Which Introduces the Shepherd of the Birds

The day that Henry Smix met and embraced Gasoline Power and went up Main Street hand in hand with it is not yet forgotten. It was a hasty marriage, so to speak, and the results of it were truly deplorable. Their little journey produced an effect on the nerves and the remote future history of Bingville. They rushed at a group of citizens who were watching them, scattered it hither and thither, broke down a section of Mrs. Risley's picket fence and ran over a small boy. At the end of their brief misalliance, Gasoline Power seemed to express its opinion of Mr. Smix by hurling him against a telegraph pole and running wild in the park until it cooled its passion in the fountain pool. In the language of Hiram Blenkinsop, the place was badly "smixed up." Yet Mr. Smix was the object of unmerited criticism. He was like many other men in that quiet village—slow, deliberate, harmless and good-natured. The action of his intellect was not at all like that of a gasoline engine. Between the swiftness of the one and the slowness of the other, there was a wide zone full of possibilities. The engine had accomplished many things while Mr. Smix's intellect was getting ready to begin to act.

In speaking of this adventure, Hiram Blenkinsop made a wise remark: "My married life learnt me one thing," said he. "If you are thinkin' of hitchin' up a wild horse with a tame one, be careful that the tame one is the stoutest or it will do him no good."

The event had its tragic side and whatever Hiram Blenkinsop and other citizens of questionable taste may have said of it, the historian has no intention of treating it lightly. Mr. Smix and his neighbor's fence could be repaired but not the small boy—Robert Emmet Moran, six years old, the son of the Widow Moran who took in washing. He was in the nature of a sacrifice to the new god. He became a beloved cripple, known as the Shepherd of the Birds and altogether the most cheerful person in the village. His world was a little room on the second floor of his mother's cottage overlooking the big flower garden of Judge Crooker—his father having been the gardener and coachman of the Judge. There were in this room an old pine bureau, a four post bedstead, an armchair by the window, a small round nickel clock, that sat on the bureau, a rubber tree and a very talkative little old tin soldier of the name of Bloggs who stood erect on a shelf with a gun in his hand and was always looking out of the window. The day of the tin soldier's arrival the boy had named him Mr. Bloggs and discovered his unusual qualities of mind and heart. He was a wise old soldier, it would seem, for he had some sort of answer for each of the many questions of Bob Moran. Indeed, as Bob knew, he had seen and suffered much, having traveled to Europe and back with the Judge's family and been sunk for a year in a frog pond and been dropped in a jug of molasses, but through it all had kept his look of inextinguishable courage. The lonely lad talked, now and then, with the round, nickel clock or the rubber-tree or the pine bureau, but mostly gave his confidence to the wise and genial Mr. Bloggs. When the spring arrived the garden, with its birds and flowers, became a source of joy and companionship for the little lad. Sitting by the open window, he used to talk to Pat Crowley, who was getting the ground ready for sowing. Later the slow procession of the flowers passed under the boy's window and greeted him with its fragrance and color.

But his most intimate friends were the birds. Robins, in the elm tree just beyond the window, woke him every summer morning. When he made his way to the casement, with the aid of two ropes which spanned his room, they came to him lighting on his wrists and hands and clamoring for the seeds and crumbs which he was wont to feed them. Indeed, little Bob Moran soon learned the pretty lingo of every feathered tribe that camped in the garden. He could sound the pan pipe of the robin, the fairy flute of the oriole, the noisy guitar of the bobolink and the little piccolo of the song sparrow. Many of these dear friends of his came into the room and explored the rubber tree and sang in its branches. A colony of barn swallows lived under the eaves of the old weathered shed on the far side of the garden. There were many windows, each with a saucy head looking out of it. Suddenly half a dozen of these merry people would rush into the air and fill it with their frolic. They were like a lot of laughing schoolboys skating over invisible hills and hollows.

