Drought

I

ONCE more Spring is calling, ‘Step up, gentlemen, and place your bets.’ And we advance behind our ploughs with, perhaps, a step less assured than that of last year, when Nature won all the bets.

Even the ponies and I do not amble twice a week to the village with as light an amble, for eggs are ten cents now, when they were twenty-five cents this time last year.

Last spring I used to stop to watch Joey — eighteen, and married — following the mules proudly up and down the furrows, while his child-wife ran about in the field picking rocks and carrying them to the stone wall, reminding one, in her ragged red sweater, of a spring robin hopping about and running with an early worm. How many weary years of rock picking in that field! And still the rocks spring like dragons’ teeth from the land.

There are four farms on my road to the village. Joey’s, the Turleys’,— two bachelor brothers who live opposite each other, — and last, Jimmy Reed’s. Jimmy lives with his mother and his young wife at the foot of the steep Reed hill where I always rest the ponies beside the busy, crystal-clear stream and watch Jimmy and his wife working in the wide, clean fields where later the cotton will bloom. We wave at each other happily, for the season is propitious, and it is spring.

At the ford I watch warily for the little island. If it is submerged, I dare not trust the swift waters from the mountains, but must turn to the longer road, where the crossing is safe. But to-day the pussy willows sway above the island, so the ponies drink their fill of the water they like best, and John, after his swim, visits, as he always does, the little mossy dens along the bank. For hope springs eternal that one great day he may come upon the ‘varmint’ which he knows hides there at night.

Among the green pines the dogwood stars, ineffably pure, white, like moonlight on snow, and across Tom Turley’s pasture, against the azure sky, a long line of blushing redbuds. Beyond, old Rich Mountain, clothed in purple, benignant and mighty. Then comes the flower-bordered curve in the road that ever satisfies my soul, and I call John, who reluctantly abandons the hawk high in the tree, at which he barks defiance. For there is now no bounty on chicken hawks, and Arkansas expects every dog to do his duty.

From his accustomed stump John jumps into the cart. We are approaching the highway that leads to our county seat, and John, who has never learned to fear anything, might pause in the middle of the road to scratch his ear before a passing motor car, certain that it would stop for him.

Up the long, steep hill, where I rest the ponies and gaze at the sky, bluer from this depth, and smile that the mistletoe on the hardwood trees that slope south to the Ouachita River still grows too high for holiday fears. And I look with a passing sadness at the churchyard with its remembered dead, and our little church on the summit of the hill. Around the curve, and there is the village, and Billy at his shop is shoeing a patient horse, or gazing thoughtfully at a grief-stricken motor car.

There are five houses in the village, and two small stores. If you fail to find what you desire in one, the storekeeper says, ‘I kinder think the other store’s got some o’ thet ter-day.’

In the farther store the postmaster sits on a nail keg before the little cage which is our post-office department, bent on improving his mind with a book. For all the farmers are busy now, and the precious checkerboard lies idle and neglected on an adjacent flour sack. I receive my mail, and select another nail keg beside the postmaster and read aloud portions of my letters which may interest him. For the postmaster is my friend and confidant. He will say proudly, ‘Here’s one from the lady in New York. And here’s one I do believe’s got a check in it!’

II

Summer — and the little Robin and Joey, chopping cotton, look up wearily from their persistent, never-resting hoes. But Joey calls hopefully: —

‘Hit ’pears now lak it might be weatherin’ ter-morrer.’

But each day the clouds gather high in the sky, and, after a conference, disperse and vanish into thin air, and once more the sun sinks rose and gold behind the violet mountains. The days that follow are not hot days. The fields are not scorched by the sun alone. The corn and the cotton simply die of thirst.

I note, in passing, that Tom Turley has moved his bed into the yard by the dusty crape-myrtle tree, for never have the stars, it seems to me, shone down upon us with such pitiless brilliancy.

Then one day, as I pass, Joey says, ‘No’m, hit would n’t do no good now effen it did rain. The corn hit dried up in ther tossle before it could make; an’ ther cotton suares they fell off, an’ them would set won’t make now.’

Jimmy Reed sits idle with his drooping young wife among the withered rosebushes in the yard, and looks across to the burned fields that represent so many days of toil for them both, and so many dollars for fertilizer which was to be paid for from the cotton. He greets me as gallantly as ever, but when I turn again from the stream to call John, passing the compliments of the season with the hounds, I catch a look on Jimmy’s young face that I wish I might forget.

