He never came back.
In two years the Honorable Peter was as extinct, so far as the American Congress, newspapers and people were concerned, as any saurian dead before the Flood. His mother died. Peter had always been an alien to her, a perpetual disquiet. But when he was gone the thorn was out of her flesh. She talked and thought of him as in his babyhood, and left him her blessing at the last. As year after year crept by, the twin-brothers ceased to talk of him. But it was because they had begun to think of him with that strained, tense attention with which we sit and listen for the steps of one who long delays his coming, and who may be dead by the way.
He might come back any day, with a crown of glory on his head. Or—was he dead? So many ships went down in that dim outer world—so many cities were burned; legions of men were swept away in battle; in short, the millions of graves which dotted the earth's surface only meant to these Boyers the one possible grave where he might lie. The gray-headed old men went stealthily alone at night sometimes to the big chest and turned over again the poems and essays yellow now with age, and the gilded prize-books. But they never spoke to each other of them.
About eighty miles from Black Mountains, in a hamlet on the Nantahela range, the whereabouts of Peter Boyer was discussed one July day as a subject of more practical interest. All the men in Sevier—a dozen, all told—were gathered as usual under the great oak which stood by the pump in the middle of the square. It was a grassy, weedy square: one or two cows lay chewing the cud on it, as they did all day long. Why not? There was never enough noise in the little street which ran round its four sides to disturb them. In the evening the women went out and milked them just where they were: occasionally, a meditative sow with her litter, or a slouching boy, passed them; or a canvas-covered wagon drawn by a steer would lumber slowly along, stop, and a woman get out of it with a bag of ginseng or angelica to barter for sugar and shoes; or a farmer in butternut homespun would jog up the street on his mule, his gun and bag of rations strapped behind, on his way to the higher peaks to salt his wild cattle; or a party of Cherokees from Qualla would come in with baskets to sell; or Seth Keen, the dwarf hunter, would bring in a roll of wolf-skins, and stay to tell his old stories over for the hundredth time. But these were rare events: on ordinary days the cows dozed undisturbed in the sleepy, foggy air, and the men lounged on the trough by the pump, and smoked from morning until bed-time, and cracked jokes on each other, and told marvellous stories of the war and its ravages.
"It giv' Sevier a staggerin' blow, gentlemen," old Judge Scroope would say: "we'll never recover from it. I tell you, Jefferson Davis an' Lincoln wur men the country hed no use for. Nor the Almighty neyther. That's my cool jedgment, now that we are out of the fracas. Look at the ruin them men wrought around you!"
And his audience would look around them, and shift their legs, and shake their heads with solemn conviction, though they knew, and he knew that they knew, that since North Carolina began to exist the decrepit frame houses yonder had turned the same pauper faces to the square in Sevier, and that their grandfathers in homespun had lounged just as they did on this very broken trough, and watched their lean cows chew the cud, and leisurely abused the Federalists for the ruin of the country. Twice a year the judge and Lawyer Grayson rode down to court and crossed the old track of Sherman and his raiders, and coming back would tell of levelled fences and burned barns. For thirteen years they had gone down, and the barns and fences yet lay as Sherman left them, as unchanged as the gneiss rocks about them.
On this day, however, they had a new subject to discuss. The sheepskin-covered chair which sat by the pump day and night the year round, ready for the judge, had been empty for two weeks. The old man had pneumonia, and was on his deathbed. Every morning the doctor brought a full account of his latest symptoms, and the crowd drearily discussed them during the rest of the day over interminable melancholy games of backgammon.
On this morning Grayson the lawyer had been sent for.
"The old gentleman's going to make his will," said the doctor, taking a seat.