Chapter 3

He was quite happy again. The crisp, bracing air, the strong pull of the spirited young team, put all thought of sorrow behind him. He had planned it all out. He would first put his arm round her and kiss her--there would not need to be any words to tell her how sorry and ashamed he was. She would know!

Now, when he was alone and going toward her on a beautiful morning, the anger and bitterness of Monday fled away, became unreal, and the sweet dream of the Sunday parting grew the reality. She was waiting for him now. She had on her pretty blue dress, and the wide hat that always made her look so arch. He had said about eight o'clock.

The swift team was carrying him along the cross-road, which was little travelled, and he was alone with his thoughts. He fell again upon his plans. Another year at school for them both, and then he'd go into a law office. Judge Brown had told him he'd give him--

"Whoa! Ho!"

There was a swift lurch that sent him flying over the dasher. A confused vision of a roadside ditch full of weeds and bushes, and then he felt the reins in his hands and heard the snorting horses trample on the hard road.

He rose dizzy, bruised, and covered with dust. The team he held securely and soon quieted. The cause of the accident was plain; the right fore-wheel had come off, letting the front of the buggy drop. He unhitched the excited team from the carriage, drove them to the fence and tied them securely, then went back to find the wheel, and the burr whose failure to hold its place had done all the mischief. He soon had the wheel on, but to find the burr was a harder task. Back and forth he ranged, looking, scraping in the dust, searching the weeds.

He knew that sometimes a wheel will run without the burr for many rods before coming off, and so each time he extended his search. He traversed the entire half mile several times, each time his rage and disappointment getting more bitter. He ground his teeth in a fever of vexation and dismay.

He had a vision of Agnes waiting, wondering why he did not come. It was this vision that kept him from seeing the burr in the wheel-track, partly covered by a clod. Once he passed it looking wildly at his watch, which was showing nine o'clock. Another time he passed it with eyes dimmed with a mist that was almost tears of anger.

There is no contrivance that will replace an axle-burr, and farm-yards have no unused axle-burrs, and so Will searched. Each moment he said: "I'll give it up, get onto one of the horses, and go down and tell her." But searching for a lost axle-burr is like fishing; the searcher expects each moment to find it. And so he groped, and ran breathlessly, furiously, back and forth, and at last kicked away the clod that covered it, and hurried, hot and dusty, cursing his stupidity, back to the team.

It was ten o'clock as he climbed again into the buggy, and started his team on a swift trot down the road. What would she think? He saw her now with tearful eyes and pouting lips. She was sitting at the window, with hat and gloves on; the rest had gone, and she was waiting for him.

But she'd know something had happened, because he had promised to be there at eight. He had told her what team he'd have. (He had forgotten at this moment the doubt and distrust he had given her on Monday.) She'd know he'd surely come.

But there was no smiling or tearful face watching at the window as he came down the lane at a tearing pace, and turned into the yard. The house was silent, and the curtains down. The silence sent a chill to his heart. Something rose up in his throat to choke him.

"Agnes!" he called. "Hello! I'm here at last!"

There was no reply. As he sat there the part he had played on Monday came back to him. She may be sick! he thought, with a cold thrill of fear.

An old man came around the corner of the house with a potato fork in his hands, his teeth displayed in a grin.

"She ain't here. She's gone."

"Gone!"

"Yes--more'n an hour ago."

"Who'd she go with?"

"Ed Kinney," said the old fellow, with a malicious grin. "I guess your goose is cooked."

Will lashed the horses into a run, and swung round the yard and out of the gate. His face was white as a dead man's, and his teeth were set like a vice. He glared straight ahead. The team ran wildly, steadily homeward, while their driver guided them unconsciously without seeing them. His mind was filled with a tempest of rages, despairs, and shames.

That ride he will never forget. In it he threw away all his plans. He gave up his year's schooling. He gave up his law aspirations. He deserted his brother and his friends. In the dizzying whirl of passions he had only one clear idea--to get away, to go West, to escape from the sneers and laughter of his neighbors, and to make her suffer by it all.

