for me.” “You said it when out of your head,” said Doctor John, calmly. “Now go to sleep.” “But I’ve.got lots of things I must attend to about him,” looking at the baby curiously. “You see, having him makes me different. I feel I must do things for him I don’t want to tell.” “To-night will do.” “I might die.” “You are not in the slightest danger, nor is the boy; and, though you have had your own way a long time —possibly too long—you mv*st mind now.” She obediently closed her eyes, and in the late afternoon when Dr. John returned greeted him with a radiant smile.

“I’m quite sure I am going to die,” she said, happily, “and you don’t know how glad 1 am. T fe*l so good and sensible, I know I can’t live long. Now I want you to write out legally all about the child and me, how I came here. His name is to be Francois —French for Francis, you know--de Restaud, after his grandfather, who is a general in France. His father's name is Henri de Restaud. My name, which is funny, is Minerva Patten de Restaud, and my old aunt, Hannah Patten.in Newcastle, Me., has my marriage certificate and all my other papers. She took them away when she visited me up in the valley of the Troublesome. She was afraid my husband might take them from me and say we were not married if he wanted to go back to his people in Paris. I never wanted to see any of them; one member of the family was enough” (with a ghost of a smile); “but the baby has made me see things differently. The family are very rich, and there is only one heir, Henri’s older brother’s son. Henri said he was sickly, his mother’s family being consumptive. That little baby may grow up a man, and he would hate me because I had not looked after his interests. Of course it will seem strange to people in France that I was here without anybody, and that is why I want you and the Macons to witness a legal paper tolling all about it."

“I have half a mind toaaafi toDvavaf for a lawyer,” said Dr. John. “If th< little boy's claims should ever be dis puted—and they might, you know— it would be best to have everything right. Besides, the French people are great for documentary evidence, certificates of birth and such things.” “I suppose you had better," she sighed, lying back on her pillow, “but I hate any more people to know. I’ve had such a long peaceful time, I am sorry to have to go back to quarreling.” “Mrs. Minny, before you go to sleep I will tell you something, but you must not ask a question, for you have talked enough. I know all about you. I was Craig Oliver’s guest last fall, and I have seen and talked to your Aunt Hannah; so you need not think me a stranger, but an old friend eager to serve you.” She caught his hand with her frail little one and turned her face away without speaking. He sat by her until she slept, and he felt, as Oliver had done, that she was a woman child, not a woman, and doubly dear by that clinging helplessness. A week had Mrs. Minny been sick at the switchman’s house when Dr. John telegraphed to Oliver to send a lawyer to the station. He also added: “If Hannah Patten is in Denver, send her along.” He had telegraphed to Newcastle and found she was not there. When by special order the train stopped at the lonely brown house, Dr. John was on the watch. He went daily to the track for papers, having established communication with different conductors. He had received no answer to his message sent the day before, and he surmised that Oliver, with his usual attention to business, had sent a lawyer directly the message waa received. The station was only a night and a part of a day’s ride from Denver. To his surprise and dismay, Oliver himself stepped down from the train, turned and assisted a tall lady to descend, a lady much burdened with parcels and carrying a large basket. There was no chance to speak until the train had gone; then Miss Patten said, calmly: “Where is she?” The doctor pointed to the house. “I must tell her first,” he said in a whisper; “she is still very weak, and the surprise might upset her. Where did you come from?” “Bosting. I’ve traced her, but went on to Denver instid, an’ was in Mr. Oliver’s office when the telegram come. Him being a lawyer, I persuaded him to come too.” [TO BE CONTINUED.]

“YOU MUST BE GOING TO BE MARRIED," LAUGHED OLIVER.

THE DOCTOR POINTED TO THE HOUSE.