The Able McLaughlins Margaret Wilson (best ebook reader under 100 TXT) 📖

the hire of a horse. John himself walked when his sister Mary’s company didn’t necessitate a wagon. Having John at Wully’s suited the whole family. His mother liked it because Wully was such an excellent example of patience and goodness for John, who needed just that. Chirstie liked it not only because she was spared the unpleasantness of having a strange hired man at the table, but because she saw in John the first of a succession of younger brothers, to whom, as they worked for Wully, she might in some degree repay their mother’s kindness to her. Wully heartily admired John, and never neglected to point out the signs of his brilliancy to those who were interested, especially his mother. There was no one like John in the family, and therefore, of course, in the community, in Wully’s estimation. The books which the other children in the little school studied ragged, John glanced at, and mastered. He never had anything to read, because the few books that Wully went slowly through, he read in an hour or two, getting more out of them in that fashion than Wully could in his. He had read every printed thing in the neighborhood: the books Wully had sent home from St. Louis, most of Scott, and some of Dickens, and Macaulay’s histories. (“You understand that no stolen book comes into my house, Wully!” his mother had written him, enraged by the boys’ stories of war plunder.) He had read those three hundred pious volumes that the governor of an eastern state had sent to the library of a Sunday school near by, in which he had become, in so romantic a manner, interested. He had read the college library from start to finish, and the more precious books his interested teachers would lend him. His teachers thought sometimes that John was to have a great career. But they were all amateurs in expectations, compared to his mother.

John had two very good reasons for wanting to work for Wully. The first was that at Wully’s he could study all the Sabbath day in peace, which he was not allowed to do at his father’s. To be sure, he was still expected to appear at church, which he did but seldom, and then only with great groans and complainings. Wully told him it wouldn’t hurt him to rest his mind an hour or two once a week, and he retorted that after a week in the field, rest was the thing his mind needed least. He scolded about his father’s intolerance. Wully only grinned at him, and remarked that he couldn’t see that the father was much more intolerant than the son. However, if John was seized with a pain on the morning of the Sabbath, Wully wouldn’t minimize his agony when his father inquired about it.

The other reason that John liked being with his brother was that there he could be sure of being paid. The summer before he had hired out to a Yankee at Fisher’s Grove, for twelve dollars a month, payable in gold. He had endured food inexcusably bad, even for those circumstances, and when he had asked for his wages the man had given him, shamefacedly enough to be sure, instead of gold, one hundred and twenty acres of land! John had been barely seventeen at the time and it was years before he acknowledged that in his disappointment he had gone to the woods and cried bitterly. He could afford to tell that story with amusement when there was a town of forty thousand on that land, and he still owned most of it. That year his father had with much difficulty got a deed to the land, and mortgaged it for a little to help with the boy’s schooling. He and his sister, living together on cornmeal carried from home, and working for their room rent for the kindly New Englanders with whom they lived, needed, fortunately, only a little cash. But this next year John was going to Chicago to study law. That was what the teachers advised and that would take real money.

It was one of those interested teachers who unknowingly changed the order of worship at Wully’s that season. One morning, when breakfast was over at dawn, John’s first week there, as Wully reached for The Book, he said in a voice which seemed, as usual, a little impatient, somewhat too eager;

“Let me do the reading, Wully, and you do the praying!”

Wully was rather surprised by such devotion on John’s part.

“All right,” he said, handing him the book.

John began abruptly at the first of Isaiah, which was not the place according to the custom of their fathers, and he read stumblingly, with pauses, so that his brother, turning toward him, saw that he was looking at the text only for occasional phrases, trying to read from memory. And when they sat around the table again, in the evening, almost stupid from weariness, John went over the same chapter, but with scarcely any hesitation. Wully asked him, after prayers, why he had repeated it. John had just picked up the lamp to go up to bed⁠—he had the one lamp, because he studied⁠—and he turned at the bottom of the stairs to answer, the light flickering across his neck, where his hickory shirt collar was open. He was six feet, even then, and he had huge broad shoulders strangely awkward. His head was long and narrow, and though he was blistered red just then from the sun, his untanned forehead was a clear yellow, unlike any other complexion in the family. He had the long upper lip that spoiled the symmetry of so many McLaughlin faces, and a long determined chin, and from his deep-set blue eyes he stood gazing at his brother with that speculating keenness with which he examined even the most familiar things.

“Professor Jamison advised me to learn Isaiah this summer. He said it would be a good thing to get the swing