"What is it, Myron?" he said, and tried to put his hand to where the pain was—but failing to reach his head, it faltered and fell upon one of Myron's arms, over which it closed. He realized that her arm was under his head, and that he was leaning heavily upon her. He tried to gather himself together, but one of his feet was held fast. He looked at her inquiringly. At that moment she was the source of life—knowledge—everything to him. The blood was streaming from a cut in his temple. She replied to his unspoken question promptly.
"The reins are tangled round your feet," she said. "Oh, I thought I couldn't get here in time! I thought they would surely drag you to death; and you fell so near the wheels, I——" here she gave way to a paroxysm of tears. She tried to stifle them. The sight set Homer's manhood for a moment again upon its throne. He untied the neckerchief he wore, clumsily dried her tears, and then applied it to his own head. She rose. Just then two men came in sight; they had been on their way home to dinner. Turning at the gate, they had seen something was wrong, and hastened back. As they approached, Myron snatched up her sunbonnet from where it had fallen and tied it on with trembling fingers.
"How was it, Homer? What's up?" called the men as they drew near. Homer's evanescent strength was gone; he was supporting himself on one elbow, upon which he seemed to be whirling, as on a pivot. He looked at Myron, and she answered for him:
"I was looking for Mrs. Deans' turkeys; they've strayed," she said. "As I came over the knoll, I saw him drop the reins and fall; I ran as hard as I could and stopped the horses; they were dragging him; he must have struck on a stone when he fell." She paused; her voice was trembling. "It's the sun," she said; and, turning, was over the crest of the knoll, her sunbonnet disappearing among the stacks on the opposite side, before the men made any comment.
As she disappeared, Homer's long-tried elbow gave way, and his head sank upon the stubble.
The men untied the leather rein from his foot, tied up his head as well as they could, steadied him as he rose to his feet, and helped him to mount the gray horse.
A day's rest set him right. The touch of sunstroke had been neutralized by the cut, whose bleeding had relieved the pressure on the brain and in a measure from his heart, for he no longer battled with intangible desires and maddening uncertainties of purpose; he yearned with his whole heart for the clasp of Myron's Holder's arms.
His mother heard the story of his accident and by whom a much more serious one was averted. She was thoroughly enraged and excited. She harped upon the one string until Homer's new-found store of patience reached an end, and he was fain to betake himself out of doors in the evenings until sleep stilled his mother's tongue.
It was a week or so after his fall—the wound on his temple had already healed in the wholesome skin—when, one night as dusk fell, he was beset with desire to see Myron. The vision he had had in the field returned to him often now; that strange vision—compound of reality and dream, part wrought of the needs of his own heart, part woven of the glimpses his reeling eyes caught of the woman's figure in the distance. As he had emerged from the chaos of indefinite yearnings to a definite desire, so he had put aside all women for one woman; to his credit be it told, he thought of Myron Holder as she was—the disgraced mother of a fatherless child. He could draw no fine distinction between letter and spirit, deduce no hair-splitting arguments to bear out his views, being only a rough countryman, unused to subtle mental processes. But he decided for himself that it was not muttered rites and outward forms that made the mother, but all the dolorous agonies of maternity. Which of them had this woman not endured? What jot or tittle of woman's horrible heritage had not been hers? And what more holy than a mother?
"God knows," he said to himself, as he strode along that night to the village, "a woman needs to be pretty bad before she's not good enough for the average man!" He had reached the fence round the Holder cottage—that fence in which the gaps grew greater and greater as old Mrs. Holder used the pickets for kindling-wood—and was just about to enter quietly, when Gamaliel Deans drove up. He recognized Homer and called out: