"Keep the main-travelled road up the Coolly--it's the second house after
crossin' the crick."
I
The ride from Milwaukee to the Mississippi is a fine ride at any time,
superb in summer. To lean back in a reclining-chair and whirl away in a
breezy July day, past lakes, groves of oak, past fields of barley being
reaped, past hay-fields, where the heavy grass is toppling before the
swift sickle, is a panorama of delight, a road full of delicious
surprises, where down a sudden vista lakes open, or a distant wooded
hill looms darkly blue, or swift streams, foaming deep down the solid
rock, send whiffs of cool breezes in at the window.
It has majesty, breadth. The farming has nothing apparently petty about
it. All seems vigorous, youthful, and prosperous. Mr. Howard McLane in
his chair let his newspaper fall on his lap, and gazed out upon it with
dreaming eyes. It had a certain mysterious glamour to him; the lakes
were cooler and brighter to his eye, the greens fresher, and the grain
more golden than to any one else, for he was coming back to it all after
an absence of ten years. It was, besides, his West. He still took pride
in being a Western man.
His mind all day flew ahead of the train to the little town, far on
toward the Mississippi, where he had spent his boyhood and youth. As the
train passed the Wisconsin River, with its curiously carved cliffs, its
cold, dark, swift-swirling water eating slowly under cedar-clothed
banks, Howard began to feel curious little movements of the heart, like
those of a lover nearing his sweetheart.
The hills changed in character, growing more intimately recognizable.
They rose higher as the train left the ridge and passed down into the
Black River valley, and specifically into the La Crosse valley. They
ceased to have any hint of upheavals of rock, and became simply parts of
the ancient level left standing after the water had practically given up
its post-glacial scooping action.
It was about six o'clock as he caught sight of the splendid broken line
of hills on which his baby eyes had looked thirty-five years ago. A few
minutes later, and the train drew up at the grimy little station set
into the hillside, and, giving him just time to leap off, plunged on
again toward the West. Howard felt a ridiculous weakness in his legs as
he stepped out upon the broiling-hot, splintery planks of the station
and faced the few idlers lounging about. He simply stood and gazed with
the same intensity and absorption one of the idlers might show standing
before the Brooklyn Bridge.
The town caught and held his eyes first. How poor and dull and sleepy
and squalid it seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his
left, and stretched away to the north, between two rows of the usual
village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty. An unpaved
street, with walled, drab-colored, miserable, rotting wooden buildings,
with the inevitable battlements; the same--only worse and more
squalid--was the town.
The same, only more beautiful still, was the majestic amphitheatre of
green wooded hills that circled the horizon, and toward which he lifted
his eyes. He thrilled at the sight.
"Glorious!" he cried involuntarily.
Accustomed to the White Mountains, to the Alleghanies, he had wondered
if these hills would retain their old-time charm. They did. He took off
his hat to them as he stood there. Richly wooded, with gently sloping
green sides, rising to massive square or rounded tops with dim vistas,
they glowed down upon the squat little town, gracious, lofty in their
greeting, immortal in their vivid and delicate beauty.
He was a goodly figure of a man as he stood there beside his valise.
Portly, erect, handsomely dressed, and with something unusually winning
in his brown mustache and blue eyes, something scholarly suggested by
the pinch-nose glasses, something strong in the repose of the head. He
smiled as he saw how unchanged was the grouping of the old loafers on
the salt-barrels and nail-kegs. He recognized most of them--a little
dirtier, a little more bent, and a little grayer.
They sat in the same attitudes, spat tobacco with the same calm delight,
and joked each other, breaking into short and sudden fits of laughter,
and pounded each other on the back, just as when he was a student at the
La Crosse Seminary and going to and fro daily on the train.
They ruminated on him as he passed, speculating in a perfectly audible
way upon his business.
"Looks like a drummer."
"No, he ain't no drummer. See them Boston glasses?"
"That's so. Guess he's a teacher."
"Looks like a moneyed cuss."
"Bos'n, I guess."
He knew the one who spoke last--Freeme Cole, a man who was the fighting
wonder of Howard's boyhood, now degenerated into a stoop-shouldered,
faded, garrulous, and quarrelsome old man. Yet there was something epic
in the old man's stories, something enthralling in the dramatic power
of recital.
Over by the blacksmith shop the usual game of "quaits" was in progress,
and the drug-clerk on the corner was chasing a crony with the
squirt-pump with which he was about to wash the windows. A few teams
stood ankle-deep in the mud, tied to the fantastically gnawed pine
pillars of the wooden awnings. A man on a load of hay was "jawing" with
the attendant of the platform scales, who stood below, pad and pencil in
hand.
