When he had seen the stagecoach whirl off with Patty and had seen her handkerchief flaunt its last farewell through the dust, RoBards drove home.
Or was it home now? Home seemed to be a something cloudlike trailing after his wife. Home was the immediate neighborhood of his love.
His heart ached with anxiety for her. What if she should not arrive safely? The number of stagecoach accidents was astounding: drunken drivers, runaway horses, capsizings, collisions, kept up an endless succession of deaths and cripplings.
Thinking of Patty as perhaps doomed already he thought of her with overwhelming tenderness. The very road backward was denuded of the aureole she lent it. It stretched dour and stark in the harsh outlines of autumn. The trees were stripped of leaves; the lanes of their soft borders. Everything was naked and harsh. The wind was ugly, cynical; it tormented the flocks of fallen leaves, sent them into panics of flight with hoarse little cries and scurries.
This was no place for a rose like Patty.
He rode past the home of the Lashers. It was always autumn there. However, the wild flowers of spring held picnics in the lanes and the weeds put on their Sunday calico; however the peach trees and the plums and cherries in their disordered companies broke forth into hosannas of bloom and pelted the yard and the house with petal confetti, this house and this fence always sagged and creaked; the shutters hung and flapped in the breeze; the family slumped, eternally exhausted from the sheer neglect of industry.
None of the men was to be seen to-day; though the mother of the family, as always, hung over the washtub, bobbing up and down like a Judy on a string. She alone toiled, while the good-for-naught men dawdled and leered. They were as vicious as the filthy dogs that ran from the yard now and hurled themselves yelping at RoBards’ horses, trying to nip them while dodging their hooves. RoBards drove them off with whip and yell and the horses bolted.
As he approached his own house at length, still fuming with anger at the Lashers and their dogs, he saw his boy running toward him along the road. He was shrieking: “Papa! papa! papa!”
When Keith came up alongside the carry-all, he was gulping for breath, in such pain of fear and suffocation that he had to lean against the wheel a moment before he could speak.
But his trembling hands pointed and his eyes were wild with fear as he gasped: