CHAPTER XXXV
GOLDEN BRIDGE
THEY followed the Susquehanna northward into Jean’s country—“my country” she had called it. They saw dawn and sunset brighten the glad water into silver and gold and bronze. They moved slowly, for it is sweet to loiter in that lovely valley when June is young, and a man in search of his soul may catch glimpses of it on the hilltops. When the days were hot they tramped at night and many pleasant adventures were theirs. We are foolish—we men—in our loving, thinking that we can hide the blind god’s arrow when it quivers in our hearts; and these men believed that each hid from the other his happiness in the knowledge that they journeyed toward her hills—“my country!” They loitered the more because Wayne knew she might not be there; she must be about her errands in the South and West, and he had no idea what effect her grandfather’s death might have had upon her affairs. At any rate it would be sweet to see the hills of her youth and the places that had known her.
They paused one afternoon at a little town to which their bags had been expressed. They had now come into the region where the irregular outlines of the anthracite breaker are roughly etched on the horizons, and Joe at once found acquaintances. The prospect of a baseball contest between the local nine and its formidable rival from a neighbouring town thrilled the community. Joe’s eligibility as an amateur was not discussed; the opposing nine openly boasted of a retired professional. He was got into uniform without ado, and put his left arm in commission with a few hours’ practice. The young fellow’s joy in this opportunity to display his skill emphasized to Wayne the irreconcilable difference between Jean Morley with her high aspirations and this young fellow with his childish ideals. There was no hour of the day that did not bring its thought of her.
Wayne sat amid a turbulent throng in the ball park and watched Joe with pride. And is there in the history of sport another game so exacting in its demands on skill, judgment and strength, so prolific of surprise, as our national game? Or did ever Greek athlete bend his lithe body into forms half so graceful as those seen a hundred times on the diamond in every contest! The shortstop at his nimble pick-up and throw has no points to yield to the Discobolus of Myron. Behold Joe Denny, a master of the pitcher’s art and all its subtle psychology! The man at the bat is less his antagonist than his victim. He plays upon doubt, hesitation, and suspense. His good nature, expressed in a half-ironic grin, is part of his equipment. That deliberate search for the proper footing, those tentative thrusts of his shoe into the earth, are features of his strategy. His glance at the bases is the most casual—never furtive or anxious. He holds the stage, the coolest figure in the scene. A declaration of war between powers is awaited less anxiously than his delivery. He caresses and woos the ball, but is at all times its master. He lifts it with a graceful sweep above his head; arms and body are in perfect agreement; the mind has devised the exact curve and speed of the flight, and the arm is shrewd in execution. The world leans to the ordained, controlled flight; there is quick after-play; and again young Atlas, a trifle bored by his applause, takes the ball into his hands and by wit and strength lures another batter to destruction. Whatever Joe’s right arm might have been, his left had its own peculiar cunning. After two innings he had the opposing batters at his mercy; his grin broadened under the stimulus of the cheering. He struck out three men in succession and the crowd was wild.
“They was fruit,” said Joe later, as he and Wayne ate supper in the village hotel. “They hadn’t any eye. They fanned before the ball started.”
“It’s too bad to waste you. You ought to go back into the game,” said Wayne. “You’d better write to those fellows who wanted you in New York before you cracked your arm. They’re always looking for talent.”
“Ain’t we goin’ to work? Ball playin’ ain’t work, it’s fun,” replied Joe; but Wayne knew that the taste of the joys of the game had whetted Joe’s appetite, and that only loyalty to himself kept him from going back to it.
A few nights later they walked into Denbeigh. This was Jean’s country at last and this was the town where she had grown to womanhood, and gone to school, and seen the dead men brought out of the pit. And here she and Joe had played together and had been sweethearts—this was in Wayne’s thought and not less in Joe’s we may well believe. But they did not speak her name and had not spoken it since the night Wayne visited Joe in the garage; and that was very long ago!
Wayne, more and more inexplicable to Joe, insisted that they should go to a miner’s boarding house, though there was a fair commercial hotel in the place. Wayne passed well enough for an American labourer now—big, vigorous, bearded, and shabby as to clothes. It was a question whether Joe, who had been faithful to his razor, did not inspire greater confidence in the beholder. A stranger in such a community is a marked man and his motives are sharply questioned; but Joe was on his own soil, and a power, it seemed, among the men of the pit, and he gave satisfactory assurances as to Wayne’s intentions. Pittsburg has few lines of contact with the anthracite country—a fact of which Wayne had been cognizant in choosing the upper Susquehanna for his exile, and his own name, if he had not dropped it, would have meant little here.
Joe had believed that when confronted by a day’s real work Wayne’s determination would weaken. Wayne was a man of whims, to be sure, but Joe had no illusions as to the nobility of labour, and having himself enjoyed the fleshpots of the Craighill kitchen he was confident that the food of the miner’s boarding house would give Wayne pause, if nothing else did. But Wayne kept doggedly to his resolution. He had received his commission to labour from Jean’s hands, and he had come into her country as into holy land. He was not a miner and under the law could not go down into the earth as he had expected, to wrest coal from its great caverns; but Joe found work for him as a teamster at the Florence colliery, hauling timbers and other supplies, and he himself instructed Wayne in his duties. The humour of the thing tickled Joe; Wayne Craighill with a pipe in his mouth, driving a mule team and running when the whistle blew, was certainly funny. And when the day’s work was done Wayne smoked and talked with the motley crowd at the boarding house and made them like him—as was his way. He caught a glimpse now and then, through the office window, of Craig, the chief engineer—a classmate of his at the “Tech,” bending over blue-prints of the workings; but they never met face to face.