The doctor’s pipe grew cold, and placing it in one of the deep pockets of his jacket, he fumbled in the other as he turned to his companion, saying: “Was I not right, Rob? Give the city boys, with their automobiles and pretty clothes, and the trolley-car hunters, the first two weeks of October in which to moult their fine feathers, ruin their firearms and dispositions, and decide that the Moosatuk has been overhunted, and we may have the rest of open season to ourselves without danger when crossing a brush lot in broad daylight of being mistaken for wild turkeys or what not. It is the eighteenth to-day. We’ve tramped good twenty miles since daybreak, and whom have we met? A woman looking for cows, two men stacking slab sides, and some school children on the cross-road, while we’ve had our fill of air unpeppered by small shot, this glorious view at every curve and through every gap, and,” freeing his pocket, “a brace of grouse, another of quail, and three woodcock as an excuse for our outing, in the eyes of those who insist that excuses, aside from the desire, must be made for every act.
“Strange, perhaps, that the killing and hunting lust should be an excuse. I often feel like begging pardon of these little hunched-up feathered things; but in spite of humanitarian principles, I somehow fear that we are growing too nice, and when the hunting fever dies out wholly, something vital is lacking in a man.”
“Hunting fever or not,” replied Stead, kicking a decaying log at his feet into dust, “I’d rather the woods were full of visible men with guns than invisible snares. Do you know that I have broken thirty or more this morning? Some day these setters of snares and I shall meet, and there will be trouble; it seems that I am destined always to war with the intangible.” Then he spread his game on the fence, and though it outranked the doctor’s spoils, he seemed to take no pleasure in it, but still looked moodily across the river.
“Ah, Rob, Rob,” said the doctor, throwing his arm affectionately about the shoulder of the taller man, who leaned heavily on the fence-top, “will your mood never change? Can you not forgive and at least play bravely at forgetting?
“It is ten years—no, eleven—since your child whom I tended died and Helen left you, or you her, whichever way you choose to put it. The why of it all you have never deemed best to tell, and I have never asked, trusting your manhood. She led her own life then for the four years she lived. I have managed to see you every year since, in spite of the drifting life your profession forced upon you. And since the railway’s completion, when you settled here, I’ve spent a week of my holiday each autumn with you, hoping to see a change, believing you would waken and live your life out instead of moping it away. But no! Your work and old comrades need you, and you still refuse. What is it, Rob? Life seems so good to me with the threescore and ten in plain sight that I cannot bear to see it playing through your fingers at fifty.
“Love may be gone, or clouded, let us say, but there is always work, and work is glorious! Get out of your own shadow, man, and let the sun pass. It is with you as The Allegorist says:—
“‘One looked into the cup of life,
And let his shadow fall athwart;
The wine gleamed darkly in the cup—