“Your ticket, sir, if you please.”
Winthrop opened his eyes and blinked. The train was swaying along between green, sunlit forest walls, and at his side the conductor was waiting with good-humored patience. Winthrop yielded the last scrap of his green strip and sat up. Suddenly the wood fell behind on either side, giving place to wide fields which rolled back from the railroad to disappear over tiny hills. They were fertile, promising-looking fields, chocolate-hued, covered with sere, brown cotton-plants to which here and there tufts of white still clung. Rail fences zigzagged between them, and fire-blackened pine stumps marred their neatness. At intervals the engine emitted a doleful screech and a narrow road crossed the track to amble undecidedly away between the fields. At such moments Winthrop caught glimpses of an occasional log cabin with its tipsy, clay-chinked chimney and its invariable congress of lean chickens and leaner dogs. Now and then a commotion along the track drew his attention to a scurrying, squealing drove of pigs racing out of danger. Then for a time the woods closed in again, and presently the train slowed down before a small station. Winthrop reached tentatively toward his bag, but at that instant the sign came into sight, “Cowper,” he read, and settled back again.
Apparently none boarded the train and none got off, and presently the journey began once more. The conductor entered, glanced at Winthrop, decided that he didn’t look communicative and so sat himself down in the corner and leisurely bit the corner off a new plug of tobacco.
The fields came into sight again, and once a comfortable-looking residence gazed placidly down at the passing train from the crest of a nearby hill. But Winthrop saw without seeing. His thoughts were reviewing once more the chain of circumstances which had led link by link to the present moment. His thoughts went no further back than that painful morning nearly two years before when he had discovered Gerald Potter huddled over his desk, a revolver beside him on the floor, and his face horrible with the stains of blood and of ink from the overturned ink-stand. They had been friends ever since college days, Gerald and he, and the shock had never quite left him. During the subsequent work of disentangling the affairs of the firm the thing haunted him like a nightmare, and when the last obligation had been discharged, Winthrop’s own small fortune going with the rest, he had broken down completely. Nervous prostration, the physician called it. Looking back at it now Winthrop had a better name for it, and that was, Hell. There had been moments when he feared he would die, and interminable nights when he feared he wouldn’t, when he had cried like a baby and begged to be put out of misery. There had been two months of that, and then they had bundled him off to a sanitarium in the Connecticut hills. There he, who a few months before had been a strong, capable man of thirty-eight, found himself a weak, helpless, emaciated thing with no will of his own, a mere sleeping and waking automaton, more interested in watching the purple veins on the backs of his thin hands than aught else in his limited world. At times he could have wept weakly from self-pity.
But that, too, had passed. One sparkling September morning he lay stretched at length in a long chair on the uncovered veranda, a flood of inspiriting sunlight upon him, and a little breeze, brisk with the cool zest of Autumn, stirring his hair. And he had looked up from the white and purple hands and had seen a new world of green and gold and blue spread before him at his feet, a twelve-mile panorama of Nature’s finest work retouched and varnished overnight. He had feasted his eyes upon it and felt a glad stirring at his heart. And that day had marked the beginning of a new stage of recovery; he had asked, “How long?”
The last week in October had seen his release. He had returned to his long-vacant apartment in New York fully determined to start at once the work of rebuilding his fallen fortunes. But his physician had interposed. “I’ve done what I can for you,” he said, “and the rest is in your own hands. Get away from New York; it won’t supply what you need. Get into the country somewhere, away from cities and tickers. Hunt, fish, spend your time out of doors. There’s nothing organically wrong with that heart of yours, but it’s pretty tired yet; nurse it awhile.”
“The programme sounds attractive,” Winthrop had replied, smilingly, “but it’s expensive. Practically I am penniless. Give me a year to gather the threads up again and get things a-going once more, and I’ll take your medicine gladly.”
The physician had shrugged his shoulders with a grim smile.