He drove into the yard, did not stop to unharness the team, but rushed into the house, and began packing his trunk. His plan was formed. He would drive to Cedarville, and hire some one to bring the team back. He had no thought of anything but the shame, the insult, she had put upon him. Her action on Monday took on the same levity it wore then, and excited him in the same way. He saw her laughing with Ed over his dismay. He sat down and wrote a letter to her at last--a letter that came from the ferocity of the mediæval savage in him:

"It you want to go to hell with Ed Kinney, you can. I won't say a word. That's where he'll take you. You won't see me again."

This he signed and sealed, and then he bowed his head and wept like a girl. But his tears did not soften the effect of the letter. It went as straight to its mark as he meant it should. It tore a seared and ragged path to an innocent, happy heart, and he took a savage pleasure in the thought of it as he rode away in the cars toward the South.

III

The seven years lying between 1880 and 1887 made a great change in Rock River and in the adjacent farming land. Signs changed and firms went out of business with characteristic Western ease of shift. The trees grew rapidly, dwarfing the houses beneath them, and contrasts of newness and decay thickened.

Will found the country changed, as he walked along the dusty road from Rock River toward "The Corners." The landscape was at its fairest and liberalest, with its seas of corn, deep-green and moving with a mournful rustle, in sharp contrast to its flashing blades; its gleaming fields of barley, and its wheat already mottled with soft gold in the midst of its pea-green.

The changes were in the hedges, grown higher, in the greater predominance of cornfields and cattle pastures, and especially in the destruction of homes. As he passed on, Will saw the grass growing and cattle feeding on a dozen places where homes had once stood. They had given place to the large farm and the stock-raiser. Still the whole scene was bountiful and beautiful to the eye.

It was especially grateful to Will, for he had spent nearly all his years of absence among the rocks, treeless swells, and bleak cliffs of the Southwest. The crickets rising before his dusty feet appeared to him something sweet and suggestive, and the cattle feeding in the clover moved him to deep thought--they were so peaceful and slow motioned.

As he reached a little popple tree by the roadside, he stopped, removed his broad-brimmed hat, put his elbows on the fence, and looked hungrily upon the scene. The sky was deeply blue, with only here and there a huge, heavy, slow-moving, massive, sharply outlined cloud sailing like a berg of ice in a shoreless sea of azure.

In the fields the men were harvesting the ripened oats and barley, and the sound of their machines clattering, now low, now loud, came to his ears. Flies buzzed near him, and a kingbird clattered overhead. He noticed again, as he had many a time when a boy, that the softened sound of the far-off reaper was at times exactly like the hum of a bluebottle fly buzzing heedlessly about his ears.

A slender and very handsome young man was shocking grain near the fence, working so desperately he did not see Will until greeted by him. He looked up, replied to the greeting, but kept on until he had finished his last stook; then he came to the shade of the tree and took off his hat.

"Nice day to sit under a tree and fish."

Will smiled. "I ought to know you, I suppose; I used to live here years ago."

"Guess not; we came in three years ago."

The young man was quick-spoken and pleasant to look at. Will felt freer with him.

"Are the Kinneys still living over there?" He nodded at a group of large buildings.

"Tom lives there. Old man lives with Ed. Tom ousted the old man some way, nobody seems to know how, and so he lives with Ed."

Will wanted to ask after Agnes, but hardly felt able. "I s'pose John Hannan is on his old farm?"

"Yes. Got a good crop this year."

Will looked again at the fields of rustling wheat over which the clouds rippled, and said with an air of conviction: "This lays over Arizony, dead sure."

"You're from Arizony, then?"

"Yes--a good ways from it," Will replied, in a way that stopped further question. "Good luck!" he added, as he walked on down the road toward the creek, musing.

"And the spring--I wonder if that's there yet. I'd like a drink." The sun seemed hotter than at noon, and he walked slowly. At the bridge that spanned the meadow brook, just where it widened over a sandy ford, he paused again. He hung over the rail and looked at the minnows swimming there.

"I wonder if they're the same identical chaps that used to boil and glitter there when I was a boy--looks so. Men change from one generation to another, but the fish remain the same. The same eternal procession of types. I suppose Darwin 'ud say their environment remains the same."

