II
THE STALLED TRAIN
FEBRUARY—THE COON MOON
He was no kin to the man of Whittier’s eulogy, though he might well have been; Jim Bradley was only the conductor on the milk freight that fussed and fumed its way down the valley of the Moosatuck every evening, at intervals leaving the single track road of the Sky Line to rest upon the sidings while a passenger train or the through express took right of way.
To Miranda Banks, however, Bradley seemed a hero as he sprang from the caboose, swinging his lantern, when his train took the switch and halted on the side track below the calf pastures.
To be sure his claim to heroism had, so far, rested upon the fact that both he and his vocation moved. In Hattertown very few people or things had moved these ten years past; they had groped as being between daylight and dark. The beginning of this twilight period was when the trade that gave the town both its name and reason for being, owing to change of methods and market, vanished across the low gentian meadows of the Moosatuck to install itself anew in Bridgeton, fifteen miles away. The empty factory, long and vainly offered for sale, became a storage place for the hay that speculators bought on the field from the somnolent hillside farmers and held for the winter market. At the same time the hay gave the building a good reputation among the travelling brotherhood of the back roads, who work a week and tramp on again (an entirely distinct clan from the hoboes who follow the railroad through villages and alternate thieving with stolen rides upon freight trains), and the factory became a wayfarers’ lodging-house, until gradually the unpainted boards turned black and the building grew hollow-eyed as its window panes were shattered.
When man wholly forsook it, swallows and swifts brought primitive life to it again, the one nesting against its warped rafters, the others lining the chimney, now free from plaster and very hospitable, with their bracketed homes, until their flocks pouring forth from its mouth at dawn and swirling and settling at evening, seemed in the distance a curling column of smoke.
The row of cheap wooden houses where the factory hands had lived, had also mouldered away and joined the general ruin, only a starved grape-vine or rose-bush telling that they had once been homes; until, at the time I first saw the place, the most depressing of all palls seemed over it,—the shadow of a dead industry.
It was an October morning when Lavinia Cortright and I drove up into the hill country with father, who went to see a woman who had applied for a free bed in the Bridgeton hospital, an aunt of Miranda Banks, she afterward proved to be; and while father went into the little farm-house, that had bright geraniums in the windows and wore more of a general air of thrift than any of those we had passed in the last mile of our uphill ride, Lavinia and I sauntered along the road and finally settled ourselves on a tumble-down stone wall in the midst of a wild grape-vine whose fruit was black with sun-ripeness and bore the moist bloom of the first light frost.
As we gazed idly over the fields toward the river, that seemed, as we looked down upon it, to filter through the glowing branches of the swamp maples, washing their colours with it, rather than to flow between banks of earth, we sipped the pure wild grape wine where alone it may be found,—between the skin and pulp of the grape itself, a few drops to each globe,—and fell to moralizing.
“You like to find a reason for everything, Barbara,” said Lavinia Cortright, after a long pause; “can you tell me exactly why the country hereabout seems so desolate and impossible? It has all the colour and atmosphere of the perfect autumn landscape, and yet the idea of living here would be appalling.”