Before He Grew Up

: The Man From The Bitter Roots

The little white "digger," galloping with the stiff, short-legged jumps

of the broken-down cow pony, stopped short as the boy riding him pulled

sharply on the reins, and after looking hard at something which lay in a

bare spot in the grass, slid from its fat back.



He picked up the rock which had attracted his eye, and turned it over

and over in his hand. His pockets bulged with colored pebbles and

odd-loo
ing stones he had found in washouts and ravines. There was no

great variety on the Iowa prairie, and he thought he knew them all, but

he had never seen a rock like this.



He crossed his bare, tanned legs, and sat down to examine it more

closely, while the lazy cow pony immediately went to sleep. The stone

was heavy and black, with a pitted surface as polished as though some

one had laboriously rubbed it smooth. Where did it come from? How did it

get there? Involuntarily he looked up at the sky. Perhaps God had thrown

it down to surprise him--to make him wonder. He smiled a little. God was

a very real person to Bruce Burt. He had a notion that He kept close

watch upon his movements through a large crack somewhere in the sky.



Yes, God must have tossed it down, for how else could a rock so

different from every other rock be lying there as though it had just

dropped? He wished he had not so long to wait before he could show it to

his mother. He was tempted to say he saw it fall, but she might ask him

"Honest Injun?" and he decided not. However, if God made crawfish go

into their holes backward just to make boys laugh, and grasshoppers chew

tobacco, why wouldn't He----



The sound of prairie grass swishing about the legs of a galloping horse

made him jump, startled, to his feet and thrust the strange rock into

the front of his shirt. His father reined in, and demanded angrily:



"What you here for? Why didn't you do as I told you?"



"I--I forgot. I got off to look at a funny rock. See, papa!" His black

eye sparkled as he took it from his shirt front and held it up eagerly.



His father did not look at it.



"Get on your horse!" he said harshly. "I can't trust you to do anything.

We're late as it is, and women don't like people coming in on 'em at

meal-time without warning." He kicked his horse in the ribs, and

galloped off.



The abashed look in the boy's face changed to sullenness. He jumped on

his pony and followed his father, but shortly he lowered his black

lashes, and the tears slipped down his cheeks.



Why had he shown that rock, anyhow? he asked himself in chagrin. He

might have known that his father wouldn't look at it, that he didn't

look at anything or care about anything but horses and cattle. Certainly

his father did not care about him. He could not remember when the

stern man had given him a pat on the head, or a good-night kiss. The

thought of his father kissing anybody startled him. It seemed to him

that his father seldom spoke to him except to reprimand or ridicule him,

and the latter was by far the worse.



His eyes were still red when he sat down at the table, but the discovery

that there was chicken helped assuage his injured feelings, and when the

farmer's wife deliberately speared the gizzard from the platter and laid

it on his plate the world looked almost bright. How did she know that he

liked gizzard, he wondered? The look of gratitude he shyly flashed her

brought a smile to her tired face. There were mashed potatoes, too, and

gravy, pickled peaches, and he thought he smelled a lemon pie. He

wondered if they had these things all the time. If it wasn't for his

mother he believed he'd like to live with Mrs. Mosher, and golly! wasn't

he hungry! He hoped they wouldn't stop to talk, so he'd dare begin.



He tried to regard his mother's frequent admonitions concerning

"manners"--that one about stirring up your potatoes as though you were

mixing mortar, and biting into one big slab of bread. He did his best,

but his cheek protruded with half a pickled peach when he heard his

father say:



"I sent Bruce on ahead to tell you that we'd be here, but he didn't mind

me. I found him out there on the prairie, looking at a rock."



All eyes turned smilingly upon the boy, and he reddened to the roots of

his hair, while the half peach in his cheek felt suddenly like a whole

one.



"It was a funny kind of rock," he mumbled in self-defence when he could

speak.



"The rock doesn't have to be very funny to make you forget what you're

told to do," his father said curtly, and added to the others: "His

mother can't keep pockets in his clothes for the rocks he packs around

in them, and they're piled all over the house. He wants her to send away

and get him a book about rocks."