He hung for a long time over the railing, thinking of a vast number of things, mostly vague, flitting things, looking into the clear depths of the brook, and listening to the delicious liquid note of a blackbird swinging on the willow. Red lilies starred the grass with fire, and golden-rod and chicory grew everywhere; purple and orange and yellow-green the prevailing tints.

Suddenly a water-snake wriggled across the dark pool above the ford and the minnows disappeared under the shadow of the bridge. Then Will sighed, lifted his head and walked on. There seemed to be something prophetic in it, and he drew a long breath. That's the way his plans broke and faded away.

Human life does not move with the regularity of a clock. In living there are gaps and silences when the soul stands still in its flight through abysses--and there come times of trial and times of struggle when we grow old without knowing it. Body and soul change appallingly.

Seven years of hard, busy life had made changes in Will.

His face had grown bold, resolute, and rugged; some of its delicacy and all of its boyish quality was gone. His figure was stouter, erect as of old, but less graceful. He bore himself like a man accustomed to look out for himself in all kinds of places. It was only at times that there came into his deep eyes a preoccupied, almost sad, look which showed kinship with his old self.

This look was on his face as he walked toward the clump of trees on the right of the road.

He reached the grove of popple trees and made his way at once to the spring. When he saw it, he was again shocked. They had allowed it to fill with leaves and dirt!

Overcome by the memories of the past, he flung himself down on the cool and shadowy bank, and gave himself up to the bitter-sweet reveries of a man returning to his boyhood's home. He was filled somehow with a strange and powerful feeling of the passage of time; with a vague feeling of the mystery and elusiveness of human life. The leaves whispered it overhead, the birds sang it in chorus with the insects, and far above, in the measureless spaces of sky, the hawk told it in the silence and majesty of his flight from cloud to cloud.

It was a feeling hardly to be expressed in words--one of those emotions whose springs lie far back in the brain. He lay so still the chipmunks came curiously up to his very feet, only to scurry away when he stirred like a sleeper in pain.

He had cut himself off entirely from the life at The Corners. He had sent money home to John, but had concealed his own address carefully. The enormity of his folly now came back to him, racking him till he groaned.

He heard the patter of feet and the half-mumbled monologue of a running child. He roused up and faced a small boy, who started back in terror like a wild fawn. He was deeply surprised to find a man there, where only boys and squirrels now came. He stuck his fist in his eye, and was backing away when Will spoke.

"Hold on, sonny! Nobody's hit you. Come, I ain't goin' to eat yeh." He took a bit of money from his pocket. "Come here and tell me your name. I want to talk with you."

The boy crept upon the dime.

Will smiled. "You ought to be a Kinney. What is your name?"

"Tomath Dickinthon Kinney. I'm thix and a half. I've got a colt," lisped the youngster, breathlessly, as he crept toward the money.

"Oh, you are, eh? Well, now, are you Tom's boy, or Ed's?"

"Tomth's boy. Uncle Ed heth got a little--"

"Ed got a boy?"

"Yeth, thir--a lil baby. Aunt Agg letth me hold 'im."

"Agg! Is that her name?"

"Tha'th what Uncle Ed callth her."

The man's head fell, and it was a long time before he asked his next question.

"How is she anyhow?"

"Purty well," piped the boy, with a prolongation of the last words into a kind of chirp. "She'th been thick, though," he added.

"Been sick? How long?"

"Oh, a long time. But she ain't thick abed; she'th awful poor, though. Gran'pa thayth she'th poor ath a rake."

"Oh, he does, eh?"

"Yeth, thir. Uncle Ed he jawth her, then she crieth."

Will's anger and remorse broke out in a groaning curse. "O my God! I see it all. That great lunkin houn' has made life a hell for her." Then that letter came back to his mind--he had never been able to put it out of his mind--he never would till he saw her and asked her pardon.

"Here, my boy, I want you to tell me some more. Where does your Aunt Agnes live?"

"At gran'pa'th. You know where my gran'pa livth?"

"Well, you do. Now I want you to take this letter to her. Give it to her." He wrote a little note and folded it. "Now dust out o' here."

