They tried to keep track of him, to see which one of which neighbor’s daughters he was frequenting. But he always managed to elude them. He would lie coiled in a chair somewhere reading Walter Scott or Dickens or Byron, or the morbid Poe, until they gave over watching him. When they looked for him he had vanished.
They decided to take him back to the city, in spite of the heat of the late September and the charm of the golden countryside. The announcement staggered the boy. It dazed them to see one so young so capable of despair—as if any age were immune to anguish; as if a little pitcher could not overflow as well as a large.
One afternoon he got away from the house with a fox’s craftiness. RoBards missed him immediately and, seizing his hat, set out in pursuit, knowing that Junior had but little start of him.
He hurried to the gate and looked up and down the road. In neither direction was anyone visible. What other way could the boy have gone? The view before him was wide and clear; the hill fell away in such broad billows that the eye commanded more of the scene than a man could have covered, running.
The only region left to explore was above and back of the house. RoBards had avoided that realm for years. Up there was the Tarn of Mystery, where he had almost killed Jud Lasher; up there were the thickets where he had hunted him down and ended him.
There was no pleasure in invading that accursed demesne of black memories, but his frenzy for an answer to the riddle of his son outweighed his reluctance.
He turned and marched grimly up the slope. It seemed to have steepened since he ran up it so fleetly years ago. His breath was shorter—excitement it was, no doubt, that made his heart beat faster and more heavily.
Time had wrought upon everything up here. Bushes were clumps of shrubbery; saplings were trees; trees were columns upholding the sky. The very boulders seemed to have enlarged with age. The dead logs must have grown higher and fatter. At the top he had to pause and sink to the ground till his heart slowed up. Sitting here he could see afar. The autumnal winds had torn away foliage like curtains pulled down, discovering a wide expanse of the surging Westchester scene.
The last time he was up here there was hardly another home to be descried except his own roof and the distant hut of the Lashers. Now there were gables and chimneys and gateways everywhere. A few of the houses were mansions, snowy colonial residences with high white pillars reminiscent of Greek temples.
The Lasher rookery alone was not new. It was older, more ramshackle than ever, though he had noted as he passed the growth of the little brats to big brats.