"Hit 'im! hit 'im! Jump off and knock 'im!" suggested a bystander,
jovially.
Howard knew the voice.
"Talk's cheap. Takes money to buy whiskey," he said, when the man on the
load repeated his threat of getting off and whipping the scales-man.
"You're William McTurg," Howard said, coming up to him.
"I am, sir," replied the soft-voiced giant, turning and looking down on
the stranger, with an amused twinkle in his deep brown eyes. He stood as
erect as an Indian, though his hair and beard were white.
"I'm Howard McLane."
"Ye begin t' look it," said McTurg, removing his right hand from his
pocket. "How are yeh?"
"I'm first-rate. How's mother and Grant?"
"Saw 'm ploughing corn as I came down. Guess he's all right. Want a
boost?"
"Well, yes. Are you down with a team?"
"Yep. 'Bout goin' home. Climb right in. That's my rig, right there,"
nodding at a sleek bay colt hitched in a covered buggy. "Heave y'r grip
under the seat."
They climbed into the seat after William had lowered the buggy-top and
unhitched the horse from the post. The loafers were mildly curious.
Guessed Bill had got hooked onto by a lightnin'-rod peddler, or
somethin' o' that kind.
"Want to go by river, or 'round by the hills?"
"Hills, I guess."
The whole matter began to seem trivial, as if he had been away only for
a month or two.
William McTurg was a man little given to talk. Even the coming back of a
nephew did not cause any flow of questions or reminiscences. They rode
in silence. He sat a little bent forward, the lines held carelessly in
his hands, his great lion-like head swaying to and fro with the movement
of the buggy.
As they passed familiar spots, the younger man broke the silence with a
question.
"That's old man McElvaine's place, ain't it?"
"Yep."
"Old man living?"
"I guess he is. Husk more corn'n any man he c'n hire."
In the edge of the village they passed an open lot on the left, marked
with circus-rings of different eras.
"There's the old ball-ground. Do they have circuses on it just the same
as ever?"
"Just the same."
"What fun that field calls up! The games of ball we used to have! Do you
play yet?"
"Sometimes. Can't stoop as well as I used to." He smiled a little. "Too
much fat."
It all swept back upon Howard in a flood of names and faces and sights
and sounds; something sweet and stirring somehow, though it had little
of æsthetic charms at the time. They were passing along lanes now,
between superb fields of corn, wherein ploughmen were at work. Kingbirds
flew from post to post ahead of them; the insects called from the grass.
The valley slowly outspread below them. The workmen in the fields were
"turning out" for the night. They all had a word of chaff with McTurg.
Over the western wall of the circling amphitheatre the sun was setting.
A few scattering clouds were drifting on the west wind, their shadows
sliding down the green and purpled slopes. The dazzling sunlight flamed
along the luscious velvety grass, and shot amid the rounded, distant
purple peaks, and streamed in bars of gold and crimson across the blue
mist of the narrower upper Coollies.
The heart of the young man swelled with pleasure almost like pain, and
the eyes of the silent older man took on a far-off, dreaming look, as he
gazed at the scene which had repeated itself a thousand times in his
life, but of whose beauty he never spoke.
Far down to the left was the break in the wall through which the river
ran on its way to join the Mississippi. They climbed slowly among the
hills, and the valley they had left grew still more beautiful as the
squalor of the little town was hid by the dusk of distance. Both men
were silent for a long time. Howard knew the peculiarities of his
companion too well to make any remarks or ask any questions, and besides
it was a genuine pleasure to ride with one who understood that silence
was the only speech amid such splendors.
Once they passed a little brook singing in a mournfully sweet way its
eternal song over its pebbles. It called back to Howard the days when he
and Grant, his younger brother, had fished in this little brook for
trout, with trousers rolled above the knee and wrecks of hats upon their
heads.
"Any trout left?" he asked.
"Not many. Little fellers." Finding the silence broken, William asked
the first question since he met Howard. "Le' 's see: you're a show
feller now? B'long to a troupe?"
"Yes, yes; I'm an actor."
"Pay much?"
"Pretty well."
That seemed to end William's curiosity about the matter.
"Ah, there's our old house, ain't it?" Howard broke out, pointing to one
of the houses farther up the Coolly. "It'll be a surprise to them, won't
it?"
"Yep; only they don't live there."
"What! They don't!"
"Who does?"
"Dutchman."