A Son of the Hills

by Harriet T. Comstock

Sandy, with the superstition of The Hollow responding in his blood, went to the window overlooking The Way. Just turning into the trail leading up to the cabin a tall, lithe form swung in sight. Well dressed, carrying a modern suitcase, and whistling, gayly came the stranger. At the moment of recognition Sandy felt a cold aloofness overpower him. He spoke, as if to convince a doubting listener: "I—I reckon that is Lans Treadwell! Treadwell, of all people!"

But Sandy pulled himself together and went to greet his visitor with characteristic warmth and cordiality. He believed it was only surprise that had swayed him earlier. Lans, somehow, could not easily be fixed into place in the rough hill life. Lans, always at his ease in Boston, seemed oddly out of tune in Lost Hollow. But try as he might, Sandy could not feel like himself, with Treadwell's cheerful laugh and big-hearted, patronizing jollity resounding through the cabin. He was too desperately and determinedly bent upon being "one of them" to be comfortable.

"By Jove! Morley," he exclaimed, when Sandy had drawn him into the living room; "this is a place. You've worked wonders here. I have always wanted to see you in your family—is that your—your mother?" For Sally Taber could be seen and heard through the half-open door leading to the kitchen.

"No. My mother has been long dead. My father will return by evening meal time. Come in here, Lans—you see I have unoccupied quarters——" He led him to Levi's apartments. "Make yourself comfortable. I'll start a fire on the hearth in this bedroom and the adjoining sitting-room."

"Well, I'll be"—Treadwell glanced about at the plain luxury—"eternally flambusted! If you are not a——" Then he laughed.

It was after the evening meal which Sally served in silent, morose dignity, that the three men went to Sandy's study. The shed-rooms were attached to the main cabin by a narrow hallway and this passage was dark and cold. Coming from it into the warmth and glow of the room filled with books and pictures, Treadwell paused to glance about and exclaim before he took the easiest chair by the hearth and accepted pipe and tobacco. Martin was ill at ease and looked helplessly now and again to his son for leadings with this stranger who laughed so constantly and regarded him as if he were a person of inferiority and lack of intelligence who must, nevertheless, be treated with kindness and tolerance.

"I suppose," Treadwell remarked when the three had finally settled into some kind of comfort, "I suppose, Sand, you wonder how I found you out?"

Sandy had wondered but had restrained his curiosity. He looked now at the big, handsome fellow and again was seized with the sense of chill that he had felt in the afternoon.

"It sounds like a fairy story—a best seller or what you will. By and by"—he glanced at Martin as though to suggest a time when he would be absent—"I've got a lot to tell you, but something turned turtle in my affairs and got on to my nerves. Aunt Olive made me consult Doctor Travers, he's my uncle's pet aversion, you know, because he wanted Aunt Matilda to go into his sanatorium and Uncle Levi considered it an insult. Well, I saw Travers and he advised a vacation. 'Get to the hills,' he suggested, 'and browse a bit. Why don't you go up to that place—a hole in the ground,' he called it, 'where your uncle has sent—Morley?' And then it all came out, and by Jove! I found out that you hailed from the place of my forefathers!"

At this Martin dropped his pipe on the hearth and fixed his dim eyes on the stranger's face. Back rolled the years that had been but stagnant pools in poor Martin Morley's life; into focus came the simple hates and injustices that had brought him where he was.