The boy slipped away through the trees like a rabbit; his little brown feet hardly rustled. He was like some little wood-animal. Left alone, the man fell back into a revery which lasted till the shadows fell on the thick little grove around the spring. He rose at last, and taking his stick in hand, walked out to the wood again and stood there gazing at the sky. He seemed loath to go farther. The sky was full of flame-colored clouds floating in a yellow-green sea, where bars of faint pink streamed broadly away.

As he stood there, feeling the wind lift his hair, listening to the crickets' ever-present crying, and facing the majesty of space, a strange sadness and despair came into his eyes.

Drawing a quick breath, he leaped the fence and was about going on up the road, when he heard, at a little distance, the sound of a drove of cattle approaching, and he stood aside to allow them to pass. They snuffed and shied at the silent figure by the fence, and hurried by with snapping heels--a peculiar sound that made Will smile with pleasure.

An old man was driving the cows, crying out:

"St--boy, there! Go on there! Whay, boss!"

Will knew that hard-featured, wiry old man, now entering his second childhood and beginning to limp painfully. He had his hands full of hard clods which he threw impatiently at the lumbering animals.

"Good-evening, uncle!"

"I ain't y'r uncle, young man."

His dim eyes did not recognize the boy he had chased out of his plum patch years before.

"I don't know yeh, neither," he added.

"Oh, you will, later on. I'm from the East. I'm a sort of a relative to John Hannan."

"I want 'o know if y' be!" the old man exclaimed, peering closer.

"Yes. I'm just up from Rock River. John's harvesting, I s'pose?"

"Yus."

"Where's the youngest one--Will?"

"William? Oh! he's a bad aig--he lit out f'r the West somewhere. He was a hard boy. He stole a hatful o' my plums once. He left home kind o' sudden. He! he! I s'pose he was purty well cut up jest about them days."

"How's that?"

The old man chuckled.

"Well, y' see, they was both courtin' Agnes then, an' my son cut William out. Then William he lit out f'r the West, Arizony, 'r California, 'r somewhere out West. Never been back sence."

"Ain't, heh?"

"No. But they say he's makin' a terrible lot o' money," the old man said in a hushed voice. "But the way he makes it is awful scaly. I tell my wife if I had a son like that an' he'd send me home a bushel-basket o' money, earnt like that, I wouldn't touch finger to it--no sir!"

"You wouldn't? Why?"

"'Cause it ain't right. It ain't made right noway, you--"

"But how is it made? What's the feller's trade?"

"He's a gambler--that's his trade! He plays cards, and every cent is bloody. I wouldn't touch such money nohow you could fix it."

"Wouldn't, heh?" The young man straightened up. "Well, look-a-here, old man: did you ever hear of a man foreclosing a mortgage on a widow and two boys, getting a farm f'r one quarter what it was really worth? You damned old hypocrite! I know all about you and your whole tribe--you old blood-sucker!"

The old man's jaw fell; he began to back away.

"Your neighbors tell some good stories about you. Now skip along after those cows, or I'll tickle your old legs for you!"

The old man, appalled and dazed at this sudden change of manner, backed away, and at last turned and racked off up the road, looking back with a wild face, at which the young man laughed remorselessly.

"The doggoned old skeesucks!" Will soliloquized as he walked up the road. "So that's the kind of a character he's been givin' me!"

"Hullo! A whippoorwill. Takes a man back into childhood--No, don't 'whip poor Will'; he's got all he can bear now."

He came at last to the little farm Dingman had owned, and he stopped in sorrowful surprise. The barn had been moved away, the garden ploughed up, and the house, turned into a granary, stood with boards nailed across its dusty, cobwebbed windows. The tears started into the man's eyes; he stood staring at it silently.

In the face of this house the seven years that he had last lived stretched away into a wild waste of time. It stood as a symbol of his wasted, ruined life. It was personal, intimately personal, this decay of her home.

All that last scene came back to him; the booming roar of the threshing-machine, the cheery whistle of the driver, the loud, merry shouts of the men. He remembered how warmly the lamp-light streamed out of that door as he turned away tired, hungry, sullen with rage and jealousy. Oh, if he had only had the courage of a man!

