Part 12

The old man's jaw fell; he began to back away.

"Your neighbors tell some good stories about you. Now skip along after those cows, or I'll tickle your old legs for you!"

The old man, appalled and dazed at this sudden change of manner, backed away, and at last turned and racked off up the road, looking back with a wild face, at which the young man laughed remorselessly.

"The doggoned old skeesucks!" Will soliloquized as he walked up the road. "So that's the kind of a character he's been givin' me!"

"Hullo! A whippoorwill. Takes a man back into childhood--No, don't 'whip poor Will'; he's got all he can bear now."

He came at last to the little farm Dingman had owned, and he stopped in sorrowful surprise. The barn had been moved away, the garden ploughed up, and the house, turned into a granary, stood with boards nailed across its dusty, cobwebbed windows. The tears started into the man's eyes; he stood staring at it silently.

In the face of this house the seven years that he had last lived stretched away into a wild waste of time. It stood as a symbol of his wasted, ruined life. It was personal, intimately personal, this decay of her home.

All that last scene came back to him; the booming roar of the threshing-machine, the cheery whistle of the driver, the loud, merry shouts of the men. He remembered how warmly the lamp-light streamed out of that door as he turned away tired, hungry, sullen with rage and jealousy. Oh, if he had only had the courage of a man!

Then he thought of the boy's words. She was sick, Ed abused her. She had met her punishment. A hundred times he had been over the whole scene. A thousand times he had seen her at the pump smiling at Ed Kinney, the sun lighting her hair; and he never thought of that without hardening.

At this very gate he had driven up that last forenoon; to find that she had gone with Ed. He had lived that sickening, depressing moment over many times, but not times enough to keep down the bitter passion he had felt then, and felt now as he went over it in detail.

He was so happy and confident that morning, so perfectly certain that all would be made right by a kiss and a cheery jest. And now! Here he stood sick with despair and doubt of all the world. He turned away from the desolate homestead and walked on.

"But I'll see her--just once more. And then--"

And again the mighty significance, responsibility of life, fell upon him. He felt, as young people seldom do, the irrevocableness of living, the determinate, unalterable character of living. He determined to begin to live in some new way--just how he could not say.

Old man Kinney and his wife were getting their Sunday-school lessons with much bickering, when Will drove up the next day to the dilapidated gate and hitched his team to a leaning-post under the oaks. Will saw the old man's head at the open window, but no one else, though he looked eagerly for Agnes as he walked up the familiar path. There stood the great oak under whose shade he had grown to be a man. How close the great tree seemed to stand to his heart, someway! As the wind stirred in the leaves, it was like a rustle of greeting.

In that old house they had all lived, and his mother had toiled for thirty years. A sort of prison after all. There they were all born, and there his father and his little sister had died. And then it passed into old Kinney's hands.

Walking along up the path he felt a serious weakness in his limbs, and he made a pretence of stopping to look at a flower-bed containing nothing but weeds. After seven years of separation he was about to face once more the woman whose life came so near being a part of his--Agnes, now a wife and a mother.

How would she look? Would her face have that old-time peachy bloom, her mouth that peculiar beautiful curve? She was large and fair, he recalled, hair yellow and shining, eyes blue--

He roused himself. This was nonsense! He was trembling. He composed himself by looking around again.

"The old scoundrel has let the weeds choke out the flowers and surround the bee-hives. Old man Kinney never believed in anything but a petty utility."

Will set his teeth, and marched up to the door and struck it like a man delivering a challenge. Kinney opened the door, and started back in fear when he saw who it was.

"How de do? How de do?" said Will, walking in, his eyes fixed on a woman seated beyond, a child in her lap.

Agnes rose, without a word; a fawn-like, startled widening of the eyes, her breath coming quick, and her face flushing. They couldn't speak; they only looked at each other an instant, then Will shivered, passed his hand over his eyes and sat down.

There was no one there but the old people, who were looking at him in bewilderment. They did not notice any confusion in Agnes's face. She recovered first.

"I'm glad to see you back, Will," she said, rising and putting the sleeping child down in a neighboring room. As she gave him her hand, he said:

"I'm glad to get back, Agnes. I hadn't ought to have gone." Then he turned to the old people:

"I'm Will Hannan. You needn't be scared, Daddy; I was jokin' last night."

"Dew tell! I want o' know!" exclaimed Granny. "Wal, I never! An, you're my little Willy boy who ust 'o he in my class? Well! Well! W'y, pa, ain't he growed tall! Grew handsome tew. I ust 'o think he was a dretful humly boy; but my sakes, that mustache--"

"Wal, he give me a turrible scare last night. My land! scared me out of a year's growth," cackled the old man.