With that I took two or three steps down the hill—but felt the old man's hand on my arm.
“Say, mister,” he asked, “are you one of the electric company men? Is that high-tension line comin' across here?”
“No,” I said, “it is something more valuable than that!”
I walked onward a few steps, as though I was quite determined to get out of his field, but he followed close behind me.
“It ain't the new trolley line, is it?”
“No,” I said, “it isn't the trolley line.”
“What is it, then?”
In that question, eager and shrill, spoke the dry soul of the old man, the lifelong hope that his clinging ownership of those barren acres would bring him from the outside some miraculous profit.
His whole bearing had changed. He had ceased to be truculent or even fearful, but was now shrilly beseeching, A great wave of compassion came over me, I was sorry for him, imprisoned there within the walls of his own making, and expecting wealth from the outside when there was wealth in plenty within and everywhere about him.
But how could I help him? You can give no valuable thing to any man who has not the vision to take it. If I had told him what I found upon his hill or in his fields he would have thought me—well, crazy; or he would have suspected that under cover of such a quest I hid some evil design. As well talk adventure to an old party man, or growth to a set churchman.