A Cross-Country Idyl
“A man who will feed his horse before he does himself is a good hand.”
--O’Malley of the Mounted.
Thanks to Fred’s practicability and my mother’s good head for managing, the actual plans for the August trip were rapidly materializing. My precious sisters were also arranging for me a small belated trousseau, a lovely tailored blue suit, and an exquisite gown of deep, rich, red, silk; and as theses were being prepared, I saw myself, my dark hair coiled simply to become the simple luxury of that rich, red silk, as I should present him, my beloved husband, to all the legions of my oldest and best friends at the old Woodbine reunion.
Mr. Smith has sometimes said there are two ways of identifying him; he is either Joseph Smith’s boy or Ruth Cobb’s husband. For a man with the host of official and personal friends that my husband has, that is a peculiar remark; but at about this age Frederick was not widely known throughout the church, and he was naturally Joseph Smith’s son to his father’s friends at home and to his father’s people at large whenever he met them. And in this case it was just possible that he would appear among all these people who had known my family and me for so many years, as Ruth Cobb’s husband, for this place was my home, and there were even members of the church, who waited with interest to see just what sort of a man Ruth Cobb should bring back to them as her husband.
Being a native of Iowa it would be improper for me to admit that the long, lazy camping trip in the broiling, Middle West sun, with the little insects dancing in the August heat, and all around our ankles, was not the pleasantest in the world. Mr. Smith has frequently accused me, however, and my brother-in-law comes in for a share of the indictment of liking to “rough it” with all the Pullman accessories. Consequently, in spite of the many comforts which my mother and Fred had planned for the journey, some of us did not take kindly to camp life.
I could see no reason, for instance, why a young husband who was very much in love with his wife should fall completely in love with the horses, and Bess and her husband and even Baby Wayne could not understand why the horses should not only be fed but put to bed before the fire could be built and his hungry family given the comfort of a warm supper.
It was really our own fault, for there were three of us, a man and two supposedly intelligent young women, who might have built the fire and cooked the supper if we had cared to, but Fred Blair and I had no intention of burdening ourselves with camp work, preferring to wait and grumble rather then to turn in and help. Bess did try once, but the women of our family are noted for their futile efforts at fire-building, and Fred likes to tease Bess yet about the time he found her trying to chop out with a dull hatchet a gnarled apple root that a farmer would to have tackled with anything less than dynamite. She was getting it, she said, to keep up the flame she had started with some twigs little Wayne had dragged in.
After that Bess waited with us, and we would scold Fred for pottering over his other duties so long when we were all so hungry until my mother would intervene and, as she always did whenever any of her girls went to her with small complaints about their husbands, she stood by her boy.
“Of course Fred must take care of the horses first. If it wasn’t for them we couldn’t get there at all,” she said. “They must have the best of care.”
We stopped over Saturday and Sunday at Shenandoah, a little city of homes, a normal school and half a dozen churches, where I heard my husband preach his first sermon, as he and Fred Blair had both recently been ordained to the ministry and were expected to speak on Sunday evening. They had been asked to divide the hour between them.
There has always been a little superstition or awe or something of that nature, in the minds of some people, attached to the president and prophet of their church and other leading men, which I could never understand. I have always liked our find church men for their splendid personal qualities. I have admired them for the sincerity with which they have met their big responsibilities, and I have always believed that if they keep themselves in a proper mental and spiritual they do certainly receive inspiration and enlightenment for the direction of their activities, both as quorums and personally. This is the attitude of many of our church people. But to some of the members there is much of the mysterious and the marvelous connected with matters of religion, as it is with all churches.
Consequently the people of this little town, and for miles around, as the word spread over the countryside, were anxious to hear what these two young men would have to say to them. Of course the son of their president, and the son of W. W. Blair who had been a missionary of the church for many years and was later counselor to the president, were objects of considerable curiosity to these our isolated congregations, but it is just possible, too, that they had heard of the controversies which had accompanied the ordaining of the two.
The two young men were presented for ordination at the same time and there were those who feared that the move to ordain them had come because of the friendship and reverence which many held for their fathers. Well do I remember how Bess and I followed our miserable and harassed boys from one district business meeting to another, listening with more amusement than perturbation to the long-winded discussions between those who favored the ordinations and extolled the virtues of the young fellows, and those who opposed them on the grounds of youth, inexperience and favoritism. Just what the two thoughts I cannot say. No doubt they would have been willing enough to have foregone both the honor and labor of church position, but they were sufficiently consecrated to await the decision of the people.
They were eventually ordained, and I know from observation that as public men my husband and his brother-in-law who still works closely by his side, even as their fathers had worked together for so many years, and as a result perhaps of this early experience, have never refused to any consecrated and willing boy the opportunity to try himself out in church. In fact, when years later the sons and grandsons of the very men who opposed their first ordination were called into the church work, President Smith and Bishop Blair were the last to oppose and the first to advise, encourage and support them. Which is beside the question.
