V
Wayside Destiny
Like many natives of the Pennsylvania Mountains, Ammon Tatnall was a believer in dreams and ghosts. Even in his less prosperous days, when life was considerable of a struggle, he had time to ponder over the limitless possibilities of the unseen world. Probably his faith in the so-called supernatural was founded on a dream he had while clerking in a hotel at Port Allegheny, during the active days of the lumber business in that part of the Black Forest.
It seemed that his mother was lying at the point of death, and wanted him to come to her, but as she did not know his whereabouts, was suffering much mental anguish. Just in the midst of the dream the alarm clock went off, but he awoke and got up with the impression that his vision had been real. In the office he informed the landlord of his dream. Like a true mountain man, the proprietor merely asked him to come back as soon as he could, such occurrences being not unusual in his range of experience.
AMONG THE VIRGIN HEMLOCKS, BLACK FOREST. (Photograph by W. T. Clarke.)
At home, in the Wyoming Valley, he found conditions exactly as reproduced in the dream. His sudden coming proved the turning point in his mother’s illness; she rallied and got well. During her convalescence, for Tatnall remained longer than he had expected, she told him of a story which her mother had told her of the straight dreaming of some of their ancestors, pioneers of the North Branch.
The woman in question, who lived many years before, dreamed one night that her daughter who lived in Connecticut, and who had married just as they left for Wyoming, appeared to her with a baby in her arms. She[She] said she herself was dead and she desired the baby to be given to the grandmother. As a sign of the reality of the vision, she placed her hand on the wrist of the grandmother, leaving a mark on it that could never be effaced.
The grandmother took the long journey to Connecticut and found that everything had happened as told in the dream. The child grew up, and became the wife of a well-known Methodist preacher, and was famed throughout Northern Pennsylvania for her good deeds.
Tatnall gradually advanced in life, and became agent or traveling salesman for several wholesale lumber concerns. He had gotten his start by being polite to the manager of one of the companies who came up from Pittsburg every week and stopped at the hotel. He made a success as a salesman, and it was a matter of quiet satisfaction to him that in ten years he had[had] sold 160,000,000 feet of lumber. But he had been too busy to marry, too busy to have a home; was a driving, pushing machine in the interests of his employers. Sometimes on the trains he met with intelligent people, but generally his associates were like himself, human dynamos, but without his interest in the supernatural.