XVIII.
ON THE FARM.
On his way down the bluffs to town Scarborough felt as calm and peaceful as that tranquil evening. He had a sense of the end of a long strain of which he had until then been unconscious. "NOW I can go away and rest," he said to himself. And at sundown he set out for his farm.
He arrived at ten o'clock, by moonlight, amid a baying of dogs so energetic that it roused every living thing in the barnyard to protest in a peevish chorus of clucking and grunting and quacking and squealing.
"What on airth!" exclaimed Mrs. Gabbard, his farmer's wife, standing at the back door, in calico skirt and big shawl. When she saw who it was, her irritated voice changed to welcome. "Why, howdy, Mr. Scarborough! I thought it was old John Lovel among the chickens or at the granary. I might 'a' knowed he wouldn't come in the full of the moon and no clouds."
"Go straight back to bed, Mrs. Gabbard, and don't mind me," said Scarborough. "I looked after my horse and don't want anything to eat. Where's Eph?"
"Can't you hear?" asked Mrs. Gabbard, dryly. And in the pause a lusty snore penetrated. "When anything out of the way happens, I get up and nose around to see whether it's worth while to wake him."
Scarborough laughed. "I've come for a few days—to get some exercise," he said. "But don't wake me with the others to-morrow morning. I'm away behind on sleep and dead tired."
He went to bed—the rooms up-stairs in front were reserved for him and were always ready. His brain was apparently as busy and as determined not to rest as on the worst of his many bad nights during the past four months. But the thoughts were vastly different; and soon those millions of monotonous murmurings from brook and field and forest were soothing his senses. He slept soundly, with that complete relaxing of every nerve and muscle which does not come until the mind wholly yields up its despotic control and itself plunges into slumber unfathomable.
The change of the air with dawn slowly wakened him. It was only a little after five, but he felt refreshed. He got himself into farm working clothes and went down to the summer dining-room—a shed against the back of the house with three of its walls latticed. In the adjoining kitchen Mrs. Gabbard and her daughters, Sally and Bertha, were washing the breakfast dishes—Gabbard and his two sons and the three "hands" had just started for the meadows with the hay wagons.