With the curtain rung down on the thrilling drama whose theme had been dominated by love, work seemed to Boone increasingly the motif of things. Service appeared more and more the purpose meant in the blind gropings of existence toward some end. Otherwise there was nothing.
But one day long after all this, when the months had run to seasons, Boone broke his law of self-appointed exile and went to Louisville. He did not go from Marlin Town but came the other way—from Washington.
For now the mountain man had his place on Capitol Hill and no longer felt the uncertainty of diffidence in answering when he heard himself recognized from the speaker's chair as "the gentleman from Kentucky."
It was not at all the Washington he had pictured. In many ways it was a more wonderful, and in many a less wonderful, place than that known from photographs and print and fancy.
Life had caught him out of meagre and primitive beginnings and led him, for a while, through corridors of romanticism. Before his eyes, imagination-kindled, had been the colours of dreams and the beckoning of an evening star. The colours had been evanescent, and the star had set. The corridor of visionary promise had come to an end, and its door had opened on Commonplace.
He told himself that he was done with romance. In his life it had been, perhaps, necessary as a stage through which experience must lead him. Henceforth his deity was to be Reason, a cold and austere goddess but a constant one.
But Boone did not quite know himself. Sentiment still lay as strong in him as the spring life that sleeps under the winter sleet. The man in whom it does not survive is one whose spiritual arteries have hardened.
One lesson he modestly believed he had learned out of his journeying from his log-cabin down to the Bluegrass and up to Capitol Hill. He had become an apostle of Life's mutability, chained to no fixed post of unplastic thought.
Upon these things his reflections had been running as he made the journey back to Kentucky, and of them he was thinking now, as, having arrived, he stood with bared head in the billowing stretches of Cave Hill Cemetery.
Victor McCalloway had been in Marlin County hardly at all during these last two years and he was not there now. As usual, when the veteran was absent, Boone had no idea to what quarter of the globe, or in response to what mysterious call, his steps had turned. He thought, though, that it would be his preceptor's wish to be represented as the body of General Prince was lowered to its last rest.