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Page 58
The next morning when Mrs. Harling and Frances tried to reason with
Antonia, they found her agitated but determined. `Stop going to the tent?'
she panted. `I wouldn't think of it for a minute! My own father couldn't
make me stop! Mr. Harling ain't my boss outside my work. I won't give up
my friends, either. The boys I go with are nice fellows. I thought Mr.
Paine was all right, too, because he used to come here. I guess I gave him
a red face for his wedding, all right!' she blazed out indignantly.
`You'll have to do one thing or the other, Antonia,' Mrs. Harling told her
decidedly. `I can't go back on what Mr. Harling has said. This is his
house.'
`Then I'll just leave, Mrs. Harling. Lena's been wanting me to get a place
closer to her for a long while. Mary Svoboda's going away from the
Cutters' to work at the hotel, and I can have her place.'
Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. `Antonia, if you go to the Cutters' to
work, you cannot come back to this house again. You know what that man is.
It will be the ruin of you.'
Tony snatched up the teakettle and began to pour boiling water over the
glasses, laughing excitedly. `Oh, I can take care of myself! I'm a lot
stronger than Cutter is. They pay four dollars there, and there's no
children. The work's nothing; I can have every evening, and be out a lot
in the afternoons.'
`I thought you liked children. Tony, what's come over you?'
`I don't know, something has.' Antonia tossed her head and set her jaw.
`A girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there
won't be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the
other girls.'
Mrs. Harling gave a short, harsh laugh. `If you go to work for the
Cutters, you're likely to have a fling that you won't get up from in a
hurry.'
Frances said, when she told grandmother and me about this scene, that every
pan and plate and cup on the shelves trembled when her mother walked out of
the kitchen. Mrs. Harling declared bitterly that she wished she had never
let herself get fond of Antonia.
XI
WICK CUTTER WAS the money-lender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter. When
a farmer once got into the habit of going to Cutter, it was like gambling
or the lottery; in an hour of discouragement he went back.
Cutter's first name was Wycliffe, and he liked to talk about his pious
bringing-up. He contributed regularly to the Protestant churches, `for
sentiment's sake,' as he said with a flourish of the hand. He came from a
town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes, and could speak a little
Swedish, which gave him a great advantage with the early Scandinavian
settlers.
In every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to escape
restraint. Cutter was one of the `fast set' of Black Hawk business men.
He was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When we saw a light
burning in his office late at night, we knew that a game of poker was going
on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than sherry, and
he said he got his start in life by saving the money that other young men
spent for cigars. He was full of moral maxims for boys. When he came to
our house on business, he quoted `Poor Richard's Almanack' to me, and told
me he was delighted to find a town boy who could milk a cow. He was
particularly affable to grandmother, and whenever they met he would begin
at once to talk about `the good old times' and simple living. I detested
his pink, bald head, and his yellow whiskers, always soft and glistening.
It was said he brushed them every night, as a woman does her hair. His
white teeth looked factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as if from
perpetual sunburn; he often went away to hot springs to take mud baths. He
was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had lived in
his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had taken to
Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted her. He
still visited her.
Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife, and yet,
apparently, they never thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy,
scroll-work house, painted white and buried in thick evergreens, with a
fussy white fence and barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal about
horses, and usually had a colt which he was training for the track. On
Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fair grounds, speeding around
the race-course in his trotting-buggy, wearing yellow gloves and a
black-and-white-check travelling cap, his whiskers blowing back in the
breeze. If there were any boys about, Cutter would offer one of them a
quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive off, saying he had no change
and would `fix it up next time.' No one could cut his lawn or wash his
buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that a
boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back
yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar
combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so
despicable.
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