Then one day when the dust is deep, and the rocks in the road seem to have grown and sharpened; when the ponies no longer pause to stand and pretend to drink long after they have finished of the cool mountain water, but plod disconsolately through the revealing waste that was our beautiful ford; when the oaks stand brown and desolate, marked for death among the haughty pines, and the ground is strewn with withered leaves as if already winter were here, I reproach myself, in this barren land where no bird sings, for my joy in the encircling mountains — splendid, gigantic bouquets of softest browns and deepest maroon, and scarlet and green and shining gold. Tom Turley waits at his gate and stops me, — it is the twelfth of August, — and leans on the wheel of the cart, and looks at me with a white face.

‘I thought I’d jist break hit ter you kinder — before you git ter town. The bank — hit failed yesterday. The one where yore money is — and where all our school money is.’

Tom commends me for the way in which I bear the shock. Since I am a ‘furrin womern,’ he had not expected the stoicism of a mountaineer. But the school money! That is incredible! How many anxious conferences we have held at our own little schoolhouse at my corner in an endeavor to resign ourselves to the mandate which had gone forth for a consolidated school at the village. We know that we might have better teachers there, and more time given to smaller classes, and it might be well enough for the elder pupils, though ‘hit’ll be mighty hard fur ther womern ter git th’u ’ith ther work in ther ev’nin’ ’ithout ’em — bein’ so late on ther road.’ But the little ones, who must be snatched from a breakfast at dawn, who must walk to our old schoolhouse, deserted and cold, and wait for a dangerous-looking bus to bear them away until nightfall, — for we cannot afford another bus at once, and the road is long and must be repaired, too, — ‘ thim leetle fellers thet hain’t niver ben nowhere a-tall!’ Who will care for them, swinging away in that rocking machine?

Then, too, we feel that we shall be standardized — we shall lose our individuality. No more will there be a community centre at our own schoolhouse, where we hold our pie suppers, and exhibitions, and our Christmas tree celebrations. The village will swallow us. After all our agony of resistance, and our final resignation, now the money for the new stone schoolhouse at the village, — our one consolation, — the money is lost!

At the village are sober faces. ‘Frozen securities,’ sighs the postmaster.

‘Thet means us, I reckon,’ grins Barton, looking up from a brilliant move of a checker-man.

‘Finish the game,’ I say to the postmaster. ‘I am in no hurry for the mail.’

I never have had the heart to interrupt a game.

An onlooker cries: ‘He’s finished, right now! Thet move o’ Barton’s finished him.’

Later, at the bank in town with my friend the newspaper man, I watch the long line of those who have responded to the bank’s call for debts. Women in faded print gowns, with pained faces and trembling hands; men in patched overalls, their heads held high. They are facing, not our genial bankers, but a stranger, arrogant of manner, with a cold, set face — perhaps from poring over frozen securities.

A neighbor tells me that at another bank, where there is an unwonted air of anxiety and mystery, a man stands at the window with his ‘cotton money’ for the fertilizer bill, and asks for enough deducted to buy his wife and children winter shoes. He is refused. Banks must be wary now. Who knows when a run may start? Another asks for money enough from the first bales to purchase groceries. He is refused. He cries desperately: —

‘All right! Thar’s three more bales out ther to pick, and if you want ’em just go out and pick ’em!’

Still, we feel that these bankers have been our friends for years, and we are patient, and we speak with pride of the banker whose thirty-nine banks in our state failed in one week and who surrendered his own private fortune in gilt-edged securities and went back to the little home town to begin over again. But we wonder a little about banking laws, and why they do not protect depositors.

In the store next door I wait for the clerk whom I know and like. He is engaged with a man, evidently a laborer, who wears a faded shirt and no coat, though the day is chill and raw. Beside him stand two children with the remnants of shoes on their little feet.

The man counts aloud the silver in his hand. ‘One dollar and twenty-nine cints.’

‘ All right,’ says young George crisply. ‘One sack of flour, twenty-four pounds

— sixty cents. Beans — thirty-five cents. We have n’t the lard in bulk. You ’ll have to get a five-pound bucket

— forty-five cents.’

