Just then, Asher reached the corner of the door yard. Catching sight of the two, he put his hands on the top of the paling fence, leaped lightly over it, and came across to the veranda, where he sat down on the top step.
“Just getting in from town? The place hasn’t changed much, has it?” the father declared.
“No, not much,” Asher replied absently, looking out with unseeing eyes at the lengthening woodland shadows, “a church or two more, some brick sidewalk, and a few stores and homes—just added on, not improved. I miss Jim Shirley everywhere. The older folks seem the same, but some of the girls are pushing baby-carriages and the boys are getting round-shouldered and droopy-jawed.”
He drew himself up with military steadiness as he spoke.
“Well, you are glad to settle down anyhow,” his father responded. “The old French spirit of roving and adventure has had its day with you, and now you will begin your life work.”
“Yes, I’m done with fighting.” Asher’s lips tightened. “But what do you call my life work, father?”
It was the eighth April after the opening of the Civil War. Asher had just come home from two years of army service on the western plains. Few changes had come to the little community; but to the young man, who eight 6 springtimes ago had gone out as a pink-cheeked drummer boy, the years had been full of changes. He was now twenty-three, straight as an Indian, lean and muscular as a veteran soldier. The fair, round cheeks of boyhood were brown and tinged with red-blooded health. There was something resolute and patient in the clear gray eyes, as if the mother’s own far vision had crept into them. But the ready smile that had made the Cloverdale community love the boy broke as quickly now on the man’s face, giving promise that his saving sense of humor and his good nature would be factors to reckon with in every combat.
Asher had staid in the ranks till the end of the war, had been wounded, captured, and imprisoned; had fought through a hospital fever and narrowly escaped death in the front of many battle lines. But he did not ask for a furlough, nor account his duty done till the war was ended. Just before that time, when he was sick in a Southern prison, a rebel girl had walked into his life to stay forever. With his chum, Jim Shirley, he had chafed through two years in a little eastern college, the while bigger things seemed calling him to action. At the end of the second year, he broke away, and joining the regular army, began the hazardous life of a Plains scout.
Two years of fighting a foe from every way the winds blow, cold and hunger, storms and floods and desert heat, poisonous reptiles, poisoned arrows of Indians, and the deadly Asiatic cholera; sometimes with brave comrades, sometimes with brutal cowards, sometimes on scout duty, utterly and awfully alone; over miles on endless miles of grassy level prairies, among cruel canyons, in dreary sand lands where men die of thirst, monotonous and maddening 7 in their barren, eternal sameness; and sometimes, between sunrises of superb grandeur, and sunsets of sublime glory, over a land of exquisite virgin loveliness—it is small wonder that the ruddy cheeks were bronze as an Indian’s, that the roundness of boyhood had given place to the muscular strength of manhood, that the gray eyes should hold something of patience and endurance and of a vision larger than the Cloverdale neighborhood might understand.
When Asher had asked, “What do you call my life work, Father?” something impenetrable was in his direct gaze.