Concerning this early opposition, it was only typical of my husband’s life and work that his first appearance in an official position should have been heralded by the displeasure of those who did not appreciate the situation, who feared the new and clung with failing fingers to the past that slipped mercilessly through their hands. It would have been no real kindness for them to have let him begin his church work in peace, when he must necessarily have found the strife of it thrust upon him in later years. But if the accomplishment of these men in the many years of church work has at least partly vindicated the good men who urged their ordination at that time, their reputation had not yet been established before those sermons at Shenandoah.
Consequently they looked forward to Sunday evening with a little anxiety, and even Bess and I in the midst of our pleasant visit with friends felt a half-conscious uneasiness which we refused to admit until shortly before the ordeal.
“Mother,” I said, as we dressed for church, “what are we going to do about it? I am very sure that Fred Smith cannot preach a sermon.”
“Yes; he can,” smiled my mother. “You know quite well, Ruth, that Fred can anything he chooses, from taking his college degrees to keeping the lawn mower in shape or taking care of the furnace.”
“Besides,” said my sister, “if you are worrying about Fred M., how do you think I feel about Fred B.? You know he didn’t start out to be a minister, and he can make business talks or possibly a political speech, but he cannot preach.”
“Oh, Fred Blair is all right,” I insisted. “He can quote scripture. But you know my Fred cannot even repeat four lines of poetry and make the rhymes come out right, let alone remembering long passages from the bible. Will you fancy what will happen when he gives this old-fashioned and Bible-read audience his favorite misquotation about the rich men getting into heaven through a camel’s eye? And he is sure to use it because he is so fond of presenting his ideas about rich and poor alike having to cooperate in order to build up Zion.”
“We might pray about it,” suggested Bess despairingly.
“I’ll try that later,” I said, as I finished slipping on my gloves, “I am going to talk gently to him on the way to the church now, so that he will not shake his fists at the audience in his earnestness, and disgrace us all.”
When the two Freds were seated, one on either side of the local officer who was presiding over the meeting, I noticed that Fred Blair looked fairly at ease and seemed to be concentrating on his address, so I turned my attention to my husband.
“How handsome he looks tonight in his new blue suit,” I thought as I gazed at my idol, “but what is the matter with his face?”
Too tanned from the long summer, and too sunburned from the long trip to look pale, his face had taken on a curious shade, a sort of mauve, from which his great brown eyes looked, unnaturally big and bright in his excitement. I began to giggle.
“He looks like George Washington,” I whispered to Bess.
“George Washington?”
“Yes,” I whispered, “our old Negro. Don’t you remember how scared he used to look when he had to wash the high stair window from a ladder and plank?”
“Well, look at Fred Blair,” countered Bess.
I looked more closely. His lips seemed to be moving as though he recited his opening paragraph to keep it firmly in mind, and from his throat which the prevailing type of wing collar made more prominent, it was painfully evident that he swallowed constantly. A ghastly pallor had overspread his fine, strong features, and I doubt if anyone in “divine presence” would have been surprised had he suddenly burst into tears.
In this manner the boys sat through the music and other long preliminaries until Frederick M. Smith, son of the president of the church was introduced.
He stepped out limping, slightly embarrassed and a little bewildered, but with no idea of giving up unless he or his audience perished in the attempt.
He chose for his subject “Faith,” which was sufficiently general for him to have said almost anything without displeasing his audience or contradicting himself. With his splendid university training he was able to bring out several good points, but he brought them out with a jerk, pounded them on the table as it were, for the congregation to take undiluted or leave tabled.
With the passing minutes his “effort” became more and more of an effort to him and to his hearers, and exactly eleven minutes after he started, and without any attempt at conclusion or summary, he suddenly sat down.
Perspiration broke out on his forehead. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face with a sigh. Then he looked to see if I had noticed his relief, but I only smiled at him reassuringly, and he smiled back sheepishly. Personally, I should have enjoyed a chance to go quietly into hysterics. I could only be thankful that he had not by any chance approached the subject of rich men and camels.
Having now completed my vigil (for whatever he had or had not done, the ordeal was at least over) I was beginning to enjoy the situation, but my sister’s turn had come and I saw her sit very straight in her chair.
The congregation had followed my husband’s talk very carefully, a little breathless, to be sure, at the headlong discourse, but kindly and courteously as always. They now settled back to hear what Brother Blair’s boy had to say.
