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.