CHAPTER NINE

THE BIG PROBLEM, that I could see right off, was that Robert and I were plain mill hands, and didn’t have any right to speak to Colonel Humphreys. He was a mighty important man, and you just didn’t go up to his house and knock on his door like he was an ordinary farmer. He had a big house on a hill just on the edge of Humphreysville. I knew where it was, because I’d been past it plenty of times heading down to Derby to see Ma’s cousins. I could go around to the back door and tell the servants that I had a message for the colonel. But the servants weren’t likely to take much note of me. They’d want to know what the message was, and all of that, and wouldn’t believe me if I told them, anyway. What were we going to do? I didn’t know. All I could do was go on from day to day and hope I would come up with an answer.

Two nights later, when I came home from the mill, Pa was sitting at the table waiting for me. “Sit down, Annie,” he said.

I sat down at the table. “What’s wrong, Pa?”

He looked at me. “Daniel Brown came by this morning. He seems to know this story of yours about Mr. Hoggart pestering you.”

Daniel Brown was Hetty’s pa. “I didn’t tell him, Pa.”

“He thought I didn’t know about it. He came to warn me. It was mighty embarrassing for me, Annie.”

“I swear I didn’t say anything to him, Pa.”

“Who did, then?”

“Hetty must have. She knows all about it.”

“How does she know? Did you tell her some story?”

I blushed, for I had told her, and she’d told some of the other girls. “Pa, the girls all know. They’re all afraid Mr. Hoggart will try the same on them.”

“Annie, you shouldn’t be spreading these stories. It could cause us a lot of trouble if it got back to Mr. Hoggart that you were spreading gossip about him.”

“Pa, it’s not just stories. It’s true.” It was making me feel sort of crazy and sick that he wouldn’t believe me.

“What about that tale that Mr. Hoggart’s been stealing wool? You have no proof of that.”

Suddenly I was worried. Hetty had promised not to tell her pa about that. “Did Mr. Brown tell you I’d said that?”

“No,” Pa said. “He didn’t seem to have heard that.”

So Hetty hadn’t told. “It’s true, anyway.”

“Annie, you can’t go around saying things like that without proof.”

But we had proof. I’d seen that cabin in the woods. “Pa—” Then I realized that I couldn’t say anything about it, for he’d be dreadful angry at me if he found out I’d tracked Mr. Hoggart through the woods. “Robert says the tally sheets didn’t work out. That’s proof.”

“No, it’s not.” He slapped the palm of his hand down on the table. “It doesn’t prove anything at all. There could be a whole lot behind this that you don’t know anything about.” He gave me a stern look. “Now, I want you to stop all this. We could get into serious trouble if it got back to Mr. Hoggart that you were spreading these kinds of rumors about him.”

Well, there wasn’t any point in trying to argue with him. I had a funny feeling that he believed me, at least partly. He’d known me all my life, and he knew I wasn’t the kind to make up stories like that. But what with the mess he’d got himself in, he couldn’t afford to believe me. For if he believed me, he’d have to take me out of the mill.

Anyway, I realized that I’d better make sure Hetty didn’t tell her pa about the wool, so that night I walked her home. “Did you know your pa came to see my pa about what Mr. Hoggart tried to do to me?

“He said he was going to. I figured maybe he could get your pa to take it serious.”

“It didn’t help. Pa still doesn’t believe it. He told your pa it was all just stories.”

“But it isn’t stories,” Hetty said. “The girls all know about it.”

“Hetty, you didn’t tell your pa about Mr. Hoggart stealing wool, did you?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “You made me promise. Besides, I don’t know as Pa would believe it unless you had proof.”

But now I had proof. I wondered: Ought I to tell Mr. Brown myself? “Hetty, does your pa know Colonel Humphreys?”

“I think he knows him some,” Hetty said. “He made a farm wagon for him once, and he mends his wagon wheels for him sometimes. I reckon he knows him.”

But I decided I’d better talk it over with Robert before I said anything more. So I changed the subject, and we talked about the new bonnet Hetty was making herself until we got to her house and I headed for home.

For the next few days I hardly got a chance to see Robert. Mr. Hoggart had got him limping here and limping there all day long, carrying things. It was taking all the strength out of him, and the few times I saw him he looked so tired I didn’t want to bring up anything that would cause him worry. But finally I did. “Robert, Mr. Brown knows Colonel Humphreys. Leastwise, he did some work for him.”