‘Wait. Hold on a minute.’ And the man anxiously counts the money in his hand once more. ‘I hain’t got enough. You see, I got ter git er can er snuff, too.’

‘Well,’ says George helpfully, ‘then get a few less beans — and cut out the snuff! You don’t need the snuff — you can’t eat snuff.’

The man shakes his head sadly.

‘I cain’t leave out ther snuff,’ he says.

‘You are n’t like me,’ cries George, in his superior, youthful wisdom. ‘I don’t use tobacco myself. I can’t afford it.’

‘Suppose you don’t, George!’ I say impertinently. ‘What has that to do with it? Of course he can’t leave out the snuff!’

The man turns to me and murmurs, ‘Hit’s ter pleasure my womern. She’s purty puny this winter.’

Alas, the standard of living among our workingmen is too high; and ten cents is too much for ‘pleasurin’ an invalid.’

III

This was the beginning. Our county seat, a town of about thirty-five hundred, comes bravely to the rescue.

‘ Home money for the hungry at home ’ is the slogan.

Our county newspaper, of which we are so proud, the Chamber of Commerce, the various clubs, are active. A store in a vacant building — donated, with lights, heat, and water — receives gifts from the merchants and from the Red Cross, food, clothing, and shoes. A cobbler advertises to mend all shoes free of charge, and a truck driver offers to collect all donations from individuals. We boast that we are one of the five counties of Arkansas that do not accept financial aid from the Red Cross. Mercifully the winter is mild, but sometimes in the mountains our spring is tardy and cold — however, there is the Red Cross, ready to help.

Later, at the village, I sit in my especial chair between the big vinegar barrel and the medicine shelf, with its boxes of salve for flu and its bottles of tonic for chills. I listen to the conversation in silence and pride; for great patience and what diplomacy I possess have earned me, a woman, the right to a seat in the Wisdom Club beside the sacred, eternal checker game.

The talk is of our new stone schoolhouse in the village, for the county treasurer held a surety bond for forty thousand dollars which partially covered the public money. Then, in November, the closed bank paid the depositors twenty-five cents on the dollar, and promised more when the money could be collected. We shake our heads dubiously about the time this will take — with fertilizer at the same ruinous price. And we estimate and computate, and guess that the fertilizer bill takes about half of the cotton crop of our county!

But our beautiful schoolhouse grows each day, though the building has been delayed and our school is held in the church on the hill; for we must be kept firmly to a consolidated school. We reluctantly admit how fresh and well our children look, in spite of an unusually low diet — in other townships there are soup kitchens for the school children, but not in ours! Some of us reflect that we may thank the new bus, with its merry rides till dark instead of hurried work at home after school.

There was the usual Christmas celebration at the church, and though we knew that the programme far exceeded anything we ever gave at Piney Hill schoolhouse, yet somehow it was not the same, and perhaps we were a trifle lonely, and not yet reconciled. But our girls were beautiful, — cotton stockings this year in place of rayon or silk, — their finely cut features and their delicate complexions heightened by rouge. (We have each, for a long time, possessed a pair of silk stockings for Sunday, and long since we have attained to cosmetic consciousness.) There was much display of bright Christmas paper to cover the paucity of gifts.

Later my friend Jack, who works in town, but loves a country lass, said to me: —

‘I just thort I’d ask you. I give my girl a mighty nice pair o’ shoes fur a birthday present. She did n’t wear ’em an’ I found out the pore girl did n’t hev no stockings. So I goes an’ putts a pair on the tree fur her. She’s mad, an’ don’t want to take ’em. She lows hit ain’ no nice present ter give a girl. I told her I knowed it wuz, an’ I wuz goin’ ter ask you. Effen it don’t missputt you none, you just tell her so, will you? Hit’s all right, hain’t it?’

‘Of course. It is the usual gift nowadays,’ I answered, and I wondered why anyone should consider stockings a more indelicate gift than shoes. Still, one must draw the line somewhere, and while our mountain girls are pliant as to short dresses, bobbed hair, and cosmetics, they are rigid as to their own ideas of propriety.

