“Well, I’ll walk part of the way with you,” said his father crossly. “I want to talk to you about the drainage scheme and—and, Oliver, I’d like to see if I can’t coax you to change your mind about coming into the store. If you don’t mind, we’ll take the lower road along the swamp. It’s a short-cut for you—saves you a quarter of a mile or more. I’ve been over the road several times lately, looking the land over, and I want to get your idea fixed in my mind. It’s as bright as day almost. This may be the last night we’ll ever spend together, so I—”
“Don’t say anything like that, dad!”
“Never can tell. You may be sent off to some out-of-the-way place in the West—in case you get a job, which I doubt very much—and God knows whether I’ll be here when you come back. Got to look these things in the face, you know. I’m seventy-five. If I do say it myself, a pretty good little man for my age—wiry as a piece of steel—but, as I say, you never can tell.”
A few minutes before nine o’clock, Oliver October appeared at the home of the Reverend Mr. Sage, somewhat out of breath and visibly agitated.
“I’m awfully sorry to be so late,” he apologized. “Father and I had a long and trying confab and I—I couldn’t get away. He gave it to me hot and heavy to-night, Uncle Herbert. The worst yet. God knows I hate to say it, but I’m glad I’m going to-morrow, and the way I feel now, I hope I’ll never see the place again.”
“No, you shouldn’t say it, Oliver,” said Mr. Sage. “Poor man, he is really not responsible these days. I wish you could see your way clear to remain here.”
“You don’t believe he is—unbalanced, do you? I mean out of his mind?”
“By no means. He is as sound as a dollar, mentally. But his nerves, my boy—his nerves are shattered. He thinks of nothing but the fate he believes to be in store for you. Every day is an age to him. You will not be thirty until a year from next October. Do you know how long that seems to him? Endless! You see, Oliver, for nearly thirty years he has lived in dread of—well, of the absurd thing that gypsy woman said. He tries to laugh it off, but I know it has never been out of his thoughts. Once you have passed your thirtieth birthday, he will be another man. He sleeps on thorns now. It is no wonder that he is cross and irritable and unreasonable. He is not deceived by the recent change of front on the part of Joe Sikes and Silas Link, both of whom now loudly profess not to believe a word of the fortune. He knows they are trying to cheer him up.”
“He really is afraid that I am going to be hanged before I’m thirty?”
“I fear that is the case, Oliver.”