In my concentration on the previous speaker I had failed to notice when Fred Blair’s lip had ceased to quiver. He seemed quite collected, but as he glanced at Bess and tried to smile he was on able to produce a shadow of his usual patient, sunny smile. That smile he had actually inherited from his father, and the resemblance was so pronounced that when Brother Blair had returned from a two-year missionary trip to California and little Fred who had been born during his father’s absence had run down to the gate to meet him, the father had recognized by that baby smile which was his very own, the little son whom he had never seen before.
“That magnificent, sturdy man, Brother W. W. Blair, was one of the finest men this church has ever had. It has been said of him, “He was a lion of the Lord, a noble and able defender of the faith, a cultured gentle man and scholar."
The son’s was an excellent dissertation on the familiar subject of “Revelation,” well upheld, with long persuasive arguments and many illustrations, a habit of discourse with him to this day, only that now his stories have a distinctly humorous character. He rose to his tiptoes, pointed a long finger accusingly or smiled ingratiatingly at his long-suffering audience as he brought home point after point of contentions, which not one man, woman or child of the good, old-time Latter Day Saint crowd would have thought of refuting or disbelieving, and which they all had known and heard since infancy.
“Will he never stop?” wailed Bess at the end of three-quarters of an hour.
He eventually drew to a close and the service with him.
We started north again the next morning with out thoughts now turned to the old Woodbine reunion that was once called the “World Reunion” and was still second only to the annual conference it its religious and social significance. Besides the splendid inspirational services, the reunion served as a meeting place for those who belonged to the church as well as a pleasant summer camp for many who did not, and as an ideal vacation place for the young people, in which latter capacity it became the site of many budding romances.
The Latter Day Saints are noted for their generosity and hospitality, particularly toward those of their own faith, which is partly the result no doubt of their having been misunderstood as a people by he world at large, sometimes even to the point of persecution. Much of the opposition to the church in the Middle West dates from its attitude toward slavery prior to the Civil War, when the Saints were strong abolitionists in the midst of a warmly Southern community, and had become unpopular because of their position early in the struggle. There is also a certain tendency to shun any new religion or sect; and a people who are persecuted even socially are more closely-knit and clannish for that very reason.
The boys preached again at the reunion, this time very well indeed, and I had the pleasure of accepting invitations to dinners with friends, and in my new red silk of leading Fred about the old camp grounds just as I had anticipated. How eagerly I saw that with his quick good fellowship, his hearty handshake and his honest, “I’m glad to know you,” he became one of them. I had waited anxiously to see if they would accept him, and then womanlike I was a little jealous to see how thoroughly they accepted him. He made good friends among the younger men, men with whom my sisters and I had often skated and picnicked in the olden days, and toward the end of the reunion I began to look forward to the return trip with pleasure when I might have him quite to myself again.
“Can you and Bess be ready to start home early in the morning? Asked Fred M., as he came in after the sermon on the last night of the reunion.
“You may all start in the morning if you wish,” commented Fred B. quietly from the corner where he was busily packing his suitcase, “but I am going tonight.”
“Tonight!” exclaimed Bess.
“Tonight!” echoed the rest of us.
“On the train,” murmured Fred B. smiling guiltily. “I am really afraid to neglect my business any longer … don’t make much of a camper … not much help … an extra person to wait on … “ and he dodged out of the tent on some pretext or other.
We set out next morning with stout hearts, but our good time was already behind us, the fine brother-on-law already speeding toward home and comfort and the way before us seemed long. The horses dragged wearily as if they would be glad also to be home, and much as we longed to hurry, the days passed slowly in dull monotony.
Fred Smith seemed utterly engrossed in his driving. I should have liked to have chatted the whole reunion over again with him, but his thought so occupied him that to try to carry on a conversation with him was like rowing against a high wind, and I gave up. I presume he got more good out of his reunion by thinking it over and over to himself, but at any rate I likened him mentally to the animal to which he has since been compared by others than myself, that golden beast who sits and sits eternally in Egyptian sands and has never yet told its secret.
I have always been afraid that this habit of his would interfere with his office work, for when he feels so inclined he not only keeps quiet but is also very hard to talk to. One reason is because he has a habit of liking to perform some mechanical work while someone is talking to him. When I have remonstrated with him for reading while I discussed with him some matter of real importance, he has told me that he can do both with perfect ease - like Theodore Roosevelt, no doubt, who is rumored to have been able to dictate to two secretaries at the same time, while he was writing down his own memoirs in longhand. There is never any satisfaction in trying to make him prove whether or not he has heard what you said to him, either, because invariably he can repeat it all quite accurately.
At the end of one hard day (for frequently we drove till after dark) we made camp by lamplight under some pleasant trees and were soon sleeping sweetly. In the morning to my astonishment and horror, I discovered that our encampment was at the very edge of a neglected country cemetery. Fred only laughed when I showed him.
“I noticed it last night,” he admitted, “but I didn’t say anything for fear you wouldn’t sleep.”
