He tore himself loose from all the arms at once with a wild resolve, like an outcry:
“I’ll not think about it any longer! I’ll go mad if I do!”
He heard his own voice clattering across the fields, woke, looked about, and felt lost before he realized that he was in one of his own meadows.
He turned and backed the gig, and reached the highway again. The farmer, Albeson, was waiting for him, laughing:
“I seen you leave that old fool of a horse go his own sweet way, so I knowed you was fig’erin’ out some old law-soot or other. I was wonderin’ haow long you’d set there. Wall, it was a gre’t day yes’day, wa’n’t it?”
RoBards could laugh with the farmer heartily, for it showed how innocent his reverie looked to a witness; it showed that Albeson had not discovered anything amiss about the home.
He breathed elixir in the air and drove on to the house, finding it as always a mirror to his humor. It had been in turn an ancestral temple, a refuge from plague, a nuptial bower, a shelter for intrigue, a whited sepulcher. The tree had been a priest, a hypocrite, and now a faithful sentinel.
He was brought down again when Mrs. Albeson met him with a query: “How’s pore little Immy?”
She whispered, though there was no one else in the house.
“Mis’ Lasher has been takin’ on terrible along of her boy Jud lightin’ out for sea. Pity you let him live, for they do say a man what’s borned to be hung won’t never git drownded.”