Then he thought of the boy's words. She was sick, Ed abused her. She had met her punishment. A hundred times he had been over the whole scene. A thousand times he had seen her at the pump smiling at Ed Kinney, the sun lighting her hair; and he never thought of that without hardening.

At this very gate he had driven up that last forenoon; to find that she had gone with Ed. He had lived that sickening, depressing moment over many times, but not times enough to keep down the bitter passion he had felt then, and felt now as he went over it in detail.

He was so happy and confident that morning, so perfectly certain that all would be made right by a kiss and a cheery jest. And now! Here he stood sick with despair and doubt of all the world. He turned away from the desolate homestead and walked on.

"But I'll see her--just once more. And then--"

And again the mighty significance, responsibility of life, fell upon him. He felt, as young people seldom do, the irrevocableness of living, the determinate, unalterable character of living. He determined to begin to live in some new way--just how he could not say.

IV

Old man Kinney and his wife were getting their Sunday-school lessons with much bickering, when Will drove up the next day to the dilapidated gate and hitched his team to a leaning-post under the oaks. Will saw the old man's head at the open window, but no one else, though he looked eagerly for Agnes as he walked up the familiar path. There stood the great oak under whose shade he had grown to be a man. How close the great tree seemed to stand to his heart, someway! As the wind stirred in the leaves, it was like a rustle of greeting.

In that old house they had all lived, and his mother had toiled for thirty years. A sort of prison after all. There they were all born, and there his father and his little sister had died. And then it passed into old Kinney's hands.

Walking along up the path he felt a serious weakness in his limbs, and he made a pretence of stopping to look at a flower-bed containing nothing but weeds. After seven years of separation he was about to face once more the woman whose life came so near being a part of his--Agnes, now a wife and a mother.

How would she look? Would her face have that old-time peachy bloom, her mouth that peculiar beautiful curve? She was large and fair, he recalled, hair yellow and shining, eyes blue--

He roused himself. This was nonsense! He was trembling. He composed himself by looking around again.

"The old scoundrel has let the weeds choke out the flowers and surround the bee-hives. Old man Kinney never believed in anything but a petty utility."

Will set his teeth, and marched up to the door and struck it like a man delivering a challenge. Kinney opened the door, and started back in fear when he saw who it was.

"How de do? How de do?" said Will, walking in, his eyes fixed on a woman seated beyond, a child in her lap.

Agnes rose, without a word; a fawn-like, startled widening of the eyes, her breath coming quick, and her face flushing. They couldn't speak; they only looked at each other an instant, then Will shivered, passed his hand over his eyes and sat down.

There was no one there but the old people, who were looking at him in bewilderment. They did not notice any confusion in Agnes's face. She recovered first.

"I'm glad to see you back, Will," she said, rising and putting the sleeping child down in a neighboring room. As she gave him her hand, he said:

"I'm glad to get back, Agnes. I hadn't ought to have gone." Then he turned to the old people:

"I'm Will Hannan. You needn't be scared, Daddy; I was jokin' last night."

"Dew tell! I want o' know!" exclaimed Granny. "Wal, I never! An, you're my little Willy boy who ust 'o he in my class? Well! Well! W'y, pa, ain't he growed tall! Grew handsome tew. I ust 'o think he was a dretful humly boy; but my sakes, that mustache--"

"Wal, he give me a turrible scare last night. My land! scared me out of a year's growth," cackled the old man.

This gave them all a chance to laugh, and the air was cleared. It gave Agnes time to recover herself, and to be able to meet Will's eyes. Will himself was powerfully moved; his throat swelled and tears came to his eyes every time he looked at her.

She was worn and wasted incredibly. The blue of her eyes seemed dimmed and faded by weeping, and the old-time scarlet of her lips had been washed away. The sinews of her neck showed painfully when she turned her head, and her trembling hands were worn, discolored, and lumpy at the joints.

Poor girl! She knew she was under scrutiny, and her eyes felt hot and restless. She wished to run away and cry, but she dared not. She stayed, while Will began to tell her of his life and to ask questions about old friends.

The old people took it up and relieved her of any share in it; and Will, seeing that she was suffering, told some funny stories which made the old people cackle in spite of themselves.