I.
NATURE did her best for Sequatchee Valley. Between those long parallel lines of wooded ranges has been lavished every grace of landscape, every advantage of soil and many a treasure of mineral resource. And, as though these gifts were not sufficient, art brought a masterpiece, in the estimation of the simple-minded population, when a notable circus company, known as Slate’s Great Moral Hippodrome and Zoological Exhibition, passed through the favored region.
A certain village, set in rolling green meadows, was all agog. It had broken out with juveniles as though with the measles. About the great white tents were also crowded adults of various ages, sizes, and colors, eager to obtain a surreptitious glimpse of sawdust, of trained horses, perchance the gleam of tinsel and spangles denoting some popular equestrian star. Amid the mingled noises rose the frightful din of a calliope, and “Shoo Fly” shrilly dominated over quiet meadows and summer woods, more accustomed to the mocking bird’s carol and the field lark’s cry. The mid-day glare of sunshine rested on the tents and vans; on the luxurious lawn a-down the long narrow valley; on the hazy slopes of distant Cumberland Mountains; on the gleaming lines of the railroad close at hand; on the passenger train that with a sullen annunciatory roar and shrill whistle swept around the curve and drew up at the wooden station.
Two men in front of that structure watched its approach. One belonged to the large class of countrymen that come to town often and stay late, that spend much time in saloons and on street corners favoring an audience with valuable opinions, vaticinations, or narrations. He sat on a high goods-box, his heels drumming against it, his hat drawn over his eyes, a quid of tobacco in his mouth, the very personification of the rustic loafer.
The other, the bareback rider of the circus company, had an odd look of being neither old nor young and an expression of habitual fretfulness. To rural eyes his flashy shop-made suit was the extreme of fashionable elegance, and in contrast to the rural appreciation of the magnitude of this occasion his indifference to the near approach of two o’clock seemed consummate recklessness. His listless eyes turning from the train rested on a little white house near at hand, with lilac and althea bushes in the yard, and a primly ordered garden at one side.
Suddenly the door opened and a woman came quickly down the gravel walk, stopped at the little gate, and laid her hands upon it. She was tall and meager; her hair, growing thick and low, was white, so white that it seemed to flash back the sunlight in restless sparkles as snow does. Her face was pale, but, in contrast to those sad colorless masses about her brow, it was almost swarthy. Yet, despite the pallor and the sharp outlines, and the pathos of burning anxieties, that face had a strong power, the power of an absorbing emotion and an enduring purpose.
The strolling circus attaché, Tom Hart, was not usually impressionable; now, however, he was impressed.
“Who’s that woman?” he asked of the countryman perched on the goods-box; “she’s mighty cur’us looking.”
“An’ the Widder Blake don’t look no cur’user ’n what she is,” responded the other.
The rapt eagerness on her worn features intensified as she gazed in a sort of anguish of expectancy on the faces framed by the car window; a pause, the momentary stoppage was over, the clang and roar again rose on the air, and the woman turned away with a dreadful despondency in her eyes.
“How’s she cur’us?” asked Tom Hart.
“Wa-a’l,” drawled the other, “she come here some ten ’r ’leven year ago from No’th Ca’iny, an’ from the fust folks noticed she was sorter cur’us in her head. Ye see her son—a mighty peart boy, fourteen or fifteen year old an’ ez strong ez an ox—he got in a scuffle one day at a fair with another bill-country feller ’bout a jack-knife, an’ this ‘ere young Blake fetched him a lick ‘twixt his eyes an’ he fell down fur dead. An’ young Blake’s uncle happened ter be in town, and he hustled the boy off on the kyars. An’ t’other feller, he laid in a swound a long time, but they brung him to at last’.”
“I ain’t heard about the crazy part yet,” remarked Tom Hart, drily.
“Well, I’m comin’ ter that,” replied the leisurely narrator. “Ye see, Blake’s mother was mighty nigh distracted when she found out her boy was gone, an’ nobody knowed whar. Her hair, it turned white as driven snow in jes’ one night. An’ she was sorter flighty fur awhile. An’ ever since this here branch road has been built she’s got it in her head that her boy’s a-comin’ back on the train: they had tole her he went off on the kyars, an’ she made up her mind he had ter come back on ’em. Ev’y time they turn the curve she’s thar at the gate a-waitin’. Passenger or freight, it’s all the same ter her. Well, thar ain’t been one word from that feller since that day. Some thinks he’s dead, an’ some says she’s foolin’ herself; but me, I believe she’s right, an’ that he is he’ll never come back.”
