corner of his own cleared land. But Malvina Dodd, to the day of her
death, never once walked that way, but, going and coming, took the
winding track that her husband had laid out for her when their home was
built.
[Illustration]
The next maker of the path was a boy not ten years old. His name was
Philip Wessler, and he was a charity boy of German parentage, who had
been adopted by an eccentric old man in the town, an herb-doctor. This
calling was in more repute in those days than it is now. Old Doctor Van
Wagener was growing feeble, and he relied on the boy, who was grateful
and faithful, to search for his stock of simples. When the weather was
favorable they would go together through the Ogden woods, and across the
meadows to where the other woods began at the bottom of the hill. Here
the old man would sit down and wait, while the boy climbed the steep
hillside, and ranged hither and thither in his search for sassafras and
liverwort, and a hundred and one plants, flowers, and herbs, in which
the doctor found virtue. When he had collected his bundle he came
running down the path to where the doctor sat, and left them for the old
man to pick and choose from, while he darted off after another load.
[Illustration]
He did a boy's work with the path. Steep grades were only a delight to
him, and so in the course of a year or two he trod out, or jumped out,
a series of break-neck short-cuts. William Turnbull--people called him
William now, since he had built a clap-board house, and was using the
log-cabin for a barn--William Turnbull, observing these short-cuts,
approved of their purpose, but not of their method. He went through the
woods once or twice on odd days after his hay was in, and did a little
grading with a mattock. Here and there he made steps out of flat stones.
He told his wife he thought it would be some handier for her, and she
told him--they were both from Connecticut--that it was quite some
handier, and that it was real thoughtful of him; and that she didn't
want to speak no ill of the dead, but if her first man had been that
considerate he wouldn't never have got himself drowned going pickerel
fishing in March, when the ice was so soft you'd suppose rational folks
would keep off of it.
[Illustration]
This path was a path of slow formation. It was a path that was never
destined to become a road. It is only in mathematics that a straight
line is the shortest distance between two points. The grade through the
Jacobus woods was so steep that no wagon could have been hauled up it
over the mud roads of that day and generation. Lumber, groceries, and
all heavy truck were taken around by the road, that made a clean sweep
around the hill, and was connected with the Dodd and Turnbull farms by a
steep but short lane which the workmen had made when they built the Dodd
house. The road was six miles to the path's three, but the drive was
shorter than the walk.
There was a time when it looked as though the path might really develop
into a road. That was the time when the township, having outgrown the
county roads, began to build roads for itself. But, curiously enough,
two subjects of Great Britain settled the fate of that New Jersey path.
The controversy between Telford and Macadam was settled so long ago in
Macadam's favor, that few remember the point of difference between those
two noted engineers. Briefly stated, it was this: Mr. Telford said it
_was_, and Mr. Macadam said it was _not_, necessary to put a foundation
of large flat stones, set on end, under a broken-stone road. Reuben
Levi's township, like many other New Jersey townships, sided with Mr.
Telford, and made a mistake that cost thousands of dollars directly, and
millions indirectly. To-day New Jersey can show the way to all her
sister States in road-building and road-keeping. But the money she
wasted on costly Telford pavements is only just beginning to come back
to her, as she spreads out mile after mile of the economical Macadam.
Reuben Levi's township squandered money on a few miles of Telford,
raised the tax-rate higher than it had ever been before, and opened not
one inch of new road for fifteen years thereafter. And within that
fifteen years the canal came up on one side, opening a way to the great
manufacturing town, ten miles down the river; and then the town at the
end of the path was no longer the sole base of supplies. Then the
railroad came around on the other side of the hill, and put a
flag-station just at the bottom of what had come to be known as Dodd's
Lane. And thus by the magic of nineteenth-century science New York and
Newark were brought nearer to the hillside farm than the town three
miles away.
