III
AFTER DINNER THE NEXT day I said good-bye and drove back to Hastings to
take the train for Black Hawk. Antonia and her children gathered round my
buggy before I started, and even the little ones looked up at me with
friendly faces. Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate. When I
reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back. The group was still there
by the windmill. Antonia was waving her apron.
At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm on the
wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off into the pasture.
`That's like him,' his brother said with a shrug. `He's a crazy kid.
Maybe he's sorry to have you go, and maybe he's jealous. He's jealous of
anybody mother makes a fuss over, even the priest.'
I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his fine
head and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat, the
wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.
`Don't forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up on the
Niobrara next summer,' I said. `Your father's agreed to let you off after
harvest.'
He smiled. `I won't likely forget. I've never had such a nice thing
offered to me before. I don't know what makes you so nice to us boys,' he
added, blushing.
`Oh, yes, you do!' I said, gathering up my reins.
He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed pleasure
and affection as I drove away.
My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends were dead
or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were playing
in the Harlings' big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had been cut
down, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that
used to guard the gate. I hurried on. The rest of the morning I spent
with Anton Jelinek, under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his
saloon. While I was having my midday dinner at the hotel, I met one of the
old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me up to his office and
talked over the Cutter case with me. After that, I scarcely knew how to
put in the time until the night express was due.
I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land
was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of
early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I
felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of
autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could see
the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about
stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour, I remembered so well.
Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the
wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle-paths the plumes of
goldenrod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold
threads in it. I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over
little towns, and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant to
take with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.
There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet. Even after the
boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp along
a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.
As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumble
upon a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the north
country; to my grandfather's farm, then on to the Shimerdas' and to the
Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the
highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence was
all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing
across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling and
doubling like a rabbit before the hounds.
On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared--were mere shadings in
the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them. But wherever the
road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find. The rains had made channels
of the wheel-ruts and washed them so deeply that the sod had never healed
over them. They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the
slopes where the farm-wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a
pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses. I sat
down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the slanting sunlight.
This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got
off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering
children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to
hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by
that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near
that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of
coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's
experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;
had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us
all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring
us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the
precious, the incommunicable past.