Robert thought about it. “Annie, I reckon we ought to go slow. We still aren’t exactly sure that there’s wool in that cabin. Suppose we got Mr. Brown to go out there and break into the place, and there wasn’t any wool? That’d be the end of you and me. Mr. Hoggart would let me go first thing. I’d have to leave town for sure then.”

“But you can’t go on like this, Robert. It’ll kill you.

“Oh, I’ll manage for a while. Meanwhile we’ll keep our eyes open and see if we can get better proof.”

“Well, then we have to go back out to the cabin some night and find out.”

“We could try it. But we’d have to find a way to open the lock.”

“I’ll think of something.”

It snowed some that night, and off and on the next day, and then the sky cleared and the temperature began to drop. We were in for a real cold spell, with everything frozen up tight. Pa and George took the ox sledge over to the woodlot, where last year’s cutting was piled, ready to be sawed and split. They were gone all day, and when they came back the sweat was freezing to their faces. But they had enough firewood to hold us through a cold spell, if it didn’t go on for more than a week or so.

Pa was still campaigning about the clock; he wouldn’t let up on it. We had our meals to it, said our prayers to it, and went to bed to it. Ma fought it off as best she could. Meals didn’t come just so, but ten or fifteen minutes late, and when Pa told her it was time for bed she’d generally find something that had to be done, leaving Pa to grumble—why couldn’t it wait until morning, or why hadn’t she thought of it before. But she couldn’t stretch it too far: She knew Pa had the right and duty to set the rules around the house. He wouldn’t let off talking about it. We had to hear about it all the time. “It’s a marvel,” Pa said. “Once only the rich could afford clocks, but with the new methods of manufacturing, these mechanisms will soon be found in every home, no matter how humble. That’s the great value of these new methods. Where it used to take a clockmaker a week to make one of these, six men in a factory using this system can turn out several a day.”

“Bound to put a lot of clockmakers out of work, I should reckon,” Ma said.

“Not a bit of it,” Pa said. “That’s the beauty of the new system. It brings the price down so that every farmer in the country can afford to own a clock. Naturally, demand for clocks will shoot up, and soon there’ll be more clockmakers at work than ever. You’ll see.”

“Well, I hope all the farmers don’t go into the mills,” Ma said. “Otherwise we’re going to be a little short of food.”

“Not a bit of it,” Pa said. “It’ll be the same thing in farming as in anything else. Science, new methods, everything up-to-date. There’ll be machines for planting, machines for cultivating, machines for cutting wood, machines for everything. Work to the clock, instead of leaving it to nature. Think of how much labor is lost in the winter when the days grow short. With the new methods we won’t need but half the farms we have, and the farmers will be free to go into the mills. Why, it won’t be long before home spinning has disappeared. With machines, the price of cloth has got so, it’s hardly worth making your own at home. Someday the spinning wheel will be a relic, a reminder of the olden times. People will laugh at the idea of making your own cloth at home.”

I was mighty sick of hearing about all this, and I went out to the barn to feed the chickens. It had gotten even colder than before. I’d put a pan of water out in the barn for the chickens before dinner. It was frozen solid—not just on the top, but all the way down to the bottom. I turned the pan upside down and banged it, and the ice fell out in a chunk. I filled the pan up again, but I knew it wasn’t much use—it’d be frozen over pretty soon.

In the morning I bundled up real good for my walk to the mill, but the cold went right through my clothes, and I had to keep clapping at my sides with my hands to stir up some heat. My nose like to froze off. I pulled my scarf up over my nose and mouth, just leaving my eyes showing. But that wasn’t any good because my breath soon soaked the scarf, and it would have frozen to my lips if I hadn’t pulled it away. After that, about every two minutes I’d pull my hand out of my mitten and hold it over my nose; and about the time my nose was warmed up my hand would be stinging and I’d put it back in my mitten again.

Cold as it was, the snow was almost like ice. It was like trying to walk across a frozen pond, except that the snow wasn’t flat like a pond, but rutted and twisted. About every ten steps I slipped, and I fell down twice. Oh, I was pretty miserable by the time I got to the mill; and between trying to keep my nose from freezing off, and slipping and sliding, I was late when I got there, and worried that I was going to catch it from Mr. Hoggart.

