I left them the next day, with a real reluctance. I had few friends, and these boys had come near to me in many ways. But years passed, and I never heard from them again. Mails were uncertain in those days. I wrote often, but they never received my letters.
But when I returned to the West, after thirty years' absence, this last spring, one of my chief aims was to find some traces of them. I took passage for W——, therefore, the largest town in their old county, finding that a railroad had invaded that region,—passing, by the way, through the very spot where we opened the mound. Business detained me in W—— for several days, and at the close of the week, one close, sultry evening, I was strolling about the dingy streets with the lonesome feeling which always besets one in a strange place, when I came to a little foot-bridge over the creek, from which opened a view of the river below, and the foundries glaring red on either side. It was a lonely place, though in the midst of a busy town. I stopped, leaning over the little hand-rail, looking down into the muddy water, and at the silent, melancholy lights burning dully in its depths and in the air above. There was a solitary figure on the bridge, which strangely entered into the quiet and dreariness of the scene, depressing it, giving to its dingy and unclean shadows a human significance of loss and discomfort. It was an old man, in a filthy suit of black, who stood smoking a coarse cigar and looking vacantly down into the creek. His head was bald, a fringe of uncombed red hair straggling about the pinched and pimpled face; it shook weakly when he tried to look at me; the light eyes blinked blindly in the dim light. A weak, tipsy bit of old human flesh, which once might have made a man; yet you fancied he had become a drunkard as a cowardly escape from pain,—that he had been disappointed before he had begun life. Nearly an hour I stood quietly watching him,—then, having known him for some time, I touched his arm.
"Abel," I said,—"Abel Steadman?"
He started, reddened in his old womanish fashion, and, when he recognized me at last, stood cringing, holding his frowzy hat in both hands with a subservient humility pitiful to see. His manhood had slipped from him so utterly, that his harmless vanity had left but the dregs of self-disgust.
"Come, man," I said, "be cheery at seeing an old friend. Give an account of yourself."
I forced him with me to the hotel, and ordered wine, seeing that he needed a stimulant. He had come unwillingly, almost angrily, and now sat on the edge of a chair, his hat held in both hands between his knees.
"That's no good,"—pushing the wine feebly away. "I only take it when I cannot breathe without."
After a long time, however, the poor creature seemed to waken into a faint likeness of his old self, and told me his story in a forlorn, disjointed way. After I heard it, I thought, cruelly enough, that he had had sufficient of his poor portion of life, and all that remained for him was to die as weakly as he had lived. I tried to rouse him by asking for his poems and essays.
"No good came of any of them yet. When I get my rights, I'll publish. It won't be long to wait now."
"You mean"——