Inside I hesitated. It was probably overtime at housebreaking that had told on him. I pointed at the barn, however.
"All right," I said, "take a nap only, don t smoke in there."
He vanished, and some three hours later when I had forgotten him I suddenly heard a sound of great chopping. Our guest had reappeared at the wood-pile, transformed. He was no longer pale and listless. His face was ruddy in fact, tanned. The cast in his eye had taken on fire. Every movement was of amazing vigor and direction. The wood-pile was disappearing and the little heap of "stove-sticks" growing in a most astonishing way. I called Elizabeth out to see.
"If coffee and a nap will make him do that." I said, "we'd better give him dinner and get enough wood to last all summer." I went down there. "What is your name?" I asked.
"William William Deegan."
"Well, William, you seem to understand work. Come up to dinner presently, and if you want to go on cutting this afternoon I'll pay you for it."
He came, and there was nothing the matter with his appetite this time. Ham and eggs, potatoes, beans, corn-bread, pie whatever came went. William was the apostle of the clean plate. Reflecting somewhat on the matter, I reached the conclusion (and it was justified by later events) that William had perhaps been entertaining himself with friends the night before during several nights before, I judge and was suffering from temporary reaction when he had appeared on our horizon. Coffee and a nap had restored him. He was quick on recovery, I will say that.
You never saw such a hole in a wood-pile as he made that afternoon. When I went down to settle with him and announce supper he was still in full swing, apparently intending to go on all night.
"William," I said, "you're a boss hand with an ax."
"Well, sur," said William, his Celtic timbre pitched to the sky, "if I could be shtayin' a day or two longer I'd finish the job fer ye."
Was this a proposition to rob the house
and murder us in our beds? I looked at the wood-pile and at William. There was something about their intimate relations that had an honest look. I remembered the extensive garden that would have to be hoed in July.
"Where would you go from here?" I said.
"I don't know, sur. I'll be lookin' fer a job."
"Do you understand gardening and taking care of a horse and cow?"
"Yes, sur, I do that."
I had an impulse to ask him about his last job, but I checked it. It was a question that could lead to embarrassment. I would accept him on his demonstration, or not at all.
"So you want a summer job, at general farm-work?"
"Yes, sur, I do."
"Well, William, you've found one, right here."
Even after the lapse of a dozen years I cannot write of William without a tugging at the heart. We never knew his antecedents never knew where behind the sky-line he had been concealed all those years before that morning when he appeared, pale and unannounced, at the well. We got the impression, as time passed, that he had once been married and that he had at some time been somewhere on a peach-farm. With the exception of certain brief intervals of which I may speak later he remained with us three years, and that was as much as we ever knew, for he talked little, and not at all of the past. His face value was certainly not much, and some of his habits could have been improved, but a more faithful and honest soul than William Deegan never lived.
III "Ah, the bonny cow!"
She was owned by a man who was moving away moving because he had not made a success of chicken-farming by book, and still less of Mis' Cow. He was not her first owner, nor her second, nor her third. I don't know what his number was on her list of owners, but I know if he had kept her much longer he would have been her last one. More than once we had bought the mere frame of a haircloth couch, and taken an esthetic pleasure in having it polished and upholstered, and made into a thing of beauty and service. It was with this view that we acquired Mis Cow, who at the moment was a mere frame with a patchy Holstein covering and a feebly hanging tail. We gave thirty-five dollars for her, and the man who was moving because he had not made a success of chickens threw in a single buggy that broke down the week after he left.
We consulted Westbury on the matter of Mis' Cow's past history, and it was the only time I ever knew W. C. Westbury to be inexact as to the age and habits of any animal in Brook Ridge. He said he had always known her as a good milker, but that she had been unfortunate of late years in her owners. He couldn't remember her age, but he didn't think it was enough to hurt her. My opinion is that he could have given her exact birthday and record had he really tried, but that kindness of heart prompted him to encourage a trade that might improve her fortunes. I suspect that they had played together in childhood.
We managed to get Mis' Cow up the hill and into her stall, where we could provide her with upholstery material. The little pasture across the road was getting green and she presently had the full run of it. The restoring progress began, as it were, overnight. If ever an article of furniture paid a quick return in the matter of looks, she did. She could never be a very fat Mis' Cow she was not of that build. But a few days of good food and plenty of it certainly worked wonders. She filled out several of the most alarming hollows around her hips and along her ridge-pole, she seemingly took on height and length. She grew smooth, even glossy; her tail no longer hung on her like a bell-cord, but became a lithe weapon of defense that could swat a fly with fatal precision on any given spot of her black-and-white area. It was only a little while until we were really proud to have her in the landscape, and the picture she made grazing against the green or standing in the apple shade was really gratifying. When the trees were pink and white with bloom and Mis' Cow rested under them, chewing in time to her long reflections, we often called one another out to admire the pastoral scene. A visiting friend of Scotch ancestry was moved to exclaim, "Ah, the bonny cow!"