Wouldn’t sleep! I should say I wouldn’t have slept. I have a genuine aversion to graveyards, and Bess is just as bad. If we had suspected that he had set up camp there in the cityof the dead, as it were, neither of us would even have gone to bed. I think in this case mother would have been with us, and we would have held out until he had packed up, hitched up his horses and taken us far away from those silent companions of the night.
The trip brought few diversions beyond this uncanny adventure, and our subsequent indignation, until on what should have been our last night we encountered an experience such as only those who have known an Iowa electric storm can really appreciate. Coming suddenly out of the August murkiness, the wind and darkness caught us an hour or so before our regular stopping time.
Fred pulled the team out into the first available camping place and started to make a hasty camp.
“Well, boy, it’s up to you,” said my mother confidently.
“Don’t any of you worry,” commanded my hero, really delight at having the safety and shelter of three “helpless” women and a baby in his hands. “I will put up the tent strongly and dig a deep ditch around it to drain off the water. I think I can make it if I hurry. Bess can hold the ropes. Don’t any of you worry.”
He did not know his crowd. A little legitimate excitement was what we had been needing for several days. And when I saw that the horses had been left in their heavy harness, unfed and uncared for, while my husband worked and perspired to make me and my dear ones comfortable before the storm, my heart could have burst with happiness and pride, while the air grew crackly with lightning and began to “smell of thunder.”
“Where is Wayne?” called my mother quickly, and then she turned and fled after the little figure which trotted away gayly into the last light that lingered under the swiftly marching storm. We looked after them startled. The baby form seem to stumble, his feet slipped in the path he was following, his little hands clutched at the turf, when mother with a swift gesture reached him, and clasping his little frock by the tail pulled him back over the brink of an earthly bank. We ran weakly up to where they stood and drew back aghast, for directly below the steep slope of red bluff the whirls and darkening eddies of the great river swept by. We knew now why the storm had come up so suddenly. It was the “tail end” of one of those cyclonic storms that follow swiftly down the basin of the Missouri River.
We carried our frightened laddie back to the tent and I snuggled him closely in my arms while Bess and mother helped Fred to carry in the camping outfit, and Fred worked “like a beaver” to get all in shape before the first big drops battered down the dusty grass.
Nature in her lavish power was sending streak after streak of flame from heaven to earth, but it took us three women almost half an hour to persuade our small emergency stove to burn even a drop of kerosene at a time. The blaze flared up at last, however, and I succeeded in having a good hot supper ready for Fred when he came in wet and tired. He ate hastily, and with a whispered word to my mother, and a hasty caress for me went out again.
My mother said that one of the horses was sick and Fred had taken it to a livery stable. I was so tired after our excitement that I did not wake up to notice that he was gone all night.
A shriek of delight from our Wayne boy, and I woke to see that it was morning and the storm had passed. In a minute the little fellow came running to me:
“Oh, Aunt Wooffie, come an’see.”
I dressed hastily and went out into the sunlight. Fred was standing by the mare smiling a little wearily but with unutterable amusement; and no wonder he smiled, for leaning against the good old mare who had brought us all the way to Woodbine and almost back again was the dearest, wobbly, little colt imaginable.
“Why,” I said, “it has come to take Fred Blair’s place. Can’t we name it Fred?”
“I’m afraid that wouldn’t be suitable,” said my husband.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well, because it is a case similar to that in Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island where the ‘female onaga gave birth to a little on which was the same sex as its mother.’”
“I don’t care, “ I insisted, “I must call it Fred B. because it is bad luck not to come back from a journey with the same people who started.”
Mother and baby were not able to travel, and much as we should have liked to get home, we were obliged to stay in our same camp all day and night; and so two mornings later, and a day behind our latest schedule, we drew into Lamoni as bedraggled a bridal party as ever returned from an overland honeymoon. We could not blame those who saw us for smiling as we passed, for the outfit was drenched and muddy, the horses plodded slowly in the bright clay roads and the little colt bore forward uncertainly on long, new legs.
“What will you tell the livery man?” I questioned as we came into town.
“I’ll tell him plenty,” growled my usually good-natured husband. “But he can’t complain that I didn’t take good care of his horses.”
No. The only complaint possible was on another score. To be kinds to dumb brutes is good, and a hobby with all my family; my Aunt Elizabeth was an honored leader in the S. P. C. A. And when William S. hart was spying in the murderer’s camp in O’Malley of the Mounted they let him stay because they said that a man who fed his horse before he did himself was a good hand. But not any of them said that a man should feed his horses and comb their hair and tuck them to bed before he has even a word for his wife.
And I say that a man who sometimes forgets his wife and family as well as himself to care for his horses, his neighbors, his business, and the world and all, is - well, as the anonymous clipping some friend once sympathetically sent me so aptly said, “Such a man may very possible be a great man.”
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