With a pair of field-glasses, which Mrs. Crooker had loaned to him, Bob Moran had learned the nest habits of the whole summer colony in that wonderful garden. All day he sat by the open window with his work, an air gun at his side. The robins would shout a warning to Bob when a cat strolled into that little paradise. Then he would drop his brushes, seize his gun and presently its missile would go whizzing through the air, straight against the side of the cat, who, feeling the sting of it, would bound through the flower beds and leap over the fence to avoid further punishment. Bob had also made an electric search-light out of his father's old hunting jack and, when those red-breasted policemen sounded their alarm at night, he was out of bed in a jiffy and sweeping the tree tops with a broom of light, the jack on his forehead. If he discovered a pair of eyes, the stinging missiles flew toward them in the light stream until the intruder was dislodged. Indeed, he was like a shepherd of old, keeping the wolves from his flock. It was the parish priest who first called him the Shepherd of the Birds.

Just opposite his window was the stub of an old pine partly covered with Virginia creeper. Near the top of it was a round hole and beyond it a small cavern which held the nest of a pair of flickers. Sometimes the female sat with her gray head protruding from this tiny oriel window of hers looking across at Bob. Pat Crowley was in the habit of calling this garden "Moran City," wherein the stub was known as Woodpecker Tower and the flower bordered path as Fifth Avenue while the widow's cottage was always referred to as City Hall and the weathered shed as the tenement district.

What a theater of unpremeditated art was this beautiful, big garden of the Judge! There were those who felt sorry for Bob Moran but his life was fuller and happier than theirs. It is doubtful if any of the world's travelers saw more of its beauty than he.

He had sugared the window-sill so that he always had company—bees and wasps and butterflies. The latter had interested him since the Judge had called them "stray thoughts of God." Their white, yellow and blue wings were always flashing in the warm sunlit spaces of the garden. He loved the chorus of an August night and often sat by his window listening to the songs of the tree crickets and katydids and seeing the innumerable firefly lanterns flashing among the flowers.

His work was painting scenes in the garden, especially bird tricks and attitudes. For this, he was indebted to Susan Baker, who had given him paints and brushes and taught him how to use them, and to an unusual aptitude for drawing.

One day Mrs. Baker brought her daughter Pauline with her—a pretty blue-eyed girl with curly blonde hair, four years older than Bob, who was thirteen when his painting began. The Shepherd looked at her with an exclamation of delight; until then he had never seen a beautiful young maiden. Homely, ill-clad daughters of the working folk had come to his room with field flowers now and then, but no one like Pauline. He felt her hair and looked wistfully into her face and said that she was like pink and white and yellow roses. She was a discovery—a new kind of human being. Often he thought of her as he sat looking out of the window and often he dreamed of her at night.

The little Shepherd of the Birds was not quite a boy. He was a spirit untouched by any evil thought, unbroken to lures and thorny ways. He still had the heart of childhood and saw only the beauty of the world. He was like the flowers and birds of the garden, strangely fair and winsome, with silken, dark hair curling about his brows. He had large, clear, brown eyes, a mouth delicate as a girl's and teeth very white and shapely. The Bakers had lifted the boundaries of his life and extended his vision. He found a new joy in studying flower forms and in imitating their colors on canvas.

Now, indeed, there was not a happier lad in the village than this young prisoner in one of the two upper bedrooms in the small cottage of the Widow Moran. True, he had moments of longing for his lost freedom when he heard the shouts of the boys in the street and their feet hurrying by on the sidewalk. The steadfast and courageous Mr. Bloggs had said: "I guess we have just as much fun as they do, after all. Look at them roses."

One evening, as his mother sat reading an old love tale to the boy, he stopped her.

"Mother," he said, "I love Pauline. Do you think it would be all right for me to tell her?"

"Never a word," said the good woman. "Ye see it's this way, my little son, ye're like a priest an' it's not the right thing for a priest."

"I don't want to be a priest," said he impatiently.

"Tut, tut, my laddie boy! It's for God to say an' for us to obey," she answered.

