Main-Travelled Roads. Garland Hamlin
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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