But year by year new feet trod the path. The laborers who cut the canal
found it and took it when they left their shanty camp to go to town for
Saturday-night frolics. Then William Turnbull, who had enlarged his own
farm as far as he found it paid, took to buying land and building houses
in the valley beyond. Reub Levi laughed at him, but he prospered after a
way he had, and built up a thriving little settlement just over the
canal. The people of this little settlement soon made a path that
connected with Reuben Levi's, by way of William Turnbull's, and whenever
business or old association took them to town they helped to make the
path longer and broader.
[Illustration: "THE LABORERS ... FOUND IT AND TOOK IT"]
By and by the regular wayfarers found it out--the peddlers, the
colporteurs, the wandering portrait-painters, the tinkers and
clock-menders, the runaway apprentices, and all the rest of the old-time
gentry of the road. And they carried the path on still farther--down the
river to Newark.
It is not wholly to be told, "The Story of the Path." So many people had
to do with its making in so many ways that no chronicle could tell all
the meanings of its twists and turns and straight lines. There is one
little jog in its course to-day, where it went around a tree, the stump
of which rotted down into the ground a quarter of a century ago. Why do
we walk around that useless bend to-day? Because it is a path, and
because we walk in the way of human nature.
The life of a tree may be a hundred years or two hundred years and yet
be long life. But the days of the age of a man are threescore and ten,
and though some be so strong that they come to fourscore, yet the strong
man may be stricken down in the flower of his strength, if it be the
will of the Lord.
[Illustration]
When William Turnbull came to die he was but twoscore years and five,
but for all he was so young the people of the township gathered from far
and near, for he had been a helpful man all his days, and those whom he
had helped remembered that he would help them no more. Four men and
four women sat up with the dead, twice as many as the old custom called
for. One of the men was a Judge, two had been Chosen Freeholders, and
the fourth was his hired man. There was no cemetery in the township, and
his tomb had been built at the bottom of the hill, looking out on the
meadows which he had just made his own--the last purchase of his life.
There were two other pall-bearers to carry him on their shoulders to the
place beyond which no man goes. These two, when they left the house on
the night before the funeral, walked slowly and thoughtfully down the
path together. They looked over every step of the way with to-morrow's
slow and toilsome march in their minds. When they came to the turn by
Pelatiah's mound they paused.
"We can't never get him round that bend," said one. "That ain't no way
to start down the hill. Best is I come here first thing in the morning
and cut a way through this bull-brier straight across the angle, then we
can see ahead where we're going. Put them two light men behind, and you
and me at the head, and we can manage it. My! what a man _he_ was,
though! Why, I seen him take the head of a coffin all by himself once."
This man was a near neighbor of the Turnbulls, for now they had a number
of neighbors; Reuben Levi Dodd had been selling small farms off his big
farm--somehow he had never made the big farm a success. There are many
services of men to man that country neighbors make little of, though to
the dwellers in great cities they might seem strange burdens. At five
o'clock the next morning Warren Freeman, the pall-bearer, went out and
mowed and hacked a path through the tangled field from midway of old
Pelatiah's trail down to a shortcut made by the doctor's charity boy,
who was to-day a Judge. This Judge came out of the silent house,
released by the waking hour, from his vigil with the dead. He watched
his fellow pall-bearer at work.
[Illustration: "I USED TO GO DOWN THAT PATH ON THE DEAD RUN"]
"I used to go down that path on the dead run twenty years ago," said he,
"when I was working for Dr. Van Wagener and he used to send me up here
gathering herbs."
"You'll go down it on the dead walk to-morrow, Jedge," said the other,
pausing in his work, "and you want to step mighty careful, or one fun'l
will breed another."
Life, death, wedlock, the lingering of lovers, the waywardness of
childish feet, the tread of weary toil, the slow, swaying walk of the
mother, with her babe in her arms, the measured steps of the bearer of
the dead, the light march of youth and strength and health--all, all
have helped to beat out the strange, wandering line of the old path; and
to me, who love to find and to tread its turns, the current of their
human life flows still along its course, in the dim spaces under the
trees, or out where the sunshine and the wind are at play upon the
broad, bright meadows.
