Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (55 page)

They could not speak of that grim wedding eve for a long while after; but the mountains brought them together upon all else in the world and their own lives. At the end they loved each other doubly more than at the beginning, because of these added confidences which they exchanged and shared. It was a new bliss to her to know a man’s talk and thoughts, to be given so much of him; and to him it was a bliss still greater to melt from that reserve his lonely life had bred in him. He never would have guessed so much had been stored away in him, unexpressed till now. They did not want to go to Vermont and leave these mountains, but the day came when they had to turn their backs upon their dream. So they came out into the plains once more, well established in their familiarity, with only the journey still lying between themselves and Bennington.

“If you could,” she said, laughing. “If only you could ride home like this.”

“With Monte and my six-shooter?” he asked. “To your mother?”

“I don’t think mother could resist the way you look on a horse.”

But he said, “It is this way she’s fearing I will come.”

“I have made one discovery,” she said. “You are fonder of good clothes than I am.”

He grinned. “I cert‘nly like ’em. But don’t tell my friends. They would say it was marriage. When you see what I have got for Bennington’s special benefit, you—why, you’ll just trust your husband more than ever.”

She undoubtedly did. After he had put on one particular suit, she arose and kissed him where he stood in it.

“Bennington will be sorrowful,” he said. “No wild-west show, after all. And no ready-made guy, either.” And he looked at himself in the glass with unhidden pleasure.

“How did you choose that?” she asked. “How did you know that homespun was exactly the thing for you?”

“Why, I have been noticing. I used to despise an Eastern man because his clothes were not Western. I was very young then, or maybe not so very young, as very—as what you saw I was when you first came to Bear Creek. A Western man is a good thing. And he generally knows that. But he has a heap to learn. And he generally don’t know that. So I took to watching the Judge’s Eastern visitors. There was that Mr. Ogden especially, from New Yawk—the gentleman that was there the time when I had to sit up all night with the missionary, yu’ know. His clothes pleased me best of all. Fit him so well, and nothing flash. I got my ideas, and when I knew I was going to marry you, I sent my measure East—and I and the tailor are old enemies now.”

Bennington probably was disappointed. To see get out of the train merely a tall man with a usual straw hat, and Scotch homespun suit of a rather better cut than most in Bennington—this was dull. And his conversation—when he indulged in any—seemed fit to come inside the house.

Mrs. Flynt took her revenge by sowing broadcast her thankfulness that poor Sam Bannett had been Molly’s rejected suitor. He had done so much better for himself. Sam had married a rich Miss Van Scootzer, of the second families of Troy; and with their combined riches this happy couple still inhabit the most expensive residence in Hoosic Falls.

But most of Bennington soon began to say that Molly’s cow-boy could be invited anywhere and hold his own. The time came when they ceased to speak of him as a cow-boy, and declared that she had shown remarkable sense. But this was not quite yet.

Did this bride and groom enjoy their visit to her family? Well—well, they did their best. Everybody did their best, even Sarah Bell. She said that she found nothing to object to in the Virginian; she told Molly so. Her husband Sam did better than that. He told Molly he considered that she was in luck. And poor Mrs. Wood, sitting on the sofa, conversed scrupulously and timidly with her novel son-in-law, and said to Molly that she was astonished to find him so gentle. And he was undoubtedly fine-looking; yes, very handsome. She believed that she would grow to like the Southern accent. Oh, yes! Everybody did their best; and, dear reader, if ever it has been your earthly portion to live with a number of people who were all doing their best, you do not need me to tell you what a heavenly atmosphere this creates.

And then the bride and groom went to see the old great-aunt over at Dunbarton.

Their first arrival, the one at Bennington, had been thus: Sam Bell had met them at the train, and Mrs. Wood, waiting in her parlor, had embraced her daughter and received her son-in-law. Among them they had managed to make the occasion as completely mournful as any family party can be, with the window blinds up. “And with you present, my dear,” said Sam Bell to Sarah, “the absence of a coffin was not felt.”

But at Dunbarton the affair went off differently. The heart of the ancient lady had taught her better things. From Bennington to Dunbarton is the good part of a day’s journey, and they drove up to the gate in the afternoon. The great-aunt was in her garden, picking some August flowers, and she called as the carriage stopped, “Bring my nephew here, my dear, before you go into the house.”

