Such is the Moosatuk where it passes Gilead, a peaceful village halfway between Stonebridge and Gordon, with its farmsteads filling the fertile river valley and climbing up the hillside as if to shun railways, until from below the topmost are lost in the trees, like the aeries of some furtive hawk or owl of the woods. This was the scene which lay below the hunters as they paused to rest in the October noon glow before returning to Stead’s lodge on top of Windy Hill.
For a little space neither man spoke. In fact, the last mile of their walk had passed in silence save for the occasional smothered exclamation of the younger hunter, when he came upon a snare, now and then, and broke it. Even the dry leaves lay untouched in their tracks, for the foot of a woodsman seems instinctively to avoid the dead twig and leaf-filled rut.
The dogs, two brown-eyed, mobile Gordon setters, well understanding that the signal of stacked arms and the smell of tobacco meant that the day’s work was over, started unchidden on a private hunting-trip, nosing about through the ground-pine and frost-bleached lady-ferns, and paused with tails swinging in wide circles before a great patch of glossy wintergreen, where a ruffed grouse or shy Bob-white had doubtless made his breakfast on the pungent scarlet berries. Out in the little-used highway, October, herself an Indian in her colour schemes, had set her loom in the grass-divided wheel tracks, a loom of many strands, wherein she wove a careful tapestry of russet, bronze, crimson, gold, and ruby from leaf of beech, sumach, oak, pepperidge, chestnut, birch, and purpling dogwood, only to drop it as a rug for hoof tracks or fling it aloft at random, a bit of gracious drapery for the too stern granite.
Between these two men, neither young, as often happens between close friends of either sex, silence did not come from lack of mutual understanding. It is only the machine-made or undeveloped brain that mistakes garrulity for companionship and casts the blight of motiveless chatter upon the precious gift of silent hours, wherein the soul may learn to know itself.
More than fifteen years divided their ages, and their temperaments were wider still apart; you could judge this even from trifles, as the shape of their pipes and the way in which they held and smoked them.
Robert Stead, turning fifty, tall and well knit, had heavy, matted brown hair, beard cut close, and impenetrable eyes, whose colour no one could tell offhand, any more than he might read the meaning of the mustache-hid mouth. His firm walk and clear skin told of strength and present outdoor life; his slightly rounded shoulders spoke either of past indoor hours or the resistless, flinching attitude where a man ceases to face the storms of life with chest thrown out and head erect as if to say to warring elements—“See, I am ready; come and do your worst!” “Silent Stead” people hereabout called him from his taciturnity, and he either held his short brier close against his lips and puffed between tightly clinched teeth, as if pulling against time, or in the revulsion let the flame die out until, forgotten, the pipe hung cold, bitter, and noisome between his lips.
Dr. Russell’s pipe, a plain meerschaum of moderate length, held with light firmness, was smoked deliberately as something that soothed yet held in no thrall, and when its first sweetness passed, with a sharp, cleansing rap, he returned the pipe to his pocket. Though in the later sixties, the doctor radiated all the hope of youth. One realized that his was a face to trust, even before compassing its details; the easy turn of his shapely, well-poised head, with its closely cut hair blended of steel and silver, every glance of his searching gray eyes, that looked frankly from under eyebrows that were still black, conveyed both comprehension and sympathy. His nose was straight and not too long, and the thin nostrils quivered with all the sensitiveness of a highly strung horse, while the mouth was saved from the sternness to which the firm chin seemed to pledge it by a drooping of the corners that told of a keen sense of humour. In stature he was of medium height, but his shoulders were still squared to the burdens of life, and his erect carriage made him appear tall; but, after all, the secret of his youth lay in a quality of mind, the very quality that the younger man lacked—his steadfast faith and confidence in his fellow-men; this had lasted undaunted by disappointment during the forty years and more that he had held to them the closest, wisest, and most blessed of human ministries—that of the good physician.