“Why don’t he write to his folks?” propounded Tom Hart, taking a final whiff of his cigar and tossing the stump down on the railroad track.
“He couldn’t read nor write nothink, he was such an ignorant cuss. He never had been out of the hills in his born days till he went down ter the fair with his uncle—never had seen a town, nor kyars, nor nothink. You dunno anythink ’bout the mountain folks in No’th Ca’liny nor Tennessee nuther,” nodding, with the disparagement of high culture, toward the blue hills. “They’re the mos’ ignorant folks in this worl’.”
He evidently relished thus figuring as the exponent of civilization in expounding worldly differences.
“I reckon,” he continued, “the feller was too green ter git anybody ter write fur him, or mebbe ‘fraid. You see when he went away he thought t’other boy was dead.”
There was a pause. Tom Hart again looked, with the approbation of a town man of bucolic tastes, at the trim cottage with its surroundings of leaf-flecked grass and clustering roses, and background of woods lot, where a meditative cow or two stood in the shade. “She’s got a pretty nice little place,” he remarked.
“’Tis that,” acceded the other. “An’ she’s a mighty fine manager, she is. She didn’t have nothink sca’cely when she come here, but somehow she gits along astonishin’ well. She managed ter rake an’ scrape enough ter finish payin’ fur that ther little place o’hern, an’ ev’y now an’ then she makes out ter buy a pig here an’ a cow thar, an’ such like. An’ thar never was sech a woman for luck. When other folks’s sheep die with the rot, she never loses a one, an’ the smut ‘ll be on ev’ry body’s wheat ‘ceptin’ hern. She has ter work mighty hard though. She’s up early an’ down late, but she makes a right sharp chance o’ money, fust an’ last. An’ what d’ye think she does with it?” glancing up with a grin.
Tom Hart looked a listless interrogative.
“She says she’s savin’ it up for ter send her son Johnny to school! An’ by this time, ef he ain’t dead, he’s a man, grown—twenty-four or five year old.”
The ignorant yeoman had lazily but with evident enjoyment. His respect for the Widow Blake’s worldly possessions was not sufficient to cancel his appreciation of this absurdity. He had no sense of any pathetic phase of the story.
“Folks say,” he continued, “she even lays his suit of clothes out fur him ev’y day, an’ breshes ’em reg’lar. Them clothes is breshed mighty nigh threadbare.” He laughed again.
There was a long pause. Tom Hart remarked that he wished he was in her son Johnny’s shoes. That was a decent sort of little place, and he was damned tired of the dog’s life he was leading. Then he languidly moved his shoulder from the red cedar post, straightened himself with an effort, and strolled toward the tent.
“Mighty easy life,” soliloquized the rustic, gazing after him disparagingly, “ridin’ a gentle horse ’round a ring. Easy as fallin’ off a log.”
II.
In the great yellow-white tent the audience, with the immobility characteristic of rural frequenters of the circus, watched the various artists in spangles and tights. The nearest approach to applause was the chorus of guffaws that greeted at intervals some favorite witticism of the clown. There was no lack of close attention—noticeably increased when one of the heavy vans was rolled into the arena. The red boards were removed, and through the iron bars were revealed two immense lions, and in a separate compartment, judiciously fenced from his companions, a virulent looking leopard that evinced its gratitude for its abrupt presentation to a position of note by seizing the bars in its forepaws, shaking them violently, and grinning viciously at the audience.
Suddenly there appeared upon the sawdust an impressive figure, a man of gigantic stature, of unusual strength, and great length of limb. His movements were as supple and as suggestive of covert power as the movements of a tiger. He wore silk tights and a blue velvet doublet profusely garnished with silver; the gratified spectators remarked, with that pleasing indifference to the peril of other people which has been a characteristic of spectators from the days of Roman gladiators to the days of Barnum, that he carried no weapon. As he advanced he looked a very Hercules for strength, a young Apollo for beauty of form and face. But he was only the most ordinary of mortals, bedecked with the poor gaudiness of cheap stage finery, following a disreputable and dangerous calling, sadly addicted to drink and cards, and, as he had said of himself with defective grammar and a vile provincial accent, “The onluckiest pore creetur what walks a-top o’ God A’mighty’s earth.”
This was Signor Brunelleschi, the noted lion-tamer, or in plain English, one Jack Topp.
No applause greeted him, but there was an intent curiosity in many faces and a craning forward of many heads during the half-minute that he approached the cage; in another instant the door was flung open, he sprang forward with an indescribable elasticity of motion, the door was slammed, and Signor Brunelleschi walked up and down the confined space, with head erect and an easy confident manner, while now and then the light whip cracked sharply above the cowering brutes that crawled after him and fawned upon him.
The pleased and attentive audience—pleased in the secondary sensation of the vanquished brutes, as it was not to have the more thrilling sensation of the vanquished man—was gratified that Signor Brunelleschi should put his head into the mouth of first one lion then the other. Then he held one lion by the hind feet, the forepaws grasping the bars convulsively, while the other lion leaped over and under its horizontal companion. Then these maneuvers were repeated with the leopard, and the grave and business-like air with which that leopard went through his share of the entertainment was indeed worth seeing. Then the leopard was again shut out; then after the firing of two pistols handed through the bars by a bandy-legged super in red velvet—the noise sending the lions cowering to the other extremity of the cage—large steaks of bloody beef were presented by the rubicund Signor Brunelleschi. Excited expectation on the part of the spectators touching the probability that the lions, tasting blood, would become more ferocious, and a decided and growing impression that this time Signor Brunelleschi had done it once too often! But no! he thrust the meat between the bars and the lions were shaking the bars, growling furiously, evidently regretting bitterly that they had not lunched on Signor Brunelleschi as well as on the bloody steaks.
The lion tamer found his friend, Tom Hart, awaiting him.
“Let’s have a beer, Jack,” said Tom.
“Jest ez soon ez I ken git shucked o’ these ‘ere traps,” replied the lion-tamer.
Big and strong as he was the expression of his countenance was mild and acquiescent, and he spoke in a soft voice, with low-spirited inflections and an incongruous mixture of the accent noticeable in the lower classes in cities and the patois characteristic of certain hilly regions of the Southern seaboard States.
It was with some reason that Jack Topp inveighed against his luck. He had lived much of the time out of employment, to-day in abject want, to-morrow recklessly squandering the money obtained by fortuitous odd jobs and signalizing his brief prosperity by falling unresisting into any petty scrape into which his wild associates might choose to lead him. So many and varied had been his vicissitudes that his mental attitude had come to be an acquiescent despondency.
“Ef I buy a ticket in a lottery, the cussed thing is sure to bust; an’ ef I was ter bet on four aces I b’lieves I’d be beat outen my money somehow’n other,” he would say.
He had climbed to his present elevation by slow degrees, having begun with the office of watering the elephant. The bareback rider was now-a-days his constant companion, and it was his habit to aver that, “Tom’s the bes’ feller in the world, an’ ef it hadn’t a-been fur Tom Hart, God only knows what would have become o’ pore Jack Topp.”
No one could say what service Tom Hart had ever rendered him except to scold him violently when he did or said anything at variance with his mentor’s views, to lend him small sums of money—which, however, was a reciprocal accommodation—and to give him a great deal of advice, to which he always listened with much docility and followed as far as in him lay. Some speculation had obtained among the circus people as to the origin and growth of this friendship. It was said that Jack Topp was a meek, bewildered fellow, ready to be led by anyone enterprising enough to take charge of him; that Tom Hart was a selfish fellow who wanted a friend willing to sing his praises, fight his battles, and endure his temper. But the theory generally received was, that one of the men had done something, perhaps long ago, of which the consequences were serious, and that the other was cognizant of the facts. Moreover, it was the prevalent impression that Jack Topp was the perpetrator of the indefinite something.
“Else ’ow does it ’appen,” demanded the Cockney ring-master, convincingly, “that Jack is allers a-follerin’ of ’im an’ a-mindin’ as he’s bid. That’s what I say.”
Tom Hart, however, knew no more of the athletic lion-tamer’s early history than did the rest of his nomadic companions. Though Jack Topp was weak and confiding, he told nobody of one dark episode. He firmly believed that to the shadow it had cast over his life might be referred the great superfluity of ill fortune that had fallen to his lot. He tried to lose the recollection in drink, in his gabbling habit, in his roistering life with wild comrades; but it would not vanish, and he had come to endure it with an uncomplaining acquiescence that in a dignified subject might rise to some height of pathetic fortitude. He was not a dignified subject, however, not morally picturesque enough, perhaps, for this sort of thing; only a traveling charlatan pursued by an unforgotten and unavailing remorse wherever he went in his ceaseless wanderings.
