VII
Marie's father, Albert Tovesky, was one
of the more intelligent Bohemians who came
West in the early seventies. He settled in
Omaha and became a leader and adviser among
his people there. Marie was his youngest child,
by a second wife, and was the apple of his
eye. She was barely sixteen, and was in the
graduating class of the Omaha High School,
when Frank Shabata arrived from the old coun-
try and set all the Bohemian girls in a flutter.
He was easily the buck of the beer-gardens,
and on Sunday he was a sight to see, with his
silk hat and tucked shirt and blue frock-coat,
wearing gloves and carrying a little wisp of a
yellow cane. He was tall and fair, with splendid
teeth and close-cropped yellow curls, and he
wore a slightly disdainful expression, proper for
a young man with high connections, whose
mother had a big farm in the Elbe valley. There
was often an interesting discontent in his blue
eyes, and every Bohemian girl he met imagined
herself the cause of that unsatisfied expression.
He had a way of drawing out his cambric hand-
kerchief slowly, by one corner, from his breast-
pocket, that was melancholy and romantic in
the extreme. He took a little flight with each of
the more eligible Bohemian girls, but it was
when he was with little Marie Tovesky that he
drew his handkerchief out most slowly, and,
after he had lit a fresh cigar, dropped the match
most despairingly. Any one could see, with
half an eye, that his proud heart was bleeding
for somebody.
One Sunday, late in the summer after Marie's
graduation, she met Frank at a Bohemian pic-
nic down the river and went rowing with him all
the afternoon. When she got home that even-
ing she went straight to her father's room and
told him that she was engaged to Shabata. Old
Tovesky was having a comfortable pipe before
he went to bed. When he heard his daughter's
announcement, he first prudently corked his
beer bottle and then leaped to his feet and had
a turn of temper. He characterized Frank
Shabata by a Bohemian expression which is the
equivalent of stuffed shirt.
"Why don't he go to work like the rest of us
did? His farm in the Elbe valley, indeed!
Ain't he got plenty brothers and sisters? It's
his mother's farm, and why don't he stay
at home and help her? Haven't I seen his
mother out in the morning at five o'clock with
her ladle and her big bucket on wheels, putting
liquid manure on the cabbages? Don't I know
the look of old Eva Shabata's hands? Like an
old horse's hoofs they are--and this fellow
wearing gloves and rings! Engaged, indeed!
You aren't fit to be out of school, and that's
what's the matter with you. I will send you
off to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in St.
Louis, and they will teach you some sense,
~I~ guess!"
Accordingly, the very next week, Albert
Tovesky took his daughter, pale and tearful,
down the river to the convent. But the way to
make Frank want anything was to tell him he
couldn't have it. He managed to have an in-
terview with Marie before she went away, and
whereas he had been only half in love with her
before, he now persuaded himself that he would
not stop at anything. Marie took with her to
the convent, under the canvas lining of her
trunk, the results of a laborious and satisfying
morning on Frank's part; no less than a dozen
photographs of himself, taken in a dozen differ-
ent love-lorn attitudes. There was a little round
photograph for her watch-case, photographs
for her wall and dresser, and even long nar-
row ones to be used as bookmarks. More than
once the handsome gentleman was torn to
pieces before the French class by an indignant
nun.
Marie pined in the convent for a year, until her eighteenth birthday was passed. Then she met Frank Shabata in the Union Station in St. Louis and ran away with him. Old Tovesky forgave his daughter because there was nothing else to do, and bought her a farm in the country that she had loved so well as a child. Since then her story had been a part of the history of the Divide. She and Frank had been living there for five years when Carl Linstrum came back to pay his long deferred visit to Alexandra. Frank had, on the whole, done better than one might have expected. He had flung himself at the soil with savage energy. Once a year he went to Hastings or to Omaha, on a spree. He stayed away for a week or two, and then came home and worked like a demon. He did work; if he felt sorry for himself, that was his own affair.
