|THERE had once been a path along the backbone of the mountain, but the
wilderness had undertaken to remove it, and had almost succeeded. The
wind had gathered bits of moss, twigs and dead stuff into the slight
depression. The great hickories had covered it with leaves. The rain
had packed it. There was no longer a path, only an open way between the
trees running down the gentle slope of the ridge to the mountain road.
The ridge was heavily wooded. The primeval forest was there. Great
hickories shot up sixty feet without a limb, and so close that a man
putting out his hand could reach from one tree to another. A gigantic
poplar now and then arose, a sugar maple, an oak--huge at the butt, deep
rooted in the good soil.
The afternoon sun, excluded of the forest, seemed to pack itself into
this abandoned path.
The leaves fallen from the hickories, under the touch of waning summer,
took on now, by the magic of this sun, golden tones of red and yellow.
Woodpeckers hammered on the great trees along this path. Insects moved
between the branches, the wild bee, the hornet, the yellow butterfly, as
though the aerial life of the woods had been drawn here to the sun.
A man was coming through the forest along this abandoned path. He walked
slowly, his hands behind him, his head bare. He was a very young man--at
that period of life when, within a day, as by the crossing of some
unmarked line, the boy becomes a man. There was about him the vigor, the
freshness, the joy of youth, under a certain maturity. He was not above
middle height, his face was oval, his eyes gray-blue, his hair of that
soft rich brown which a touch of the sun burnishes into a living yellow;
the mouth was sensitive and mobile.
There was a marked contrast between the man and the wild, rugged,
primitive country in which he appeared. His hands were firm and white,
and his skin was not in the least discolored by sun or weather.
Now and then the man stopped and looked up at the dappled woodpeckers,
and the swarms of yellow butterflies, gathered here along this sunlit
path as though to welcome his arrival, and his mouth relaxed into an
eager, luminous smile, as though, despite his maturity, he retained a
child's sense of some universal kinship with all living things. He came
down the long ridge toward the place where the mountain road crossed the
low gap.
Half a mile below him a patriarchal ox was plodding slowly up the
mountain road. The ox was old. His red hair was worn away in a variety
of places, by long labors at the sled and the plow. His ancient horns
were capped with brass knobs. Astride the ox sat a small boy on a sack
of corn, perhaps a bushel and a half shelled from the cob. Under the
sack was a strip of homemade carpet dyed yellow with copperas. The
little boy guided the ox with a piece of old rope tied to the left
horn below the brass knob, precisely as the driver of a four-horse team
directs it with a single line. When he wished the ox to go to the right,
he jerked the rope and shouted, “Gee, Berry,” when to the left, he
pulled on the rope and shouted, “Haw, Berry.”
But the ox no longer required these elaborate directions.
“Gee,”
“Haw,” accompanied by a kicking of the rider's naked heels, were enough
for the patriarch, or the soft heels alone on the broad iron ribs.
The boy could not have been above six years old. He wore two garments, a
little blue shirt of the material called “hickory,” and short trousers,
with tiny hand-knitted woolen “galluses.”
He was now engaged with an extreme difficulty.
For more than a mile, under the ox's rolling gait, the corn had been
moving over to one end of the sack. To keep the bag from falling, the
boy had added his weight to the decreasing end. As the corn moved, he
shifted his seat a little farther out on the sack. He sat now, well
over the ox's side on the very end of the sack. His little mouth was
contracted.
It had been a long, painful struggle--this fight against the corn. Every
inch, every fraction of an inch, contested.
The grains had crept slowly over, and the child had considered and
estimated the change, and moved with it. He had attributed to the corn
a certain malicious intent, a certain insidious hostility, and he had
resisted with dogged courage. It was all in the set of his little mouth,
in the clutch of his tiny brown hand.
For the sack to fall was a calamity which the child well understood.
He could not lift the sack. He could not leave the ox and go for aid,
because Berry, although a member of the family, was an eyeservant and
not above making his dinner on the corn when the master's back was
turned.
Neither could he leave the corn lying in the road and return with
the ox. Some one might carry it away and, besides, it was his bale of
stuffs, the cargo with which he had been intrusted, and he could not
leave it.
The mountain road was deserted and the evening sun was beginning to
descend.
The child's whole energies were centered on his desperate struggle with
the corn, and the ox traveled on leisurely as he liked. Presently, as
he neared the top, the ox stepped on the root of a tree remaining in
the road, and his shoulder went down. The sack slipped forward and fell,
carrying with it the boy and the piece of carpet.
The ox instantly stopped, the boy rose and sat down on the sack, resting
his elbows on his knees and his chin in the hollow of his tiny brown
hands. His features retained their set, dogged expression, but presently
big tears began to trickle slowly down over his determined little face.
He sat with his back toward the mountain gap, locking out over the vast
wilderness of tree tops below him. The ox stood before him in the road,
a figure of unending patience.
The day waned, long shadows crossed the road, the sun withdrew to the
high places. Far away through the deep wooded gorges night began to
enter the mountains.