The two men strolled toward a little grocery where they obtained the liquid refreshment they sought; then they sauntered aimlessly along the railroad track toward the wooden depot.
A sudden prolonged shrill whistle and a metallic sound vibrating along the rails portended the approach of the train. From the little white house on the green slope of the hill the woman that Tom Hart had noticed a few hours ago came with the same hurried steps down the front walk and stood at the gate waiting for the cars to pass—the same haggard hunger in her intent eyes, the sharp agitation of expectation in her worn, thin face, the convulsive clasping of her pallid hands.
Hart did not notice her and had already turned to say something to the lounging countryman; but as he and his friend stepped from the track to the grassy path which served as sidewalk Jack Topp’s eyes fell upon her. She glanced at him impatiently, for in passing close to the little gate he intercepted her view of the train, now at a standstill. The sun shone full upon his massive figure, and his straw hat pushed far back on his head revealed every line of his mild, handsome, acquiescent face. Her expression suddenly changed and he was shaken by a subtle, indefinable thrill.
The momentary pause seemed to lengthen itself into long hours. How could he interpret the look that flashed from her startled eyes to his startled eyes? In it was compressed the anguish of agonized expectation and bitter endurance and crushing disappointments; of a new wild hope, an imperious questioning, and a clutching fear. If he had had a wider range of mental vision it might have seemed that she was telling him some strange sad story and making some strong appeal in an unknown language, which, try as he might, he could not comprehend. But he was a very dull fellow, with scant imagination. He only knew that he was desperately agitated, wistful, shaken, with a rush of bewildering emotion in his heart and a whirl of chaotic ideas in his slow brain. Unconsciously, he slackened his pace.
“What are you a-dawdlin’ along that-a-way fur, Jack?” said Tom Hart, fretfully. “Come on if you’re a-comin’, and if you ain’t, set yourself down and rest; but whatever you do, don’t keep me a-waitin’ on your slow bones all day.”
Jack obediently quickened his steps, and in another second was in a line with his friend. But more than once he glanced back at the eager face set in its frame of snow-white hair, with its old long agony of expectation and its new look of almost terrified surprise.
As the lion-tamer and his companion lounged slowly along the grassy path, Jack said suddenly:
“Did you notice that thar woman by the fence, Tom, back thar a piece—an old woman with white hair?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Tom; “it keeps me busy a-noticin’ of young wimmin—let alone old—and a-havin’ the luck of wimmin a-noticin’ of me.”
After this Jack was so silent and inattentive that his friend, speaking to him and receiving no reply, suddenly lost his temper and rated him soundly, with great temerity considering the fact that the strong arm of the giant by his side could have killed him with one blow.
“I declare to God, Jack Topp,” he said in righteous anger, “you are so cussed stupid it’s enough to drive a man stark mad to have anything to do with you. Why don’t you answer my question, ’stead of polin’ along like an idiot. I never see such a stupid in all my life.”
“I’m mighty sorry, Tom,” said Jack, meekly and propitiatingly, his heavy arms hanging useless by his side. “I’ll do better ef I kin.”
“You’re too damned stupid to do any better,” retorted Tom, still in high dudgeon. “Seems to me you git sillier every day.”
“Seems so to me, too,” replied the athlete, with a sigh.
When the two men had turned a curve in the road and were lost to view she went slowly into her house. A neighbor who chanced to come in a little later thought he had never seen her so “queer.” She spoke at random, evidently absorbed in reflection; she now and then lifted her knitting from the stout work-basket by her side and laid it down without taking a stitch: her face had lost its intense eagerness, and into it had come an anxious bewilderment. Once in a pause in the talk she said to herself, evidently unconscious that she was speaking aloud:
“But my Johnny air nothin’ but a boy, an’ that thar air a full-grown man.”
“She gits worse, ’stead o’ better, pore cretur,” said the neighbor, pityingly; “’tis cur’us she ken hold her own so well in a trade.”
For he had come to treat for a certain coveted spotted calf, and he found that, despite her inattention, the widow could not be inveigled into giving him anything approximating the excellent bargain he still craved. He went away after a time, leaving her sitting motionless by the window, her eyes fixed on the hills about the horizon and the flare of gold and ruby flakes that enriched the western heavens. She was waiting for the cloud that would soon appear in a long fold above the spot where the hills began to fade, rising, thinner and thinner, until it should stain the pale sapphire sky, and for the shrill scream of the locomotive that would soon follow.
III.
