Harvey glanced down at himself, thoughtfully.
“He began, then, to look as if he was mad. A gaunt thing in rags. I dunno how he and the woman lived at all in them days. He didn’t do any work. He was all the time lookin’ for his claim.”
Harvey glanced up at a star limned in a sky as clear as water. “I hope,” he said, under his breath, “all he said and thought and did in them days is forgiven him. If his soul was black in him can you wonder? If he was ready to curse God and die, can you blame him? After all, ’twasn’t for himself he wanted it so bad.
“There was a day at last, a day in summer. He kind of woke up from a nightmare that day. And he knew it was the end.
“He knew he was finished. He knew he couldn’t go on no more. It’s so, you know. A man gets his soul used up same as his body, when things is too much against him. He knew he just couldn’t go on. He went out in the hills that day, just the same. But he was through with it. The dirty tricks of Life had downed him. He was flat on his back, laid out on the mat, in the great Ring that’s seen the finish of better men than he.
“He kissed his wife. He didn’t take a pick or a shovel that day to dig rocks with. He took his old gun. And he told her—God forgive him!—that he was goin’ to shoot birds.
“He went away, miles about the hills. Everything looked new and strange to him—like things do when you’re looking your last on ’em. He didn’t regard where he was goin’. It was all one. At last he came to a valley under great rocks, where the spruce clung with roots like snakes. He’d no memory of it. He sat down and set the gun between his knees, and slipped off his boot.”
Harvey’s voice checked, faltered. For the first time he moved. He leaned across the fence, and laid a big hand—which shook a little—on the shoulder of the old man squatting in the dew.
“Only for that old pedlar-man that gave him the little packet of flower-seeds,” he said, solemnly—“only for him, that feller’s bones’d be layin’ among the rocks to this day, where the foxes had left ’em.
“For he had his toe on the trigger, friend, when he saw white flowers in bloom a few yards off. At the foot of a slope of loose stones—white columbines.