“It's there yet; Levi Tucker has it now. He's got the tavern, too, and I don't suppose he'd care to part with either. He's his own best customer; Colonel Sharp says he's producer and consumer both; I allow you didn't know the colonel?”
Again the stranger shook his head, and the driver's placid voice just pitched to carry above the rattle of wheels and the beat of hoofs, droned on, a colourless monotone of sound.
“I didn't suppose you did, he's since your time, I guess; he's editor of the Pioneer at Benson, and a powerful public speaker; I reckon near about as good as old Webster himself, only he ain't got the name. I don't remember ever seeing him but what he had his left hand tucked in at the top of his wes'-coat; yes, I reckon you might say he was a natural born speaker; when he gets stumped for a word he just digs it up from one of them dead languages, and everything he says is as full of meat as an egg; it makes you puzzle and study, and think, and even then you don't really get what he's driving at more than half the time. He's a mighty strong tobacco chewer, too, and spits clean as a fox—why clean as a fox I don't know,” he added, but he was evidently much pleased with this picturesque description of the colonel's favourite vice.
The stranger's glance had wandered down into the cool depths of the valley. It was twenty years since his eyes had rested on its peace and calm; its beauty of sun and shade and summer-time; much of his courage and more of his hope had gone in those years; he was coming back, wasted and worn, to the spot he had never ceased to speak of and to think of as home. He had looked forward to this return for health, but he knew now that the magic he had expected in his misery and home-sickness was not there; but he was inarticulate in his suffering, and perhaps mercifully enough did not know its depths, so even his own rude pity for himself was after all but the burlesque of the tragedy he had lived. Yet there still remained that greater purpose which was to make the road smooth for the child at his side where it had been filled with difficulties for him; there should be no more hardships, no more of those vast solitudes that sapped the life that filtered into them, that crazed or brutalized; these he had know; but these the boy should never know, for him there should be ease and riches,—splendid golden riches; his ignorance could scarce conceive their limit, the possibilities were so vast. Now he leaned far forward in his seat, hunger for the sight of some familiar object pinched his face with sudden longing.
“It's mighty pretty!” he said at last with a deep breath.
“Ain't it?” agreed Mr. Bartlett indulgently.
But the log cabins he had known were gone, and frame houses painted an unvarying white with vivid green blinds closed to the sun had taken their place. To the east and to the west of the town were waving fields of grain; with here and there an island of dense shade where a strip of woodland had been spared by the axe of the pioneer; on some of the more rugged hillsides from which the timber had been but recently cleared the blackened stumps were still standing. A blur of sound rose from the valley, it was like the droning of bees.
“That's the old Bendy furnace I hear, ain't it?”
“That's what it is,” said Mr. Bartlett.
The stranger sank back with a gesture of weariness, “It's a hell of a ways to come,” he said sourly. “It will be a lot easier when they get the railroads through here; that will knock you, pardner,” he added as a pleasant afterthought.