Another Mouth to Feed

This has been a day of minor events, as well as a busy one.  I was so busy that I never sat down from 10:30 till 1:30.  I had washed my one change of raiment, and though I never iron my clothes, I like to bleach them till they are as white as snow, and they were whitening on the line when some furious gusts came down from Long’s Peak, against which I could not stand, and when I did get out all my clothes were blown into strips from an inch to four inches in width, literally destroyed!  One learns how very little is necessary either for comfort or happiness.  I made a four-pound spiced ginger cake, baked some bread, mended my riding dress, cleaned up generally, wrote some letters with the hope that some day they might be posted, and took a magnificent walk, reaching the cabin again in the melancholy glory which now immediately precedes the darkness.  We were all busy getting our supper ready when the dogs began to bark furiously, and we heard the noise of horses.  “Evans at last!” we exclaimed, but we were wrong.  Mr. Kavan went out, and returned saying that it was a young man who had come up with Evans’ wagon and team, and that the wagon had gone over into a gulch seven miles from here.  Mr. Kavan looked very grave.  “It’s another mouth to feed,” he said.  They asked no questions, and brought the lad in, a slangy, assured fellow of twenty, who, having fallen into delicate health at a theological college, had been sent up here by Evans to work for his board.  The men were too courteous to ask him what he was doing up here, but I boldly asked him where he lived, and to our dismay he replied, “I’ve come to live here.”  So we had to settle what to do with him.  We discussed the food question gravely, as it presented a real difficulty.  We put him into a bed-closet opening from the kitchen, and decided to see what he was fit for before giving him work.  We were very much amazed, in truth, at his coming here.  He is evidently a shallow, arrogant youth.

We have decided that today is November 26th; tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, and we are planning a feast, though Mr. K. said to me again this morning, with a doleful face, “You see there’s another mouth to feed.”  This “mouth” has come up to try the panacea of manual labor, but his town-bred, and I see that; he will do nothing.  He is writing poetry, and while I was busy today began to read it aloud to me, asking for my criticism.  He is just at the age when everything literary has a fascination and every literary person is a hero, specially Dr.  Holland.  Last night was fearful from the lifting of the cabin and the breaking of the mud from the roof.  We sat with fine gravel driving in our faces, and this morning I carried four shovelfuls of mud out of my room.  After breakfast, Mr. Kavan, Mr. Lyman, and I, with the two wagon-horses, rode the seven miles to the scene of yesterdays disaster in a perfect gale of wind.  I felt like a servant going out for a days “pleasuring,”’ hurrying “through my dishes,” and leaving my room in disorder.  The wagon lay half-way down the side of a ravine, kept from destruction by having caught on some trees.  It was too cold to hang about while the men hauled it up and fixed it so I went slowly back, encountering Mr. Nugent in a most bitter mood – almost in an “ugly fit” – hating everybody and contrasting his own generosity and reckless kindness with the selfishness and carefully weighed kindness of others.  People do give him credit for having “as kind a heart as ever beat.”  Lately a child in the other cabin was taken ill and though there were idle men and horses at hand, it was only the “desperado” who rode sixty miles in “the shortest time ever made” to bring the doctor.  While we were talking he was sitting on a stone outside his den mending a saddle, skins, bones, and skulls lying about him, “Ring” watching him with jealous and idolatrous affection.  The wind lifting his thin curls from as grand a head as was ever modeled — a ruin of a man.  Yet the sun which shines “on the evil and the good” was lighting up the gold of his hair.  May our Father which is in heaven yet show mercy to His outcast child!

Mr. Kavan soon overtook me, and we had an exciting race of two miles, getting home just before the wind fell and the snow began.

I.L.B.