"Perhaps he'll be one of these rock-sharps when he gets big," suggested

Mr. Mosher humorously. "Wouldn't it be kinda nice to have a perfesser in

the family--with long hair and goggles? I come acrost one once that

hunted bugs. He called a chinch bug a Rhyparochromus, but he saddled his

horse without a blanket and put bakin' powder in the sour-dough."



In the same way that the farmer's wife knew that boys liked gizzards,

she knew that Bruce was writhing under the attention and the ridicule.



"He'll be a cattleman like his dad," and she smiled upon him.



His father shook his head.



"No, he doesn't take hold right. Why, even when I was his age I could

tell a stray in the bunch as far as I could see it, and he don't know

the milk cow when she gets outside of the barn. I tell his mother I'm

goin' to work him over again with a trace strap----"



The sensitive boy could bear no more. He gave one regretful glance at

his heaping plate, a shamed look at Mrs. Mosher, then sprang to his feet

and faced his father.



"I won't learn cattle, and you can't make me!" he cried, with blazing

eyes. "And you won't work me over with a trace strap! You've licked me

all I'll stand. I'll go away! I'll run away, and I won't come home

till I'm white as a darned sheep!"



"Bruce!" His father reached for his collar, but the boy was gone. His

chair tipped over, and his precious rock dropped from his shirt front

and bounced on the floor. It was a precious rock, too, a fragment of

meteorite, one which fell perhaps in the shower of meteoric stones in

Iowa in '79.



"He's the touchiest child I ever saw," said Burt apologetically, "and

stubborn as a mule; but you'd better set his plate away. I guess the

gentleman will return, since he's twenty-five miles from home."



The farmer's wife called after the boy from the doorway, but he did not

stop. Hatless, with his head thrown back and his fists clenched tight

against his sides, he ran with all his might, his bare feet kicking up

the soft, deep dust. There was something pathetic to her in the lonely

little figure vanishing down the long, straight road. She wished it had

not happened.



"It isn't right to tease a child," she said, going back to her seat.



"Well, there's no sense in his acting like that," Burt answered. "I've

tried to thrash some of that stubbornness out of him, but his will is

hard to break."



"I don't believe in so much whipping," the woman defended. "Traits that

children are punished for sometimes are the makin' of them when they're

grown. I think that's why grandparents are usually easier with their

grandchildren than they were with their own--because they've lived long

enough to see the faults they whipped their children for grow into

virtues. Bruce's stubbornness may be perseverance when he's a man, and

to my way of thinking too much pride is far better than too little."



"Pride or no pride, he'll do as I say," Burt answered, with an

obstinacy of tone which made the farmer's wife comment mentally that it

was not difficult to see from whom the boy had inherited that trait.



But it was the only one, since, save in coloring and features, they were

totally dissimilar, and Burt seemed to have no understanding of his

passionate, warm-hearted, imaginative son. Perhaps, unknown to himself,

he harbored a secret resentment that Bruce had not been the little girl

whose picture had been as fixed and clear in his mind before Bruce came

as though she were already an actuality. She was to have had flaxen

hair, with blue ribbons in it, and teeth like tiny, sharp pearls. She

was to have come dancing to meet him on her toes, and to have snuggled

contentedly on his lap when he returned from long rides on the range.

Boys were all right, but he had a vague notion that they belonged to

their mothers. Bruce was distinctly "his mother's boy," and this was

tacitly understood. It was to her he went with his hurts for caresses,

and with his confidences for sympathy and understanding.



Now there was nothing in Bruce's mind but to get to his mother. While

his breath lasted and he burned with outraged pride and humiliation, the

boy ran, his thought a confused jumble of mortification that Mrs. Mosher

should know that he got "lickings," of regret for the gizzard and mashed

potatoes and lemon pie, of wonder as to what his mother would say when

he came home in the middle of the night and told her that he had walked

all the way alone.



