At last, after studying her face a bit, he ventured, "Have you read them all?" He spoke low, so as not to interrupt her too pointedly. She did not look up, but nodded, with a smile that said confidentially, "Well, I should think so!" He edged nearer then, like one who would be glad, if pressed, to share his secrets.
"I was sorry when I reached the last one," he began. "It was another world. Oh, he's a great writer. He writes as if he was thinking all the time in fireworks, and he makes you do the same thing. Every page or two he sets off a bunch of firecrackers in your mind that you didn't know you had there. But he writes as if he didn't care whether anybody understood him or not. It's a blind trail, lots of the way, and on some pages I just bog down."
She smiled sympathetically. "Many of us have that trouble with him." She put "Diana" back on the shelf and held up the poems of Robert Browning.
"And this?"
"Oh, do you read that, too?" he counterquestioned with sparkling curiosity. She could see that he was enlivened beyond his self-consciousness for the moment. "Well, I do, too, in spots. He's pretty good in spots. But other times he's choppy and talky and has a hard time getting into the saddle. Why, sometimes when Ben Crider is talking to himself, it would sound just like Browning, if you broke it up into poetry lengths and gave it a good title."
"And this you like, too?" She was opening a volume of Whitman.
"Sure!" he rang out. "Don't you? There's the man." He began walking about with a fine smile that was almost a friendly grin. She felt suddenly sure that he had never talked about the books before, and that it was a kind of feast day for him.
"Yes," he continued easily; "when I get to feeling too much alone up here I pretend I see him striding in off the trail, his head up, sniffing the air, his eyes just eating these big hills, and he'd march right in and sit down. Only I can't ever think of what we'd say. I reckon we'd sit here without a word. He must have had wonderful eyes. He's good in winters when you're holed up here in the snow and get on edge with nothing to do for five or six months but feed the stock and keep a water hole open. Sometimes I wonder if Ben and I won't come out crazy in the spring, and then I read old Whitman and he makes me feel all easy-like and sure of myself."
He paused again, but she only waited.
"I had a funny thought last winter," he pursued. "It seemed to me that if people turn into other things when they die—the way some folks believe, you know—that Whitman must have become a whole world when he died, whirling away somewhere off in space; a fine, big, fresh world, with mountains and valleys and lakes, with big rivers and little ones, and forests and plains and people, good people and bad people, he just liked all sorts—it didn't seem to make much difference to him what they were, so they were people—and he'd carry them all on his back and breathe in and out and feel great."