In these parlous times we felt that on Christmas Day we belonged with our own. Refusing invitations to the town or to Commonwealth College beyond, we dined with our nearest neighbors, and had backbone and turnips as the pièce de résistance, and precious canned peaches from the year before last for dessert. We were enabled to take some oranges — a gift to us from Florida — and the first grapefruit they had ever seen. Our host said sadly: —

‘Commonly we have oranges for Christmas — but not this year.’

It was a good dinner; and afterward we sat about the fire in the clean, carpetless little room where the picture of the Father of our Country, tacked on the wall, looked sternly down upon us; and some of us took snuff, and some of us smoked pipes, and some of us ‘rolled our own’ of our home-grown tobacco, and we talked of Congress, and of the Red Cross, and of Farm Relief, and marveled that, while all wished to help us, there seemed no way of agreeing on a plan before we were past assistance, and must starve or riot as some of our sister counties. And we sniffed contemptuously at the prevalent advice that we plant next year ‘only what we need to eat, and sell the surplus.’

‘Who to?’ asked Williams. ‘Who’ll we sell it to? Why, one farmer’s beans hes ben knowed to glut the market in town; and we ain’t got no means o’ transportation. I give away all but the first load o’ my watermelons last summer.’

And we all agree that while that might be sound advice when a farmer made his own shoes, and his own clothes, and his own medicine from herbs, yet, if cotton made at all, it was a cash crop and would bring in a little money for shoes and clothes, and medicines.

We look up at the picture of George Washington, and repeat that we love our country, but perhaps we draw a sharp line between our country and ‘ther gov’mint.’ And we speak in hushed voices of the renters in the most fertile counties in the state who to-day eat the salt bread of strangers.

IV

But Christmas, with its ephemeral good cheer, has passed and we are now in the winter of our discontent, I sit behind the stove at the post office, with the assembled Wisdom Club,

‘Thar’s a heap o’ unemploymint,’ says Ross, looking up from his newspaper. ‘A piece hyar in ther paper says a revolution is a-comin’.’

‘Yeah,’ says Barton, ‘an’ hit’s us communists in Arkansas (I don’t low iny o’ us iver seed one — I would n’t know one effen I met hit in ther road) is whisperin’ round an’ makin’ ther banks bust. Ther won’t be no revolution — not in these-hyar United States. Whut’ll happen is thim thet’s hed a pair o’ Sunday overhalls, they’ll jist hev one pair now, an’ thim thet’s et three aigs fur breakfast ’ll just eat one — or none. Wheat so cheap they burn hit out West, an’ bread hit’s kim down one cint! Me, I take a bushel o’ wheat an’ hev it ground at ther mill — an’ he takes toll fur hit. It’s black-lookin’, but a feller keeps a-workin’ on it. Naw, we’ll jist go on an’ git used ter hit — an’ purty soon we’ll forgit it was n’t allers lak thet.’

‘Take heart,’ grins Patton, ‘I kim in ter pay ye yore rint. Hyar ’t is.’

‘Aw, ye need n’t be in no hurry, Joe. Mebby we orter figger er leetle more on ther fertilizer bill.’

‘Uh-huh. I’m ’bout through figgerin’ thet fertilizer bill. Hyar ’t is. One dollar an’ fifty-four cints.’

There is a general grin — we do not laugh easily in the mountains — and Mr. Perry says: —

‘You’re in luck, Barton. I thought I had sixteen dollars rent, but I had forgotten my share of the fertilizer bill. Looks now as if I’m out seventy cents.’

‘Hilton,’ says another, ‘he’s got three tinants over in ther Hilton sittlemint. One of ’em kim out even, tother give him three cints, an’ tother one lift him three cints in ther hole.’

The postmaster comes from helping our carrier sort the mail and seats himself opposite our champion checker player, bent on refreshing himself from his recent labor.

‘It’s you landed proprietors that make all the trouble,’ he says, ‘though you do give a renter a garden spot here. Now up there where the poor fellows are rioting for food it’s the best land in the state, but the renter is not allowed to raise anything for himself. I can remember when he was not permitted to raise even a chicken. So when the cotton fails, where is he? We need n’t holler. Most of us own our own farms, — such as they are, — and we’ve got plenty of wood to burn. We won’t riot — unless the spring comes late. Bread lines in the cities, and right over in Oklahoma the children running after cars and begging for something to eat. We’ll pull through — for a while, anyway.’

