Finally he sighed: "Kind of wish I had brought old Moses along fer comp'ny." For the boy was feeling that need for companionship that comes after all mental strain. "But then Moses ain't like dogs; he's so bothersome he's most human—always either wantin' you to do something fer him or to set up and take notice of what he is doin'."
Relapsing into silence after this, which was soon followed by a more usual and serene state of mind, the young man shortly after took out from his duster pocket a withered russet apple left over from the winter store, and thoughtfully sunk his teeth in it. Then gradually his tranquillity deepened, increased by the recollection of his having just passed through the fire of the enemy and escaped. Behind him lay the village of Pennyroyal, suspicious yet still unsatisfied, and before him the open, empty, springtime road. At will Liza was cropping wayside grass: the traveller's hands had let slip the reins, and sometimes his eyes wandered to the far-off blue horizon and sometimes dwelt on the closer beauty of the roadsides, where elderberry, sumach and Virginia creeper were tangled in thick hedges, and where young grapevines hung like silver-green garlands under their fine coating of May dust.
In a Kentucky landscape, to those who comprehend it, there is ever a sense of generous growth, of nature's yielding herself gladly to life's eternal purpose. Now dimly this country boy began to understand the motive in the new beauties and new fragrances of each returning spring.
Again the eagerness of the dawn overtook him; and stiffening, he picked up his reins, starting off again, when, turning in from an elbow up the road, Ambrose beheld the one person whom above all others his desire had been to escape.
The figure was occupying the entire seat of a buggy, but was driving along apparently so lost in thought as to seem oblivious of anything or anybody in his vicinity.
"Morning, Ambrose," Doctor Webb began, however, as he appeared directly alongside the other gig, and yet there was nothing either in his tone or manner to suggest that he thought it unusual for a young man to be turning his back upon his natural field of labour at this hour of the morning to drive off in exactly the opposite direction.
"Morning," Ambrose returned, warily attempting to creep past without further conversation. For if the doctor should open the broadside of his humour the secret of his journey might yet be wrested from him. Nevertheless, although the older man had stopped his horse too deliberately to be ignored, he showed no present desire to ask questions. Indeed, the usual smile had disappeared from his kind face, and his deeply lined eyes appeared anxious and worried. Just such a look Ambrose had seen while the doctor sat watching by the bedside of a critically ill patient.
"What troubles you, doctor?" he inquired.
In answer the man leaned across from his buggy, taking one of Ambrose's lean hands in his, and, unaccustomed to a touch with such magnetic power in it, a kind of electric thrill passed through the susceptible boy.
"It's you I've been troubling about lately, my son," Doctor Webb answered, "and now it seems as if Providence had just sent you along for me to speak to this morning. I've brought you out of children's diseases, chicken pox, measles and the like, but I've been seein' symptoms in you lately that have made me powerful uneasy, 'cause in this trouble it ain't in my power to help you through."