“I reckon you don’t have to work?” the farmer asked, baffled in his attempts to account for a young man who strolled over the country so aimlessly, wearing what struck him as an outlandish garb.
“Oh, but I do! I’ve done considerable work as I’ve sauntered around. I’m an architect—or hope to be! I’ve earned my keep as I’ve traveled by getting jobs as a draughtsman.”
“Going to stop in the city?” the woman inquired. “I guess there’s lots of architects over there.”
“Yes,” Bruce replied, following the direction of her glance.
“You know folks there?” she persisted. “I guess it’s hard getting started if you ain’t got friends.”
“There’s a chap living there I knew in college; that’s all. But when you strike a strange town where you don’t know anyone the only thing to do is to buckle in and make them want to know you!”
“I guess you can do that,” she remarked with shy admiration.
The farmer shuffled his feet on the brick walk. For all he knew the young stranger might be a burglar. He resented his wife’s tone of friendliness and resolved to deny the request if the young man asked the privilege of sleeping in the barn; but the stranger not only failed to ask for lodging, but produced a dollar bill and insisted that the woman accept it. This transaction served instantly to dispel the farmer’s suspicions. He answered with unnecessary detail Bruce’s questions as to the shortest way to town, and walked with him to a lane that ran along the edge of a cornfield and afforded a short cut to the highway.
Bruce had expected to reach the city before nightfall, but already the twilight was deepening and the first stars glimmered in the pale sky. Now that he was near the end of his self-imposed wanderings, he experienced a sense of elation. The unhappy thoughts with which he had left his Ohio home a little more than a year earlier had gradually become dim in his memory. The letters he had burned at the riverside really marked in his consciousness a dispersion of doubts and questions that left his spirit free. His mother’s revelation had greatly shaken him; but she need never have told him; and it spoke for her courage and her faith in him that she had confessed the truth. They had been companions in an unusual sense. From his earliest youth she had interested him in the things that had been her delight—books, music, pictures. She was herself an accomplished musician, and strains of old melodies she had taught him recurred to him now, and as he swung along the country road he whistled them, happy for the first time in the awakening of old memories.
With the cool breeze blowing upon him from fields of tall ripening corn, there was no bitterness in his soul. He had beaten down the bitter thoughts that had assailed him in the early days of his journeying—the sense that a stigma attached to him, not the less hateful because he alone had knowledge of it; and the feeling that there was something fantastic in the idea that he should put himself where, in any need, he could serve the father he had never known.