| III
| 0 | |
| AFTER DINNER THE NEXT day I said good-bye and drove
back to Hastings to take the train for Black Hawk.
Antonia and her children gathered round my buggy before I started,
and even the little ones looked up at me with friendly faces.
Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate.
When I reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back.
The group was still there by the windmill. Antonia was
waving her apron.
| 1 | |
| At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm
on the wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off
into the pasture.
| 2 | |
| `That's like him,' his brother said with a shrug. `He's a crazy kid.
Maybe he's sorry to have you go, and maybe he's jealous.
He's jealous of anybody mother makes a fuss over, even the priest.'
| 3 | |
| I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his fine
head and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat,
the wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.
| 4 | |
| `Don't forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up
on the Niobrara next summer,' I said. `Your father's agreed to let
you off after harvest.'
| 5 | |
| He smiled. `I won't likely forget. I've never had such a nice thing
offered to me before. I don't know what makes you so nice to us boys,'
he added, blushing.
| 6 | |
| `Oh, yes, you do!' I said, gathering up my reins.
| 7 | |
| He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed
pleasure and affection as I drove away.
| 8 | |
| My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends
were dead or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing
to me, were playing in the Harlings' big yard when I passed;
the mountain ash had been cut down, and only a sprouting stump
was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that used to guard the gate.
I hurried on. The rest of the morning I spent with Anton Jelinek,
under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his saloon.
While I was having my midday dinner at the hotel, I met one
of the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me
up to his office and talked over the Cutter case with me.
After that, I scarcely knew how to put in the time until
the night express was due.
| 9 | |
| I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures
where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up,
and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over
the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again.
Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn;
bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could
see the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me,
and all about stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour,
I remembered so well. Russian thistles were blowing across
the uplands and piling against the wire fences like barricades.
Along the cattle-paths the plumes of goldenrod were already
fading into sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it.
I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over little towns,
and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant to take
with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.
There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet.
Even after the boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself!
I meant to tramp along a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.
| 10 | |
| As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck
to stumble upon a bit of the first road that went from Black
Hawk out to the north country; to my grandfather's farm,
then on to the Shimerdas' and to the Norwegian settlement.
Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the highways
were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence
was all that was left of that old road which used to run like a
wild thing across the open prairie, clinging to the high places
and circling and doubling like a rabbit before the hounds.
| 11 | |
| On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared--were mere
shadings in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them.
But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find.
The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed
them so deeply that the sod had never healed over them.
They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes
where the farm-wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull
that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses.
I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the slanting sunlight.
| 12 | |
| This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night
when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in
the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither.
I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in
the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness.
The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and
touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself,
and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is.
For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;
had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined
for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same
road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed,
we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
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| THE END
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