THE LOST CHILD
The best of life in a great city is that it breeds a broad and tolerant
catholicity of spirit: the best of country life is that it breeds the
spirit of helpful, homely, kindly neighborliness. The suburban-dweller,
who shares in both lives, is perhaps a little too ready to pride himself
in having learned the lesson of the great metropolis, but the other and
homelier lesson is taught so gradually and so unobtrusively, that he
often learns it quite unconsciously; and goes back, perhaps, to his old
existence in the city, only to realize that a certain charm has gone out
of life which he misses without knowing just what he has lost. He
thinks, perhaps, it is exercise he lacks. And it is, indeed--the
exercise of certain gentle sympathies, that thrive as poorly in the
town's crowded life as the country wild-flowers thrive in the
flower-pots of tenement-house windows.
It was between three and four o'clock of an August night--a dark, warm,
hazy night, breathless, heavy and full of the smell of grass and trees
and dew-moistened earth, when a man galloped up one of those long
suburban streets, where the houses stand at wide intervals, each behind
its trim lawn, or old-fashioned flower-garden, relieved, even in the
darkness, against a great rear-wood screen of lofty trees. Up the
driveway of one of these he turned, his horse's hoof-beats dropping
clear and sharp on the hard macadam. He reined up at the house and
rapped a loud tattoo with the stock of his whip on a pillar of the
veranda.
It was a minute or two before the noise, loud as it was, had reached the
ears of two sleepers in the bedroom, just above his head. A much less
startling sound would have awakened a whole city household; but slumber
in the country has a slumber of its own: in summer time a slumber born
of night-air, laden with the odors of vegetation, and silent except for
the drowsy chirp of birds that stir in vine and tree. The wife awoke
first, listened for a second, and aroused her husband, who went to the
window. He raised the screen and looked out.
[Illustration]
"Who is it?" he said, without nervousness or surprise, though ten years
before in his city home such a summons might have shaken his spirit with
anxious dread.
"I'm Latimer," said the man on the horse, briefly. "That boy of
Penrhyn's--the little one with the yellow hair--is lost. He got up and
slipped out the house, somehow, about an hour ago, they think, and
they've found one of his playthings nearly half a mile down the
Romneytown Road."
"Where shall I meet you?" asked the man at the window.
"At the Gun-Club grounds on the hill," replied Latimer; "we've sent a
barrel of oil up there for the lanterns. So long, Halford. Is Dirck at
home?"
"Yes," said Halford; and without another word Latimer galloped into the
darkness, and in a minute the sound of his tattoo was heard on the
hollow pillars of the veranda of the house next door.
This was the summons--a bare announcement of an event without appeal,
request, suggestion, or advice. None of these things was needed. Enough
had been said between the two men, though they knew each other only as
distant neighbors. Each knew well what that summons meant, and what duty
it involved.
The rat-tat of Latimer's crop had hardly sounded before a cheery young
voice rang out on the air.
"All right, old man! I heard you at Halford's. Go ahead."
It was Dirck's voice. Dirck had another name, a good long, Holland-Dutch
one, but everybody, even the children, called him by his Christian name,
and as he had lived to thirty without getting one day older than
eighteen, we will consider the other Dutch name unnecessary. Dirck
and Halford were close friends and close neighbors. They were two
men who had reached a point of perfect community of tastes and
inclinations, though they came together in two widely different
starting-places--though they were so little alike to outward seeming
that they were known among their friends as "the mismates." Though one
was forty and the other but thirty, each had closed a career, and was
somewhat idly seeking a new one. As Dirck expressed it, "We two fellows
had played our games out, and were waiting till we strike another that
was high enough for our style. We ain't playing limit games."