In a dreamy preoccupation the lion-tamer dressed for the evening performance, and as he walked with his accustomed impressiveness of mien into view of the audience, he had only a blurred and indistinct sense of the motley semi-circle with its tiers of curious eyes. He did not recover his self-command until after he was shut into the cage, and it came to him a moment too late. For the larger of the two lions laid caressingly, as it had often done, a huge heavy fore-paw on his shoulder. Unnerved as he was he staggered slightly, and there was no firecraft in the eyes that met the savage eyes of the brute. A sullen, low growl rose upon the air—a sudden spring—a mass of blue and silver and tawny brown swayed violently to and fro—then the blue and silver were streaked with long, crimson stains, and the sullen growl rolled through the shrill shrieks of the frightened audience.
The man’s incredible strength and courage stood him in good stead. Infuriated though the lions were, they perceptibly cowered as his loud, fierce voice rang upon the air. Before the frightened assistant could fire through the bars the pistols kept close by for such a contingency he had pulled himself up on one knee and was laying about him fiercely with the light whip and his heavy fists, the blood streaming from a dozen wounds with every movement he made. The sharp crack of a pistol sent the brutes trembling to their corner, the man dragged himself to the door of the cage, dragged himself out, the door was slammed with a resounding bang, a mangled heap was lying upon the ground, and a red current soaked into the sawdust.
There was a short interval filled with exclamations, conjectures, and wildly excited talk, but it was presently announced that the physicians declared Signor Brunelleschi had sustained no serious injury, and had merely fainted from loss of blood. The exhibition, therefore, would proceed.
The members of the band, pale and nervous, resumed their instruments; the trapeze performer had his flying leaps with his heart in his mouth; the bareback rider was soon speeding around the ring, springing over bright-colored scarfs or through gaudy hoops as he went, the sense of sickening horror still upon him; but to all appearance the performances were characterized by their usual zest, and the audience, recovering from its terror, was soon chuckling over the stale witticisms of the clown or gazing in open-mouthed absorption at the showy feats of the acrobats.
IV.
Meantime Signor Brunelleschi had been carried to the nearest dwelling, the little white house on the hillside close to the railroad.
The facts had been anticipated in the announcement of a medical dictum. The physician did not arrive for some little time, and the man, still in his blue and silver costume, with its significant crimson streaks and splotches, lay insensible upon the bed in a dimly lighted room. Two or three of the circus employees were around him and several of the town-people. Outside the house a large crowd had collected, mostly from the impecunious assemblage about the tent, much disappointed that the door had closed upon an even greater sensation than any within the magic canvas walls they had left.
The Widow Blake, washing the red stains from the lacerated face, saw the eyes of the wounded man open suddenly and look into hers with an unmeaning stare. No instinct warned her now. She did not even recognize these as the eyes that had so stirred her hungered heart three short hours ago. He was a fellow-creature in anguish; her woman’s nature responded now to no demand save this.
“It’s an even chance,” the doctor said with the frankness characteristic of certain learned practitioners in the treatment of charity cases. Already the circus authorities had proclaimed to any physician that might undertake the case that no remuneration was to be expected from them; they didn’t owe Jack Topp one red, and he hadn’t a cent, it was declared, to bless himself with. “An even chance,” said the physician. “He may die before daylight and he may pull through altogether.” Then he prepared some palliatives, and left the room, solemnly shaking his head.
The moments passed slowly. The wounded man lay in a deep stupor. The breath of dew-steeped clover was wafted in at the window; the breeze, grown stronger, swept down from distant hills, bringing in its freshness a subtle suggestion of wild gorges and precipices, and odorous masses of ferns that overhang rock-lined mountain streams. Above the monotonous chant of insects rose fitfully the blare of the band in the illuminated tent, idealized into a semi-transparent structure of yellow light and ruby gleams against the darkness.
Suddenly are heard mingled increasing stir and movement and the murmur of many voices; the spectators are dispersing and the performance is over.
What an exuberance of vitality; what hot hearts, quick hopes, strong muscles. And two hours ago this helpless mass of quivering agonies was as eager, as alert, as powerful as that surging humanity outside the window.
Presently the crowd has gone, the great tent disappears as suddenly as if by magic; the heavy vans roll slowly away one by one; the last curious lingerer about the Widow Blake’s door saunters to town. The loneliness of night reasserts itself. The late risen moon shows a red, distorted face through the eastern mists. A Whip-poor-will plains suddenly from a tree high in the darkness, and in the deep wood rises the ill omen of an owl’s melancholy cry.
