Main-Travelled Roads Part 4

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 pa.s.sed it looking wildly at his watch, which was showing nine o'clock. Another time he pa.s.sed it with eyes dimmed with a mist that was almost tears of anger.

There is no contrivance that will replace an axle burr, and farmyards 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 fis.h.i.+ng: 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. "h.e.l.lo! 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 vise. He glared straight ahead. The team ran wildly, steadily homeward, while their driver guided them unconsciously.

He did not see 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 pa.s.sions he had only one clear idea-to get away, to go West, to get away 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, which was to drive to Cedarville and hire someone 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 medieval savage in him:

"It you want to go to h.e.l.l 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 be took a savage pleasure in the thought of it as he rode away on 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 s.h.i.+ft. 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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, but especially in The destruction of homes. As he pa.s.sed on Will saw The gra.s.s 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 very 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, ma.s.sive, sharply outlined cloud sailing like a berg of ice in a sh.o.r.eless 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 king bird 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 till 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 very 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, n.o.body 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 Arizona, dead sure."

"You're from Arizona, 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 gra.s.s with fire, and goldenrod 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 then 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 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 that showed kins.h.i.+p 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, it gave him a shock. They had let it fill up with leaves and dirt.

Overcome by the memories of the past, he flung him-sell down on the cool and shadowy bank, and gave him-sell up to the bittersweet reveries of a man returning to his boyhood's home. He was filled somehow with a strange and powerful feeling of the pa.s.sage 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 s.p.a.ces of sky, the hawk told it in the silence and majesty of his flight from cloud to cloud.