Five minutes later the red flag was in its place behind the door, its keeper turned the key and hastened to overtake his neighbor, who had reached the highway. Hearing the hurrying footsteps behind him, the man turned, saying triumphantly, “I'm right-down, glad he didn't come.”
“So be I; there's an express late this evenin' that might bring him down. I shall be here if Louisy's so as I kin leave her.”
“Wa'al,” returned the other, “I shan't be over ag'in to-night, but you jest tell Joe, fer me, to come right ta my house; he's welcome. Whatever he done as a boy, he's atoned fer in twenty years. I remember jest how white and sot his face was the day they took him away; he was only a boy then, he's a man now, gray-headed most likely; the Athertons turned gray early, and sorrow and sin are terrible helps to white hair.”
The old man's voice faltered a little; he drew the back of his hard, brown hand across his eyes. Something that neither of the men could have defined prompted them to shake hands at the “Corners”; they did so silently, and without looking up.
Joe came that night. The moon and the stars were the silent and only witnesses of the convict's return. It was just as Joe had hoped it might be; yet there was in the man's soul an awful sense of his loneliness and isolation The eager, wistful light faded out of his large blue eyes, the lines about his firm, tightly-drawn mouth deepened, the whole man took on an air of sullen defiance. Nobody cared for him, why should he care? He wondered if “Uncle Aaron,” as the boys used to call him, still kept the old station and signaled the trains. Alas! it was one of “Louisy's” bad nights; her husband could not leave her, and so Joe missed forever the cordial hand old Aaron would have offered him, and the kind message he was to give him, for his neighbor.
Sadly, wearily, Joe turned and walked toward the road, lying white and still in the moonlight. His head dropped lower and lower upon his breast; without lifting it he put out his hand, at length, and raised the latch of a dilapidated gate that opened into a deep, weed-entangled yard. His heart was throbbing wildly, a fierce, hot pain shot through his eyes. Could he ever look up? He knew the light of the home he was seeking had gone out in darkness years before. The only love in the world that would have met him without question or reproach was silent forever; but here was her home—his home once—the little white house with its green blinds and shady porch.
He must look up or his heart would burst. With a cry that rang loud and clear on the quiet night, he fell upon his face, his fingers clutching and tearing the long, coarse grass. There was no house—no home—only a mass of blackened timbers, a pile of ashes, the angle of a tumbling wall. Hardly knowing what he did, Joe crept into the shelter of the old stone wall. With his face buried in his hands he lived over again, in one short half-hour, the life he hoped he had put away when the prison doors closed behind him. All through the day there had struggled in his heart a faint, unreasoning faith that life might yet hold something fair for him; one ray of comfort, one word of kindness, and faith would have become a reality. As the man, at last lifted his pale, agonized face to the glittering sky above him he uttered no word of prayer or entreaty, but with the studied self-control that years of repression had taught him, he rose from the ground and walked slowly out of the yard and down the cheerless road again to the station. Life hereafter could mean nothing to him but a silent moving-on. Whenever or wherever he became known, men would shrink and turn away from him. There was no abiding-place, no home, no love for him in all God's mighty world. He accepted the facts; there was only one relief—somewhere, some time, a narrow bed would open for him and the green sod would shelter the man and his sin till eternity.
He hastily plucked a bit of golden-rod that nodded by the roadside; then taking a small, ragged book from a pocket just over his heart, he opened it and put the yellow spray between the leaves. As he did so a bit of paper fluttered to the ground. Joe stooped and picked it up. It was a letter he had promised to deliver from a fellow-prisoner to his mother in a distant town.
Not very far away an engine whistled at a crossing. A slowly moving freight and accommodation train pulled up at the depot a few moments later. Joe entered the dark, ill-smelling car at the rear and turned his face once more to the world.
It was in the early twilight of the next evening that Joe found himself in the hurry and confusion of a large manufacturing town. As he passed from the great depot into the brilliantly lighted street, he was bewildered for a moment and stood irresolute, with his hand shading his eyes. At one corner of the park that lay between the station and the next street, a man with a Punch-and-Judy theatre had drawn around him a crowd of men, women, and children. Joe mechanically directed his steps that way, and unconsciously became a part of the swaying, laughing audience.