At this, Molly, stepping out of the carriage, squeezed her husband’s hand. “I knew that she would be lovely,” she whispered to him. And then she ran to her aunt’s arms, and let him follow. He came slowly, hat in hand.

The old lady advanced to meet him, trembling a little, and holding out her hand to him. “Welcome, nephew,” she said. “What a tall fellow you are, to be sure. Stand off, sir, and let me look at you.”

The Virginian obeyed, blushing from his black hair to his collar.

Then his new relative turned to her niece, and gave her a flower. “Put this in his coat, my dear,” she said. “And I think I understand why you wanted to marry him.”

After this the maid came and showed them to their rooms. Left alone in her garden, the great-aunt sank on a bench and sat there for some time; for emotion had made her very weak.

Upstairs, Molly, sitting on the Virginian’s knee, put the flower in his coat, and then laid her head upon his shoulder.

“I didn’t know old ladies could be that way,” he said. “D’ yu’ reckon there are many?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the girl. “I’m so happy!”

Now at tea, and during the evening, the great-aunt carried out her plans still further. At first she did the chief part of the talking herself. Nor did she ask questions about Wyoming too soon. She reached that in her own way, and found out the one thing that she desired to know. It was through General Stark that she led up to it.

“There he is,” she said, showing the family portrait. “And a rough time he must have had of it now and then. New Hampshire was full of fine young men in those days. But nowadays most of them have gone away to seek their fortunes in the West. Do they find them, I wonder?”

“Yes, ma’am. All the good ones do.”

“But you cannot all be—what is the name?—Cattle Kings.”

“That’s having its day, ma’am, right now. And we are getting ready for the change—some of us are.”

“And what may be the change, and when is it to come?”

“When the natural pasture is eaten off,” he explained. “I have seen that coming a long while. And if the thieves are going to make us drive our stock away, we’ll drive it. If they don’t, we’ll have big pastures fenced, and hay and shelter ready for winter. What we’ll spend in improvements, we’ll more than save in wages. I am well fixed for the new conditions. And then, when I took up my land, I chose a place where there is coal. It will not be long before the new railroad needs that.”

Thus the old lady learned more of her niece’s husband in one evening than the Bennington family had ascertained during his whole sojourn with them. For by touching upon Wyoming and its future, she roused him to talk. He found her mind alive to Western questions: irrigation, the Indians, the forests; and so he expanded, revealing to her his wide observation and his shrewd intelligence. He forgot entirely to be shy. She sent Molly to bed, and kept him talking for an hour. Then she showed him old things that she was proud of, “because,” she said, “we, too, had something to do with making our country. And now go to Molly, or you’ll both think me a tiresome old lady.”

“I think—” he began, but was not quite equal to expressing what he thought, and suddenly his shyness flooded him again.

“In that case, nephew,” said she, “I’m afraid you’ll have to kiss me good-night.”

And so she dismissed him to his wife, and to happiness greater than either of them had known since they had left the mountains and come to the East. “He’ll do,” she said to herself, nodding.

Their visit to Dunbarton was all happiness and reparation for the doleful days at Bennington. The old lady gave much comfort and advice to her niece in private, and when they came to leave, she stood at the front door holding both their hands a moment.

“God bless you, my dears,” she told them. “And when you come next time, I’ll have the nursery ready.”

And so it happened that before she left this world, the great-aunt was able to hold in her arms the first of their many children.

Judge Henry at Sunk Creek had his wedding present ready. His growing affairs in Wyoming needed his presence in many places distant from his ranch, and he made the Virginian his partner. When the thieves prevailed at length, as they did, forcing cattle owners to leave the country or be ruined, the Virginian had forestalled this crash. The herds were driven away to Montana. Then, in 1892, came the cattle war, when, after putting their men in office, and coming to own some of the newspapers, the thieves brought ruin on themselves as well. For in a broken country there is nothing left to steal.
¹

But the railroad came, and built a branch to that land of the Virginian’s where the coal was. By that time he was an important man, with a strong grip on many various enterprises, and able to give his wife all and more than she asked or desired. Sometimes she missed the Bear Creek days, when she and he had ridden together, and sometimes she declared that his work would kill him. But it does not seem to have done so. Their eldest boy rides the horse Monte; and, strictly between ourselves, I think his father is going to live a long while.

