The Way of the Strong

by Ridgwell Cullum

However eagerly his eyes gazed out ahead, his spirit was sorely enough depressed. He felt that he hated the golden wheat fields as they came within his view, spreading their rich carpet over the earth far as the eye could reach. He was struck, too, at the distance they had seemed to lie back in his memory. They seemed to belong to some other, long past existence that had no relation to his present. A great gulf seemed to have been crossed, a gulf, dreadful in its profundity, and somehow these lands belonged to it.

The delicious air of the plains seemed to oppress him. He felt that the invigorating breezes choked him. The golden sunlight, too, shining down upon the burnished grain, failed to raise a single pulse beat. Two years ago it would all have been so different.

But he knew that the change was in himself. Young as he was he knew that something of his youth had been snatched from him by the ruthless hand of life. He knew that here nothing was changed. The same breezes blew over the same fertile plains. The same sun shone down with its serene splendor. The same people dwelt on this glorious land. It was only he that was different.

The change he realized made him turn his eyes upon his new aspect of life with still further questioning, and he knew that it had brought him not one moment of happiness that could compare with those by-gone days, somewhere behind him, beyond the painful gulf he still feared to gaze upon.

But an added trouble was with him now. Fate had sternly decreed that his lot was still bound up with Deep Willows. There was no escape. Austin Leyburn had morally forced this place, he wished to shun, upon him, and, further, the subtle appeal of his affections had been played upon. There was mockery in the conflicting object, of his return to the place. His whole love was bound up in two women. He was paradoxically journeying to bring comfort to the two lives he had brought pain into, while, at the same time, he knew, in spite of Leyburn's assurances to the contrary, his duty pointed directly the opposite.

His boyish mind was disturbed, his kindly heart was troubled. While he believed that his new thought was right, all his inclinations tore him in other directions, now that his affections had been brought into conflict.

At last he drove down the wood-lined main street of the village. He passed several empty, outlying houses which he remembered he had always known as empty. The rotting sidewalk of wood, too, was just the same as he remembered it. He passed the little wooden church, which possessed a bell so reminiscent of the prairie homestead. There, too, was the parson's house beside it. Then, next, a cross street, and beyond that the stores, six in number, that made up the commercial interests of the place. On the next corner stood the Russell Hotel. Yes, he could see it. There was a buggy outside it. There was generally a buggy outside it, he remembered. Whose was it? There was some one in it. Ah, yes, a woman. No, why it was—yes, it was Phyllis.

His heart beat fast as his buckboard rattled up. His eyes had grown bright with something of their old boyish smile of delight as he noted the bent head of the girl poring over a book she was reading. For the moment, all his doubts and regrets were forgotten. Phyllis was waiting for him. Waiting, though he did not realize it, as she would always wait for him.

He called out a greeting as he drew nearer, and the girl looked up with a glad smile. Then, though many yards still separated them, he became aware of a marked change in her young face. She was thinner, the old freshness of her rounded cheeks had somehow sobered down to a delicate smoothness, almost thinness. The brilliant look of perfect, open-air health had given place to a delicate pallor that in no way robbed her of beauty, but quite banished the sun-tanned freshness gleaned from her work in the fields. Her eyes, too, they seemed bigger and wider than ever. Then there was her change of attire. The old Phyllis was gone. Here was a city girl in her place, dressed with simple taste, but in clothes that must have cost far more money than she could afford.

But his astonishment did not lessen his delight at the sight of her. Never had she looked more beautiful to him, never had she possessed more attraction. He knew that most of her time was spent at Monica's side, a place he often felt that should have been his. She had told him of the changes in her life, and that since Monica's illness her own home and mother saw her at week-ends only, while Hendrie's money provided that her little farm lacked not in its prosperity.