I have been reproved by some of the judicious for putting so much food in these narratives. Nevertheless the first warm potato tasted like peacocks’ tongues, the next like venison, and the next like ambrosia, and the next like a good warm potato with butter on it. One might as well leave Juliet out of Verona as food like this out of a road-story. As we ate we hinted to each other of our many ups and downs. He mumbled along, telling his tale. He did not care whether he heard mine or not.
He had been born nearby. In early manhood he had been taken with the oil fever. It happened in this wise:—He had cut his foot splitting kindling. Meditating ambition as he slowly recovered, he resolved to go to town. He sold his small farm and wasted his substance in speculation. At the same time his young wife and only child died of typhoid fever. He was a laborer awhile in the two cities to the northeast. Then he came back here to plough corn.
He had been saving for two years, had made money enough to go back “pretty soon” and enter what he considered a sure-thing scheme, that I gathered had a close relation to the oil business. He said that he had learned from experience to sift the good from the bad in that realm of commerce.
He put brakes on the slow freight train of his narrative. “I was about to explain, when you ast to come in, that I don’t afford dessert to my meals often.”
“If you will excuse me,” I said, emptying my pockets, “these figs, these dates, these oranges, these animal crackers were given me by Death, and the Devil. Eat hearty.”
“Death and the Devil. What kind are they?”
“They’re not a bad sort. Death gave me honey for dinner, and the Devil did no worse than drive me a little out of my way.”
He smiled vaguely. He thought it was a joke, and was too interested in the food itself to ask any more questions.
The balmy smokeless wind from the south was whistling, whistling past the window, and through the field. How much one can understand by mere whispers! The wind cried, “Life, life, life!” Some of the young corn was brushing the walls of the cottage, and armies on armies of young corn were bivouacing further down the road, lifting their sacred tassels toward the stars.
There was no change in the expression of the countenance of my host, eating, talking, or sitting still in the presence of the night. I may have had too poor an estimate of his powers, but I preached no sermon that evening.