1
(p. 1)
The Virginian: The Virginian is
set in post-Civil War America and is essentially a novel of a friendship between North and South, symbolized by the nameless narrator and the nameless Virginian. Each must leave the old, fractured East and establish himself in the new, wild—yet optimistic—West: a place for moral regeneration. The novel’s title thus privileges the cowboy’s origins as a man of the “Old South” and the West’s locale as a site for political possibility (see also note 1 to chapter 2, below).

1
(p. 3)
To Theodore Roosevelt:
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), twenty-sixth president of the United States, was a close friend of Wister’s and a fellow Harvard University student. To Wister, Roosevelt embodied the traits of both East and West—“socialite and cowboy”—that Wister considered to be essential for the new American male. (For more on this, refer to G. Edward White’s
The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister
and Owen Wister’s
Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship 1880-1919;
see “For Further Reading.”)

1
(p. 7)
We know quite well the common understanding of the term “historical novel.”
Hugh Wynne
exactly fits it: Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker
(1896), by S. W. Mitchell, tells the story of a Quaker in the Revolutionary War. Wister goes on to define the historical novel as one that may exemplify its own era, not only a previous one, and that may include either fictional or historical figures. To support his view, he cites several American novels as examples of the historical novel (see notes that follow).

2
(p. 7) Silas Lapham: William Dean Howells’s novel
The Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885) tells the story of a self-made businessman, Colonel Silas Lapham, who moves his family from pastoral Vermont to Boston, hoping to enter that cultured urban society. He does become a successful and wealthy paint manufacturer but subsequently falls from social grace.

3
(p. 7) The Scarlet Letter:
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance
(1850), by Nathanial Hawthorne, tells the story of an “adulteress” living within the confines of Puritan society in seventeenth-century Boston.

4
(p. 7) Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the
Lowly is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous pre-Civil War novel about slavery in America; it was published serially in the abolitionist newspaper the
National Era
in 1851 and 1852 and in book form in 1852.

1
(p. 13)
Medicine Bow:
The area and the town named Medicine Bow are located in the northwestern Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The area extends from Medicine Bow, Wyoming, southeast to Cameron Pass, Colorado, near Rocky Mountain National Park. It was possibly named for the Indians of the area who went there to collect materials for making bows and to hold ceremonial (“medicine”) dances. See the Introduction (p. xiii) for a discussion of Wister’s substitution of Medicine Bow for Rock Creek, the actual location for Wister’s real-life adventures.

2
(p. 15)
“Call me a Mormon, would you?”:
Mormonism, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 and was then, as it is today, concentrated in the state of Utah. Mormonism derives largely from Christianity, but it encompasses Judaism and even Native American myths as well. The old man’s joke here alludes to the practice of polygamy, or plural marriage, once sanctioned by the Mormon Church.

3
(p. 15)
“Cattle Kate”:
Cattle Kate (1860-1889) .was a legendary rancher in Wyoming, hanged with her husband for supposed rustling. Born Ellen Liddy Watson in Ontario, Canada, she emigrated with her family to Lebanon, Kansas. After an allegedly abusive first marriage, Watson left Kansas and eventually made her way to Rawlins, Wyoming, where she worked as a cook and established her own homestead claim. There she met and married Jim Averell, a surveyor who was also homesteading in the area. When Albert Bothwell, a cattle baron, tried to buy Watson’s land, which bordered his ranch, she refused. He reacted by rallying several neighboring cattlemen and telling them that Watson had rustled (stolen) some of their livestock. Whether she was guilty is still up for debate, but Bothwell and his posse captured the couple and lynched them on July 20, 1889. The event is said to have been a catalyst of the Johnson County War of 1892, when cattle ranchers came together to track and punish the region’s rustlers, whom they felt were not sufficiently disciplined by the law. “Cattle Kate” became a slang term for any woman cattle-thief.