‘Yeah,’ says Tom Turley, ‘we’ll come through. The papers say hit’s jist a transition period we’re goin’ through. Jist transition.’

‘Transition?’ asks Barton vaguely.

‘He means changing from one thing to another,’ answers the postmaster. ‘I suppose life would n’t go on at all without transition.’

‘Uh-huh. I transitioned frum corn to Bermudy grass an’ cows last year. Butter fat kims down to fifteen cints, — lowest usered ter be twinty-five, — an’ yisterday I wuz offered four dollars fur my two half-growed Jersey calves. I low my transition hain’t a-goin’ ter holp much.’

‘I was speakin’ mainly about unemploymint,’ says Tom. ‘ Hit ’ll pass.’

Billy, from his shop, posts a letter and strides down to the Wisdom Club.

‘Unemployment pass! Why, it’s a world condition, man! It’ll not pass until we learn to digest our machines. Mass production is all right, but the people will have to own the machines. What we’ve got to do is to digest the machines.’

There is an uneasy silence. Then Barton drawls: ‘I don’t know ’bout my digestin’ er machine. Mebby I could do hit. I’ve been managin’ ter digest ground-up wheat an’ hawg meat, tryin’ to stave off pellagry till pokesallet time in ther spring; but I’d kinder hate ter tackle a machine jist now. Did ye-all hyar thet Collins down by the river died o’ pellagry last week?’

‘No, but we knew he war down ’ith it.’

‘But, Billy,’ I say timidly, — for well I know that I am in double jeopardy, at once from the strength of Billy’s argument and again from an appearance of ‘big talk’ which may cost me my hard-earned membership in the club, — ‘could n’t we learn to digest the machines in the home, and give over mass production?’

‘What do you want to go backwards for, woman? Mass production frees us from all kinds of drudgery. What do you want it in the home for?’

‘Maybe to preserve the home,’ I murmur, as I rise to go.

‘Home!’ cries the postmaster then. ‘Where are homes, anyway? We just have automobiles — and Billy to mend them.’

I wait a moment as our largest landed proprietor seats himself on a nail keg.

Barton greets him with a grin. ‘Hev ye asked fur holp yit?’

‘No, but I reckon I will before summer.’

‘Ye got to swear ye hain’t got no credit.’

‘I’d like for someone to prove I got credit,’ he answers, with a sly glance at the postmaster. ‘Besides, to git help yer neighbors has got to come in and swear ye ain’t got nothin’ to eat before ye can git anything. Me — I ain’t popular enough with my neighbors to risk it. Though before we’re out of this I reckon we’ll all swear one another through.’

The other storekeeper, finding things dull at his store, wanders down. ‘The school-teacher, she says some o’ the chillern ain’t got shoes, ner much to cat, an’ Gray down by the river — he’s plumb outern everything. He’s —’

But there is a hush as Gray walks down to the medicine shelf and buys two bottles of chill tonic — on credit.

‘Folks sick?’ asks Barton sympathetically.

‘Yeah. Water low all summer an’ hed ter drink crick water. Hit ain’t typhoid, though. Jist fever ’n’ ager. Thompson’s folks is all down ’ith ther typhoid.’

At the door I turn back, having forgotten my egg money. A young man whom I do not know speaks to the postmaster, who answers him in a low tone.

‘Yes, hit’s so. I wuz a long time payin’ up last time. But ther town hes promised me road work, an’ I’ll pay up with my first money. Besides,’ and he leans across the counter and cries hoarsely, ‘I just got ter hev flour an’ lard! I cain’t let my womern an’ chillern starve, kin I?’

‘No, you can’t,’ says the postmaster. ‘Make out your list.’

When the man has gone with his groceries the postmaster sighs: ‘Times are hard. He’ll never be able to pay. No crop. Big fertilizer bill. Sick wife. It’s a queer world. They have all been telling us that we spend too much on foolish pleasures. I spent for Wells’s Outline of History, and had to give up the only magazine I took — they were my foolish pleasure. Now they tell us to spend, spend! I’ve waited ten years for a good cellar. I’m building one now. After all, the money is safer in a cellar than in a bank.’