When the widow had gone to her room for the night and Bob was thinking it over, Mr. Bloggs remarked that in his opinion they should keep up their courage for it was a very grand thing to be a priest after all.

Winters he spent deep in books out of Judge Crooker's library and tending his potted plants and painting them and the thick blanket of snow in the garden. Among the happiest moments of his life were those that followed his mother's return from the post-office with The Bingville Sentinel. Then, as the widow was wont to say, he was like a dog with a bone. To him, Bingville was like Rome in the ancient world or London in the British Empire. All roads led to Bingville. The Sentinel was in the nature of a habit. One issue was like unto another—as like as "two chaws off the same plug of tobaccer," a citizen had once said. Its editor performed his jokes with a wink and a nudge as if he were saying, "I will now touch the light guitar." Anything important in the Sentinel would have been as misplaced as a cannon in a meeting-house. Every week it caught the toy balloons of gossip, the thistledown events which were floating in the still air of Bingville. The Sentinel was a dissipation as enjoyable and as inexplicable as tea. It contained portraits of leading citizens, accounts of sundry goings and comings, and teas and parties and student frolics.

To the little Shepherd, Bingville was the capital of the world and Mr. J. Patterson Bing, the first citizen of Bingville, who employed eleven hundred men and had four automobiles, was a gigantic figure whose shadow stretched across the earth. There were two people much in his thoughts and dreams and conversation—Pauline Baker and J. Patterson Bing. Often there were articles in the Sentinel regarding the great enterprises of Mr. Bing and the social successes of the Bing family in the metropolis. These he read with hungry interest. His favorite heroes were George Washington, St. Francis and J. Patterson Bing. As between the three he would, secretly, have voted for Mr. Bing. Indeed, he and his friends and intimates—Mr. Bloggs and the rubber tree and the little pine bureau and the round nickel clock—had all voted for Mr. Bing. But he had never seen the great man.

Mr. Bing sent Mrs. Moran a check every Christmas and, now and then, some little gift to Bob, but his charities were strictly impersonal. He used to say that while he was glad to help the poor and the sick, he hadn't time to call on them. Once, Mrs. Bing promised the widow that she and her husband would go to see Bob on Christmas Day. The little Shepherd asked his mother to hang his best pictures on the walls and to decorate them with sprigs of cedar. He put on his starched shirt and collar and silk tie and a new black coat which his mother had given him. The Christmas bells never rang so merrily.

The great white bird in the Congregational Church tower—that being Bob's thought of it—flew out across the valley with its tidings of good will.

To the little Shepherd it seemed to say: "Bing—Bing—Bing—Bing—Bing—Bing! Com-ing, Com-ing, Com-ing!!"

Many of the friends of his mother—mostly poor folk of the parish who worked in the mill—came with simple gifts and happy greetings. There were those among them who thought it a blessing to look upon the sweet face of Bob and to hear his merry laughter over some playful bit of gossip and Judge Crooker said that they were quite right about it. Mr. and Mrs. J. Patterson Bing were never to feel this blessing. The Shepherd of the Birds waited in vain for them that Christmas Day. Mrs. Bing sent a letter of kindly greeting and a twenty-dollar gold piece and explained that her husband was not feeling "quite up to the mark," which was true.

"I'm not going," he said decisively, when Mrs. Bing brought the matter up as he was smoking in the library an hour or so after dinner. "No cripples and misery in mine at present, thank you! I wouldn't get over it for a week. Just send them our best wishes and a twenty-dollar gold piece."

There were tears in the Shepherd's eyes when his mother helped him into his night clothes that evening.

"I hate that twenty-dollar gold piece!" he exclaimed.

"Laddie boy! Why should ye be sayin' that?"

The shiny piece of metal was lying on the window-sill. She took it in her hand.

"It's as cold as a snow-bank!" she exclaimed.

"I don't want to touch it! I'm shivering now," said the Shepherd. "Put it away in the drawer. It makes me sick. It cheated me out of seeing Mr. Bing."