Evening was closing to a perfect night. White flowers fell from the locust-trees along the grass, and moths as white and silent haunted the garden of white flowers. A woman came from the house and stood on the white steps as if she were watching something in the garden shadows, and a white cat rubbed against her dress. Harvey’s voice, when it came, was hushed; yet it seemed to break a silence as perfect as a pearl:
“When the feller I’ve been tellin’ you about looked at the little packet, he saw there was writing on it. It said—Harvey spoke as if reading from memory—it said, ‘White Columbine. Hardy perennial. Sow in autumn in carefully prepared soil.’ D’you see anything queer about the flowers in my garden, friend?”
Again the answer came, slowly, from the other side of the fence:
“There are many of one kind.”
The old man stretched a hand through the bars and lightly touched one blossom of a thousand white columbines.
“That’s right. And when the feller had read the writing he gave a kind thought to the pedlar, and put the packet of seeds in his pocket, and forgot it.
“He’d enough to make him forget more things than a packet of flower-seeds an old pedlar had given him. If you knew those hills, you’d know that there was storms on ’em that leap on a man like wolves. He was caught in one, and all night he was lost on the mountains.
“Level rain that drove in his face like a wall: wind that bruised the livin’ flesh on his bones: sleet to glass the rocks, and a moon no more than a blot in the scud—he knew no more of the night. He kep’ going some way, thinkin’ of the woman that waited for him. If he hadn’t fixed his mind on her he’d have just given up and laid down and died, for the weather used him cruel, and he’d no heart to fight it, only because of her. Then he found he’d missed the trail, and he didn’t greatly care—only for her.
“He went on in the dark and the storm, tryin’ to strike back to the trail lower down. He couldn’t make it. Seemed as if he was in hills he’d never been in before, so strange and wild they were with the dark. At last the rain beat him down, and the wind dazed him, and he fell.
“He thought he fell into death. He did fall a long way, but not that far. He came to, very weak, sprawled on a slope of loose stones. If he moved, they moved too. He’d no wish to move for awhile. He was badly knocked about, and his clothes were half-tore off his back, but after a bit he thought of his wife, and got to his hands and knees, groaning. Then the moon came out clear, and he looked at what the slipping stones had uncovered.”