And he has so placed his chair that he can look at Tilly, who has retired into her corner, without anyone else in the room seeing the look. Now she is sitting in deep shadows, far away from the kerosene lamp with which the room is lighted and as she sits there, half lost in the darkness, there is suddenly something—a haunting kind of beauty hangs over her.
She is a little excited by something father has managed in some indescribable way to do to the very air of the room. Tilly also was once young and must at some time have had her grand moment in life. Her moment was not very prolonged. Once, when she was a young woman, she went to a country dance and a man, who dealt in horses, took a fancy to her and carried her home after the dance in his buggy. He was a tall man with a heavy mustache and she—it was a moonlight night in October—she grew sad and wistful. The horse dealer half intended—well, he had been buying horses for a trucking company at Toledo, Ohio, had secured all he wanted and was leaving the neighborhood on the next day—the thing he felt during that evening later quite went out of his mind.
As for father he is, at the moment perhaps thinking of mother, when she was young and lovely and was a bound girl in just such another farmhouse, and surely he wanted something lovely for mother then as he does for Tilly now. I have no doubt at all that father always wanted lovely things for people—to happen to people—and that he had also an absurd and never-dying faith in himself—that he was, in some inscrutable way, appointed to be the bearer of lovely things to obscure people.
However, there is something else in his mind also. Is he not the fellow who, by his personal charm, is to earn for himself, Aldrich and the horse, board, a bed, a welcome—without pay—until the show is pulled off at the schoolhouse? That is his business now and this is his hour.
In fancy I can hear the tale he would now begin telling. There was that one about his escape from the guards when he was a Union soldier in the Civil War and was being marched off to a Southern prison camp. He would no doubt use that. It was a bull’s-eye story and always hit the mark! Oh, how often and under what varying circumstances has not my father escaped from prisons! Benvenuto Cellini or the Count of Monte Cristo had nothing on him.
Yes, the story he would now tell would be that once when it rained and the Union prisoners, father among them—some forty men in all—were being marched off along a road in the deep mud—
That was indeed a night of adventure! It was a tale he loved telling, and what realistic touches he could put into it: the rain that wet the prisoners to the skin—the cold—the chattering teeth—the groans of weary men—the closeness of the dark forest on either hand—the steady weary chug-chug of the feet of the prisoners in the mud—the line of guards at either side of the road, with the guns over their shoulders—the curses of the Rebel guards when they stumbled in the darkness.
What a night of weary anguish on the part of the prisoners! When they stopped to rest the guards went into a house and left the prisoners to stand outside in the rain, or lie on the bare ground, guarded by part of the company. If any died of exposure—well, there would be that many less men to feed when they were got into the Southern prison camp.
And now, after many days and nights, marching thus, the souls of the prisoners were sick with weariness. A dreary desolated look would come upon father’s face as he spoke of it.
They marched steadily along in the deep mud and the rain. How cold the rain was! Now and then, in the darkness, a dog barked, far away somewhere. There was a break in the solid line of timber along the road and the men marched across the crest of a low hill. There are lights to be seen now, in distant farmhouses, far away across a valley—a few lights like stars shining.