Two very different games they had been, but neither had been a small
one. Dirck had started in with a fortune to "do" the world--the whole
world, nothing else would suit him. He had been all over the globe. He
had lived among all manner of peoples. He had ridden everything ridable,
shot everything shootable, climbed everything climbable, and satisfied
himself, as he said, that the world was too small for any particular
use. At the end of his travels he had a little of his fortune left, a
vast amount of experience, the constitution of a red Indian, and a
vocabulary so vast and so peculiar that it stunned and fascinated the
stranger. Halford was a New York lawyer, gray, clean-shaven, and sharp
of feature. His "game" had made him famous and might have made him
wealthy, but he cared neither for fame nor wealth. For twenty years he
had fought a host of great corporations to establish one single point of
law. His antagonists had vainly tried to bribe him, and as vainly to
bully him. He had been assaulted, his life had been threatened, and
altogether, as he admitted, the game had been lively enough to keep him
interested; but having once won the game he tired of that style of play
altogether. He picked out a small but choice practice which permitted
him to work or be idle pretty much as the fancy took him. These were two
odd chums to meet in a small suburban town, there to lead quiet and
uneventful lives, and yet they were the two most contented men in the
place.
[Illustration]
Halford was getting into his clothes, but really with a speed and
precision which got the job over before his impetuous next-door neighbor
had got one leg of his riding-breeches on. Mrs. Halford sat up in bed
and expressed her feeling to her husband, who had never been known to
express his.
"Oh, Jack," she said, "isn't it awful? Would you ever have thought of
such a thing! They must have been awfully careless! Oh, Jack, you will
find him, won't you? Jack, if such a thing happened to one of our
children I should go wild; I'll never get over it myself if he isn't
found. Oh, you don't know how thankful I am that we didn't lose our
Richard that way! Oh, Jack, dear, isn't it too horrible for anything!"
Jack simply responded, with no trace of emotion in his voice:
"It's the hell!"
And yet in those three words Jack Halford expressed, in his own way,
quite as much as his wife had expressed in hers. More, even, for there
was a grim promise in his tone that comforted her heart.
Mrs. Halford's feelings being expressed and in some measure relieved,
she promptly became practical.
"I'll fill your flask, of course, dear. Brandy, I suppose? And what
shall we women take up to the Gun Club besides blankets and clean
clothes?"
Mrs. Halford's husband always thought before he spoke, and she was not
at all surprised that he filled his tobacco-pouch before he answered.
When he did speak he knew what he had to say.
"First something to put in my pocket for Dirck and me to eat. We can't
fool with coming home to breakfast. Second, tell the girls to send up
milk to the Gun Club, and something for you women to eat."
"Oh, I sha'n't want anything to eat," cried Mrs. Halford.
"You must eat," said her husband, simply, "and you must make the rest of
them eat. You might do all right without it, but I wouldn't trust the
rest of them. You may need all the nerve you've got."
"Yes, dear," said his wife, submissively. She had been with her husband
in times of danger, and she knew he was a leader to be followed. "I'll
have sandwiches and coffee and tea; I can make them drink tea, anyway."
"Third," went on Jack Halford, as if he had not been interrupted, "bring
my field-glass with you. Dirck and I will range together along the
river. If I put up a white handkerchief anywhere down there, you stay
where you are and we will come to you. If I put up this red one, come
right down with blankets and brandy in the first carriage you can get
hold of. Get on the north edge of the hill and you can keep a line on us
almost anywhere."
"Couldn't you give us some signal, dear, to tell us if--if--if it's all
right?"
"If it was all wrong," replied the husband, "you wouldn't want the
mother to learn it that way. I'll signal to you privately, however. If
it's all right, I'll wave the handkerchief; if I move it up and down,
you'll understand."
Two minutes later he bade her good-by at the door.
"Now remember," he said, "white means wait, red means ride."
And having delivered himself of this simple mnemonic device, he passed
out into the darkness.
