After a time Valiant thrust the key into his pocket, and rising, went to a trunk that lay against the wall. Searching in a portfolio, he took out a small old-fashioned photograph, much battered and soiled. It had been cut from a larger group and the name of the photographer had been erased from the back. He set it upright on the desk, and bending forward, looked long at the face it disclosed. It was the only picture he had ever possessed of his father.
He turned and looked into the glass above the dresser. The features were the same, eyes, brow, lips, and strong waving hair. But for its time-stains the photograph might have been one of himself, taken yesterday.
For an hour he sat in the bright light thinking, the pictured face propped on the desk before him, the dog snuggled against his knee.
CHAPTER VII
ON THE RED ROAD
The green, mid May Virginian afternoon was arched with a sky as blue as the tiles of the Temple of Heaven and steeped in a wash of sunlight as yellow as gold: smoke-hazy peaks piling up in the distance, billowy verdure like clumps of trembling jade between, shaded with masses of blue-black shadow, and lazying up and down, by gashed ravine and rounded knoll a road like red lacquer, fringed with stone wall and sturdy shrub and splashed here and there with the purple stain of the Judas-tree and the snow of dogwood blooms. Nothing in all the springy landscape but looked warm and opalescent and inviting—except a tawny bull that from across a barred fence-corner switched a truculent tail in silence and glowered sullenly at the big motor halted motionless at the side of the twisting road.
Curled worm-like in the driver’s seat, with his chin on his knees, John Valiant sat with his eyes upon the distance. For an hour he had whirred through that wondrous shimmer of color with a flippant loitering breeze in his face, sweet from the crimson clover that poured and rioted over the roadside: past nests of meditative farm-buildings, fields of baby-green corn, occasional ramshackle dirt-daubed cabins with doorways hung with yellow honeysuckle and flagrant trumpet-vines, and here and there a quiet old church, Gothic and ivied and gray whose leaded windows watched benignantly over myrtled graveyards. A great soothing suspiration of peace seemed to swell from it all to lap the traveler like the moist balminess of a semi-tropical sea.
“Chum old man,” said Valiant, with his arm about the bulldog’s neck, “if those color-photograph chaps had shown us this, we simply wouldn’t have believed it, would we? Such scenery beats the roads we’re used to, what? If it were all like this—but of course it isn’t. We’ll get to our own bailiwick presently, and wake up. Never mind; we’re country gentlemen, Chummy, en route to our estate! No silly snuffle, now! Out with it! That’s right,”—as a sharp bark rewarded him—“that’s the proper enthusiasm.” He wound his strong fingers in a choking grip in the scruff of the white neck, as a chipmunk chattered by on the low stone wall. “No, you don’t, you cannibal! He’s a jolly little beggar, and he doesn’t deserve being eaten!”