The confidential clerk went back to the office filled with a profound loathing of life.
"If liquor wasn't so nasty, I'd take to drink," he said to himself as he sat down at Hillerton's desk and set to work.
The next day was Sunday, and Peckham was at something of a loss what to do with it. He hated the sight of his room. The odor of the straw matting and the pattern of the wallpaper were inextricably associated with those anticipations which he had been rudely cheated out of. To escape such associations he took an electric car to the Bluffs, those rock-bound islands in the prairie sea which lie a couple of miles to the east of the town. There was only one other passenger besides himself, a man with a gun, who softly whistled a popular air, very much out of tune. Peckham came perilously near kicking the offender, but, happily, the fellow got off just in time, and went strolling across the open with the gun over his shoulder. Once he stooped to pick a flower which he stuck in his buttonhole. Queer, thought Peckham, that a man should go picking flowers and whistling out of tune! There were the mountains, too. Some people made a great deal of them—great, stupid masses of dumb earth! He remembered he had thought them fine himself the other day when there were shadows on them. But to-day! How the sun glared on their ugly reddish sides! And what was it that had gone wrong anyhow? He could not seem to remember, and on the whole he did not wish to.
Now Lewis Peckham was neither losing his mind, nor had he been drowning his sorrows in the conventional dram. The simple fact of the matter was that he had not slept fifteen minutes consecutively all night long, and his brain was not likely to clear up until he had given it a chance to recuperate. By the time he had left the car and climbed the castellated side of Pine Bluff he was still miserably unhappy, but he had altogether lost track of the cause of his unhappiness. He strayed aimlessly along the grassy top of the Bluff, away from the road, and down a slight incline, into a sheltered hollow. At the foot of a strange, salmon-colored column of rock was a little group of budding scrub-oaks. Peckham crawled in among them, and in about thirty seconds he was fast asleep. There he lay for hours. A blue jay, chattering in a pine-tree near at hand, made no impression upon his sleep-deadened ear; a pair of ground squirrels scuttled in and out among the scrub-oaks, peering shyly at the motionless intruder, and squeaked faintly to one another, with vivacious action of nose and tail. They were, perhaps, discussing the availability of a certain inviting coat-pocket for purposes of domestic architecture. An occasional rumble of wheels on the road, a dozen rods away, startled the birds and squirrels, but Peckham slept tranquilly on, and dreamed that the Leitmann Orchestra was playing in the Springtown Opera House, and that he, by reason of his being an early Christian martyr, was forced to roast at the stake just out of hearing of the music.
PINE BLUFF.
It was well on in the afternoon when he came to himself, to find his boots scorched almost to a crisp in the sun which had been pouring upon them. He pulled himself out from among the scrub-oaks, and got his feet out of the sun. Then he looked at his watch; and after that he looked at the view.
The view was well worth looking at in the mellow afternoon light. Peckham gazed across the shimmering gold of the plain, to the mountains, which stood hushed into a palpitating blue; the Peak alone, white and ethereal, floating above the foot hills in the sun. Peckham was impressed in spite of himself. It made him think of a weird, mystical strain of music that had sometimes haunted his brain and yet which he had never been able to seize and capture. As he gazed on the soaring, mystical Peak, he remembered his dream, and slowly, but very surely, he perceived that a purpose was forming in his mind, almost without the connivance of his will. He got upon his feet and laughed aloud. A sudden youthful intoxication of delight welled up within him and rang forth in that laugh. Life, for the first time in three years, seemed to him like a glorious thing; an irresistible, a soul-stirring purpose had taken possession of him, and he knew that no obstacle could stand against it.
He started for the town almost on a run, scorning the prosaic cars which harbored passengers who whistled out of tune. He struck directly across the intercepting plain, and though he soon had to slacken his pace, his winged thoughts went on before him, and he took no note of the distance.