Toward midnight a look of consciousness came into the wounded man’s face; but when he spoke his words seemed wild and wandering.
“What did he say?” asked one of the Widow Blake’s self-constituted assistants.
In her voice, as she replied, there was the monotonous and passionless quietude peculiar to the speech of the people who inhabit this mountain region. “I didn’t rightly hear,” she said. “‘Twar suthin’ ’bout ’n a woman with black hair.”
The silver moon, red and distorted no longer, had climbed so high that she looked in at the window. Squares of pallid light fell through the tiny panes and a ghastly gleam crept along the floor and across the patchwork quilt till it touched the pallid face on the pillow. Jack Topp opened his eyes.
“They say he look now I’ve got ter die, didn’t they?” he asked faintly.
Somebody replied no; the doctor thought he would get well. “See how strong you are,” taking the uninjured right arm and holding it up.
Jack Topp clenched his fist, straightened the arm, and turning his wounded head looked with admiration at the swelling muscles.
“Yes, it’s pretty strong,” he said with a smile. Then he restlessly moved his head to its old position and the smile faded. “It’s been my ruin,” he murmured.
They thought he meant that the consciousness of his wonderful strength had betrayed him into carelessness while in the cage.
Silence again.
“I think I’ll die this time, I’m such a onlucky pore cretur,” drawled Jack Topp.
“I hope you are prepared to go,” said an old man who for many years had been busy with the spiritual and temporal affairs of his neighbors.
A violent agitation came into the mutilated face; some strong horror seized and tore him as the teeth of the wild beast had done; he lifted desperate, appealing eyes to the woman who bent above him, her white face framed in whiter hair.
“I ain’t prepared ter go,” he cried piteously in a louder voice with curious breaks and quavers in it; “but it ain’t dyin’ I’m afeard on. I’d die ez easy ez goin’ ter sleep Ef I could jest know ez that thar pore fool, George Haynes, war a-livin’ yit. Ef he war a-livin’—”
A wild shriek burst from the Widow Blake’s lips; it rose sharp on the quiet air; it rang shrill over dewy low-lying meadows; it struck frantic echoes from the cold gray rocks overhanging the Sequatchee River near by; it died far away in the recesses of the forest. The medicine had fallen from her old shaking hands; she had sunk down by the bedside; her eager fingers clutched the man’s uninjured right arm; her eager eyes were fixed on his wild eyes. She knew him now.
“You never done it, Johnny,” she cried in frantic haste. And a tumult of complex passions had come into the voice which had seemed incapable of expressing human emotion. “You never done it. He got well arter all, an’ no harm war done. An’ you never done no hurt, dear. An’ he’s hearty now an’ gone ter Californy with his folks. An’ your hands is clean, Johnny—clean as clean can be!”
Joy never kills. There is in all the Materia Medica no panacea that can work such wonders as the change the jaunty young doctor found when he came the next morning. “You can’t be handy like other people,” he said, with more interest than was his wont in charity patients. “We’ll soon have you up again and clawing lions as brisk as ever.”
Jack Topp laughed languidly, but the widow interposed with indignant reproof. “He won’t ever git sight of no lions again—much less a chance ter be a clawin’ of ’em,” she said imperatively.
Poor Jack Topp seemed made for submission. He passed from the strict code of the circus company and the rigid rule of Tom Hart to the iron surveillance of his mother. But he apparently liked her authority. He acceded without protest to her commands; he manifested a child-like deference to her opinions; he lay watching her as she came and went with a pleased wonder in his eyes.
He seemed to grow younger, going back to meet her recollection of the slim stripling who had left her so long ago, and after a time she too began to retrace her way along the years. Beneath the heavy masses of snow-white hair those deep, haggard lines of anxiety were softened and well-nigh obliterated; a gentle light came into her intent eyes; her step grew elastic; sometimes she laughed. Nobody in Sequatchee Valley had ever heard her laugh till now. She has developed something of rustic humor with a touch of good-natured sarcasm, and her sallies are relished as piquant wit by her son, against whom they are chiefly directed and who is clumsy and sheepishly embarrassed in these wordy encounters. They are simple folks and ignorant, but very happy, for he has no desire to resume his wanderings, and is satisfied with the monotonous routine and the rural tasks about the little place. Perhaps this content is merely temporary; perhaps it is due to the inertia of the mountaineer reasserting itself; perhaps it is the expression of a soul at rest. At all events, something of a tame cat is Signor Brunelleschi, since he has relinquished the noble art of intimidating lions.