He dropped to a trot, and then to a walk, for it was hot, and even a

hurt and angry boy cannot run forever. The tears dried to grimy streaks

on his cheeks, and the sun blistered his face and neck, while he

discovered that stretches of stony road were mighty hard on the soles of

the feet. But he walked on purposefully, with no thought of going back,

thinking of the comforting arms and shoulder that awaited him at the

other end. After all, nobody took any interest in rocks, except mother;

nobody cared about the things he really liked, except mother.



Toward the end of the afternoon his footsteps lagged, and sunset found

him resting by the roadside. He was so hungry! He felt so little, so

alone, and the coming darkness brought disturbing thoughts of coyotes

and prairie wolves, of robbers and ghosts that the hired man said he had

seen when he had stayed out too late o' nights.



Ravines, with their still, eloquent darkness, are fearsome places for

imaginative boys to pass alone. Hobgoblins--the very name sent chills up

and down Bruce's spine--would be most apt to lurk in some such place,

waiting, waiting to jump on his back! He broke and ran.



The stars came out, and a late moon found him trudging still. He limped

and his sturdy shoulders sagged. He was tired, and, oh, so sleepy, but

the prolonged howl of a wolf, coming from somewhere a long way off, kept

him from dropping to the ground. Who would have believed that

twenty-five miles was such a distance? He stopped short, and how hard

his heart pumped blood! Stock-still and listening, he heard the clatter

of hoofs coming down the road ahead of him. Who would be out this time

of night but robbers? He looked about him; there was no place on the

flat prairie to hide except a particularly dark ravine some little way

back which had taken all his courage to go through without running.



Between robbers and hobgoblins there seemed small choice, but he chose

robbers. With his fists clenched and the cold sweat on his forehead, he

waited by the roadside for the dark rider, who was coming like the wind.



"Hello!" The puffing horse was pulled sharply to a standstill.



"Oh, Wess!" His determination to die without a sound ended in a broken

cry of gladness, and he wrapped an arm around the hired man's leg to

hold him.



"Bruce! What you doin' here?"



"They plagued me. I'm going home."



"You keep on goin', boy. I'm after you and your father." There was

something queer in the hired man's voice--something that frightened him.

"Your mother's taken awful sick. Don't waste no time; it's four miles

yet; you hustle!" The big horse jumped into the air and was gone.



It was not so much what the hired man said that scared him so, but the

way he said it. Bruce had never known him not to laugh and joke, or seen

him run his horse like that.



"Oh, mamma, mamma!" he panted as he stumbled on, wishing that he could

fly.



When he dragged himself into the room, she was lying on her bed, raised

high among the pillows. Her eyes were closed, and the face which was so

beautiful to him looked heavy with the strange stupor in which she lay.



"Mamma, I'm here! Mamma, I've come!" He flung himself upon the soft,

warm shoulder, but it was still, and the comforting arms lay limp upon

the counterpane.



"Mamma, what's the matter? Say something! Look at me!" he cried. But the

gray eyes that always beamed upon him with such glad welcome did not

open, and the parted lips were unresponsive to his own. There was no

movement of her chest to tell him that she even breathed.



A fearful chill struck to his heart. What if she was dying--dead! Other

boys' mothers sometimes died, he knew, but his mother--his mother! He

tugged gently at one long, silken braid of hair that lay in his grimy

hand like a golden rope, calling her in a voice that shook with fright.



The cry penetrated her dulled senses. It brought her back from the

borderland of that far country into which she had almost slipped.

Slowly, painfully, with the last faint remnant of her will power, she

tried to speak--to answer that beloved, boyish voice.



"My--little boy----" The words came thickly, and her lips did not seem

to move.



But it was her voice; she had spoken; she was not dead! He hugged her

hard in wild ecstasy and relief.



"I'm glad--you came. I--can't stay--long. I've had--such hopes--for

you--little boy. I've dreamed--such dreams--for you--I wanted to

see--them all come true. If I can--I'll help you--from--the other side.

There's so much--more I want to say--if only--I had known---- Oh,

Bruce--my--li--ttle boy----" Her voice ended in a breath, and stopped.



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