V

As I drive home through the silence of the stately pines, the gaunt cows, worn to the bone, have scarce the energy to move out of our way. John does not bark at them, but turns away his head from delicacy, for an emaciated cow is a grotesque object. A starved horse retains his noble personality to the last. From his long, accusing head to his bedraggled tail he is still a pathetic but an integral personality. But a starved cow divides herself into aliquot parts. All the life in her body gathers into her pleading eyes, and below her neck the poor animal seems to drag about an ungainly, discarded piece of furniture for which she has no use. O spring, come! Quick! Quick!

At home, resolved to do my bit, I take from the machine drawer the chicken money that escaped the bank, and count it carefully. I shall begin my long-coveted rock chimney and fireplace and provide one Collie, eighteen and married a year, with work. As to the rocks on my thirty acres, ‘we ain’t got nothin’ else but.’

Collie sets blithely to work hauling rock, and as he mixes cement he talks incessantly and rapturously of his ‘houn’.’

‘My daddy-in-law’s houn’ is named Broke, so I named mine Benton, an’ call him Bent. Bent and Broke. See? I reckon thar ain’t no houn’ in this country kin tech Bent, whin I git him trained. He’s, ye might say, jist a pup now. We could hev got er place ter stay this winter an’ help eround, but the feller would n’t let me keep my houn’. Said he et too much. Why, I kin make more real money a-sellin’ possum hides thin I could er made thar all winter.

‘Possum hides is might’ low now, though. I jist git fifteen cints — er at most six bits — fur ther best, whar I used ter git two and a half fur a plumb good possum hide. But Bent’ll shore git ’em! I’ll bet Bent agin iny houn’ in this county!’

Then one morning Collie appears, silent and spiritless. In the afternoon he speaks suddenly, in a low, dead voice: ‘I lost my houn’.’

‘What! Not Bent! Did he die?’

‘No’m. Ye see, whin I got married I borrowed the money fur hit. I owed the bank fur fertilizer, an’ I did n’t make no crop, an’ I could n’t git round ter payin’ ther feller thet lent me ther money ter marry on. Last night he kim over ’n’ took my houn’. He did n’t give me even the goin’ price. But my daddy-in-law’s goin’ ter git me another ter-day. Hit’s blind, but it kin tree possums. I bet whin I git th’u ’ith him he’ll be ther best houn’ in the county.’

Poor Collie! I had chosen him for my work because he had few affiliations, lived with his father-in-law, a renter and a ‘furriner,’ and belonged to no clan. It was a long time before I could trace the ramifications of our mountain clans, and thus avoid gauche moments in a casual conversation. The clans are of the aristocrats — the old settlers. Beyond my north fence, in the same house, live four generations. The great-grandmother, aged one hundred and three, the other day administered a sound slap to her greatgrandson, a grown man six feet tall, because he rearranged the chairs at the fireside. The man told me this with a proper pride in his great-grandmother’s qualifications.

The grandfather said to me one day, ‘I don’t like ther looks er things round my place. Thar’s tracks round about thet I don’t even recognize.’

‘Do you know all our tracks?’ I asked in amazement.

‘Yeas’m, I low I do. Leastwise the folks thet live hyar, an’ in ther mountings back thar. Course I kinder expect tracks, fur the fellers thet is cotched fur makin’ liquor go past my place ter git ter ther reservation an’ hide erwhile. But effen thar’s iny thar they’ll hev ter kim down. Thar hain’t nothin’ like thar commonly is ter eat this y’ar in ther mountings.’

My neighbor has been a mighty hunter in his day, and there are still others like him in our neighborhood. I fancy these men would never riot for food, though they might demand.

I have not forgotten how, at our last school meeting, though there was some difference of opinion, and some bitterness, in the belief that we had been gerrymandered in the apportionment, there was no chairman, and there was ominous quiet. The county superintendent of schools, who was but performing a duty, had sent us word that ‘ if we would treat him right’ he would come this evening and speak to us. After a while we signed on the dotted line because we had to. But my neighbor who knows all tracks of man or beast, and who perhaps can neither read nor write, arose after the signing and, throwing back his fine old head like a deer, said with a slow dignity: —

‘Afore ye leave we wants ye ter know that we know we hain’t ben treated right. We hain’t goin’ ter make no trouble, because we cain’t. But we wanted ye ter know hit.’

We love our country, but we are not awed by officials — even ‘eddicated town fellers.’