I needn’t have worried, for his mind was occupied with something else. The great waterwheel that ran the machinery was icing up. As I came up the mill road I could see Mr. Hoggart and a couple of the New York boys standing by the shunt where the water ran under the wheel, trying to poke ice off it with long poles. The ice was clustering around the spokes and struts that the wheel was built of. That ice was heavy, and was slowing the wheel down a good deal. But the worst was, if the wheel iced up enough it would quit moving altogether. The machines would stop, and we wouldn’t be able to card or spin or anything else until they got the wheel loose again.

Mr. Hoggart had those poor boys knocking ice off that wheel with those heavy poles all day. He’d keep two or three of them down there until they were soaked and near frozen to death, and crying from the cold. Then he’d send them inside to thaw out and push another two or three out to handle the poles. To warm them up a little he’d give each of them a swallow of rum before they went out, and another when they came back; and of course he’d take one himself along the way. He was going to be drunk before the day was out, and I knew I’d best keep out of his way.

I thought about Mr. Hoggart pestering me all afternoon, and finally decided I’d slip out and head for home a few minutes early. Mr. Hoggart wasn’t thinking about anything but the waterwheel, for if it froze up and the mill stopped, Colonel Humphreys would lose a good deal of money. It was Mr. Hoggart’s place to see that things like that didn’t happen.

So I kept an eye on the clock in the bell tower and when it got to be just a few minutes before five, I told Hetty that I was feeling sick and thought I was going to throw up. I grabbed my coat, and went on out of the slubbing room and down the long stairs to the ground.

I stood for a moment at the bottom of the stairs, listening. Over the rumble of machinery coming from inside the building I could hear the thumps and shouts and curses of the boys whacking ice off the waterwheel. I felt sorry for them; they’d be doing that all night, so the wheel wouldn’t freeze up at night.

I listened for the sound of Mr. Hoggart’s voice. I didn’t hear it. I wished I knew where he was, but I didn’t dare look around the corner of the building to the waterwheel to see if he was there. I went around the building the other way, out to the mill road. A line of alder bushes ran alongside the mill road. I slipped in behind them on the snowy field so as to be out of sight of the mill as much as possible. Of course, the bushes were bare of leaves, but the alders were thick and covered me up pretty fair.

The snow was crusted over as hard as brick and as slippery as butter. I had to hang onto the alder bushes to keep from falling down. I went on slipping and sliding down toward the town road. And I was halfway there when I saw Mr. Hoggart turn off the town road onto the mill road. He was carrying a jug of rum, and slipping and sliding himself.

I was scared as I could be, for if he looked close he was bound to see me through the alders. I stopped moving, and crouched down, getting colder by the minute. On he came, cursing when he slipped, and carrying the jug cradled in his arms, so it would be protected if he fell down. He’d rather break an arm than that jug, I figured. He was concentrating on his footing, and keeping his eyes on the dips and ruts in the road, and I prayed that he’d keep on doing that until he got by me. He kept on coming until he was abreast of me. Then he stopped, uncorked the jug, and raised it to his lips. With the jug in midair, he looked around to see if anyone was noticing him. The only person he saw was me crouched down behind the alders.

“You,” he shouted. “Where do you think you’re going?” He bent over and set the jug down on the frozen snow. I didn’t wait but started on out of there, slipping and sliding along behind the alders, grabbing hold of them as I went. But I was licked, because he was out on the mill road, which was chewed up, and gave him better footing than I was getting in the field of frozen snow behind the alders. He followed along abreast of me, cursing and shouting, and trying to grab me through the alder bushes. I was as scared as could be, my heart thumping, and sweating even in that cold.

“Hold still, damn you,” he shouted. I didn’t stop, but went on scrambling along toward the town road. I figured if I made it safely there I could make a run for it. I might have a chance then, because he wouldn’t want anybody to see him chasing a mill girl down the road.

All of a sudden he made a dive for me, into the alders. He crashed through them and fell on his belly. I turned to run out across the snowfield. I didn’t make more than ten feet before I slipped and went down. He kneeled up, dove across the slick snow, and was on me. I staggered to my feet. He swatted me across the face, knocking me back into the snow. Tears began to leak out of my eyes. Then he looked down at me. “If I didn’t have that water-wheel to worry about, I’d teach you a lesson you’d never forget, miss. Now, you go on back to the mill. I’ll tend to you later.”