At the next gate he met Dirck and the two swung into step together, and
walked up the street with the steady stretching tread of men accustomed
to walking long distances. They said "Hello!" as they met, and their
further conversation was brief.
"River," said Halford; "what do you think?"
"River, sure," said the other; "a lot of those younger boys have been
taking the youngsters down there lately. I saw that kid down there last
week, and I'll bet a dollar his mother would swear that he'd never seen
the river."
"Then we won't say anything about it to her," said Halford, and they
reached along in silence.
Before them, when they came to the end of the road, rose a hill with a
broad plateau on its stomach. Here through the dull haze of the morning
they saw smoky-orange lights beginning to flicker uncertainly as the
wind that heralds the sunrise came fitfully up. The soft wet grass under
their feet was flecked with little grayish-silver cobwebs, and here and
there they heard the morning chirp of ground-nesting birds. As they went
farther up the hill a hum of voices came from above; the voices of
people, men and women, mingled and consonant like the voices of the
birds, but with a certain tone of trouble and expectancy. Every now and
then one individual voice or another would dominate the general murmur,
and would be followed by a quick flutter of sound denoting acquiescence
or disagreement. From this they knew that most of their neighbors had
arrived before them, having been summoned earlier in the journey of the
messengers sent out from the distant home of the lost child.
[Illustration]
On the crown of the hill stood a curious structure, actually small, but
looming large in the grayness. The main body of the building was
elevated upon posts, and was smaller at the bottom than where the
spreading walls met the peaked roof. This roof spread out on both sides
into broad verandas, and under these two wing-like shelters some three
or four score of people were clustered in little groups. Lanterns and
hand-lamps dimly lit up faces that showed strange in the unfamiliar
illumination. There were women with shawls over their shoulders and
women with shawls over their heads. Some of the men were in their
shirt-sleeves, some wore shooting-coats, and a few had overcoats, though
the night was warm. But no stranger arriving on the scene could have
taken it for a promiscuous or accidental assemblage. There was a
movement in unison, a sympathetic stir throughout the little crowd that
created a common interest and a common purpose. The arrival of the two
men was hailed with that curious sound with which such a gathering
greets a desired and attended accession--not quite the sigh of relief,
but the quick, nervous expulsion of the breath that tallies the coming
of the expected. These were two of the men to be counted on, and they
were there.
Every little community such as this knows its leaders, and now that
their number was complete, the women drew together by themselves save
for two or three who clearly took equal direction with the men; and a
dozen in all, perhaps, gathered in a rough circle to discuss the
organization of the search.
It was a brief discussion. A majority of the members of the group had
formed decided opinions as to the course taken by the wandering child,
and thus a division into sub-groups came about at once. This left
various stretchings of territory uncovered, and these were assigned to
those of the more decided minority who were best acquainted with the
particular localities. When the division of labor was completed, the men
had arranged to start out in such directions as would enable them to
range and view the whole countryside for the extreme distance of radius
to which it was supposed the boy could possibly have travelled. The
assignment of Halford and Dirck to the river course was prompt, for it
was known that they habitually hunted and fished along that line. The
father of the boy, who stood by, was reminded of this fact, for a
curious and doubtful look came into his face when he heard two of the
most active and energetic men in the town set aside to search a region
where he had no idea that his boy could have strayed. Some excuse was
given also for the detailing of two other men of equal ability to take
the range immediately above the river bank, and within hailing distance
of those in the marshes by the shore. Had his mind not been in the daze
of mortal grief and perplexity, he would have grasped the sinister
significance of this precaution; but he accepted it in dull and hopeless
confidence. When after they had set forth he told his wife of the
arrangements made, and she heard the names of the four men who had been
appointed to work near the riverside, she pulled the faded old Paisley
shawl (that the child's nurse had wrapped about her) across her swollen
eyes, and moaned, "The river, the river--oh, my boy, my boy!"
[Illustration]