VI

The winter wears on. One Saturday — farmer’s day — we drive into the town for one of our quarterly visits. The sun shines, but the day is chill. Never have I seen the sheltering mountains closer, bluer, more serene, and never has the air seemed sweeter or more invigorating. As we rumble across the bridge of the Ouachita I look down at the clear green water that frets itself into white foam against the brown rocks below, and note with joy the faint, first signs of spring along its banks. Never has our county seat, with ivy clinging to the walls of our beautiful churches, with magnolia leaves glistening in our spacious park, and with its rich mosaic of native stone buildings, seemed to call a gladder welcome. But, though it is Saturday, the shops are deserted; only about the quarters of the Red Cross a crowd of men are assembled, and at the Chamber of Commerce a group of women, and a secretary filing applications for government loans.

I thread my way to the counter at the Red Cross store, where my friend the newspaper man, who has given every ounce of his strength to the cause of caring for our own people, stands wan and discouraged.

‘Spring is on the way,’ I say. ‘Are n’t we about through?’

He smiles — a trifle bitterly.

‘We are about through, but I’m afraid they are not. I guess we may have to give up and ask financial aid of the Red Cross at last. We are now the last county in Arkansas that has not asked for help. We have cared for about two thousand and two hundred county families, and we have two hundred and eighty-five on the list in town.’

‘But why not ask for aid?’ I say stupidly. ‘Surely the town has done its part.’

‘ Well, yes. But our people are proud and self-respecting. They feel that when help comes from us it is assistance from their own people — why, we are many of us related to these county people in one way or another. Red Cross aid is necessarily a mathematical thing; you become, perforce, a number on a list — not a human being.’

‘I understand,’ I say, ashamedly.

‘We want to keep our people a united community. But I guess we are about through. It is not that we do not appreciate the Red Cross. They have sent us cars from Sidney, Nebraska, from Geneseo, Illinois, and from Aberdeen, Idaho. Potatoes, and corn, and food, and clothing, and canned goods, from private subscription, and the railroads have deadheaded the cars to us. When a car comes in, the trucks thunder down to the station, and the whole town shouts! But the railroads are through now, too. Our people must have help for another two months at least. It’s the timber workers, and the share croppers, and the renters, and, too, the farmers, who for some reason have exhausted their resources and their credit, that must be carried through. But I guess we’ll have to have help. The merchants, and the country stores —’

‘It’s all very heartbreaking — and complicated,’ I murmur, and accept two cans of cherries and strawberries from the Illinois car, and bear them proudly through the crowd that I may be seen to have accepted aid.

An old man comes in for his portion.

‘Don’t give me so much,’ he says. ‘Ther’s others need it worse.’

Another, known to be on the verge of want, when asked if he wants help, replies, ‘Hell no! Not so long’s I kin crawl.’

For we are of pioneer stock, and charity, or even ‘gov’mint aid,’ is bitter medicine.

It is still too early for pussy willows at the ford, and the windflowers and violets have not come. But wan little shoots push up timidly, reluctant to leave the earth for a strange new world. The swift waters from the mountains may bear some of them away, some may wither in the hot little fists of children, some may live to flaunt the summer through, but Nature will take them all home. Not one can fall outside Nature. Neither can we — patient hillbillies of the Ouachitas.

Tom Turley leaves his plough to speak to me. I look across at his new barn. His old one burned in the winter, with all his precious oats. We held two ‘workin’s,’ and his neighbor, with whom he had quarreled six years ago, — we are slow to forgive in the mountains, — came to the ‘ workin’s’ both days. If our great American satirist writes that ‘God made Arkansas for the butt of ridicule,’ we may remind him with the gentle Wordsworth that ‘we have powers that he knows not of.’

Is it that, when Nature, indifferent, or obeying the malice of strange gods, deserts us, there springs up a spiritual compensation that brings kinder hearts and wider sympathies?

‘Yes’m,’ Tom calls, ‘ther mules, an’ all of us, is purty ganted up; but ef my shoes an’ overhalls ’ll last out till grass, we’ll all make it.’

For it is spring, and who knows that the cotton may not escape the drought, and the army worm, and the boll weevil, and the fertilizer bill, and that next fall possums may not be firm again ?

It is spring. Step up, gentlemen, and place your bets.