The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Fortune of the Landrays
Title: The Fortune of the Landrays
Author: Vaughan Kester
Illustrator: Margaret West Kinney
Troy Kinney
Release date: July 11, 2016 [eBook #52560]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Widger from page images generously
provided by the Internet Archive
THE FORTUNE OF THE LANDRAYS
By Vaughn Kester
Illustrated by The Kinneys
New York: McClure Phillips and Company
1905
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
THE boy on the box was surfeited with travel. Glancing back over the swaying top of the coach, he had seen miles upon miles of hot dusty road, between banked-up masses of forests or cultivated fields, dwindle to a narrow thread of yellow. Day after day there had been the same tiresome repetition of noisy towns and sleepy cross-road villages, each one very like the other and all having a widely different appearance from that which he conceived Benson would present.
The wonderful life of the road, varied and picturesque, no longer claimed his attention. The black dot a mile distant was unnoticed. It was a long line of freight wagons north-bound to some lake port, laden with pork, flour and hides. Presently, these wagons would be passed by a party of mounted traders, travelling south to Baltimore for supplies, with their sacks of Spanish dollars loaded upon pack horses. Next they would journey for a little space with a cattle dealer and his men, who were taking a drove of Marino sheep across the state to Indiana. But the boy's curiosity had been more than satisfied; he had only to close his eyes to see again the vivid panorama of the road in the blaze of that hot June sun.
They had changed drivers so many times he had lost all count of them; and with the changing drivers a wearisome succession of passengers had come and gone; but to-day he and his father rode alone upon the box. That morning, the latter had told him they would reach Benson by noon, yet strangely enough his interest flagged; the miles seemed endless—interminable. He was sore and stiff; his little legs ached from their cramped position, and at last utterly weary he fell into a troubled sleep, his head resting on his father's arm, and his small hands, moist and warm, clasped idly in his lap.
His father, grim, motionless, and predisposed to silence, gave brief replies to such questions as Mr. Bartlett, the driver, saw fit to ask;—for Mr. Bartlett was frankly curious. As he said himself, he always liked to know who his passengers were, where they came from, where they were going, and if possible their business.
Now as they began the long descent of Landray's Hill, south of Benson, Mr. Bartlett pushed forward his brake handle and said, “That's Benson ahead of us, off yonder where you see the church spires; would you 'a knowed it, do you think?”
Instantly the man at his side who had been sitting low in his seat, took a more erect position, while a sudden light kindled in his dull eyes.
“Known it?” after a moment's survey of the scene before him. “Well, I guess not.” There was palpable regret in his tone, just touched by some hidden emotion; a passing shade of feeling not anticipated, that moved him.
“I allowed you wouldn't. Twenty years makes a heap of difference, don't it? Gives you a turn?” interestedly.
“Well, sort of,” with gentle sadness.
“I know how you feel. I been that way myself,” said the driver. Mr. Bartlett was short and stocky, with ruddy cheeks and great red hands. As one who mingled muck with the world, he prided himself on his social adaptability.
The stranger bestowed upon him a glance of frank displeasure. He felt vaguely that the other's sentiment was distasteful to him. It smacked of such fat complacency. At last he said, “I'd about made up my mind that I wa'n'. to see it again.” here a violent fit of coughing interrupted him. When it subsided, Mr. Bartlett remarked sympathetically:
“You ought to take something for that cough of your's. I would if it was mine.”
The stranger, still choking, shook his head.
“Where does it take you?”
“Here,” resting a bony hand on his sunken chest.
“Lungs?”
The stranger's jaws grew rigid. He favoured the driver with a sinister frown.
There was silence between them for a little space, which Mr. Bartlett devoted to a thoughtful study of his companion. Under this close scrutiny the stranger moved restlessly. A sense of the other's physical health oppressed him; it seemed to take from his own slender stock of vitality.
“Hope I ain't crowding you,” said Mr. Bartlett. “Here, I'll make more room for you. Well sir, Benson's about the healthiest place I know of. When a man gets ready to die there, he has to move away to do it.”
“Who the hell's talking about dying?” demanded the stranger savagely. “There are plenty of graveyards where I came from.”
“There are plenty of graveyards everywhere; yes sir, you'd have to do a heap of travelling to get shut of them.” admitted Mr. Bartlett impartially.
“And all the thundering fools ain't buried yet,” said the stranger shortly.
Mr. Bartlett meditated on this apparently irrelevant remark in silence. He had found the stranger taciturn and sullen, or given to flashes of grim humour.
“Where's Landray's mill?” the latter now demanded, the glint of anger slowly fading from his eyes.
“See that clump of willows down yonder, to the right of the road? It's just back of them.”
“Who's running it?”
“Old General Landray's sons, Bush and Steve,” he spoke of them with easy familiarity.
“I see you know them,” said the stranger.
“It'd be funny if I didn't,—everybody knows 'em.”
“I reckon so,” said the stranger briefly.
“I allow you knowed the general?” remarked Mr. Bartlett.
“I recollect him well enough.”
“He was right smart of a man in his day, and one of the old original first settlers. I knowed him well myself,” observed Mr. Bartlett.
“Powerful easy man to get acquainted with; awful familiar, wa'n'. he?” and the stranger grinned evilly.
“Well, I knowed him when I seen him,” said Mr. Bartlett, with some reserve; and he seemed willing to abandon the subject. “What you laughing at?” he added quickly, for the stranger was chuckling softly to himself.
“Oh, nothing much. Did you know him after he was took with the gout? You're sort of fat; say now, did he ever cuss you for getting in his way? It's likely that's what brought you to his notice,” and he exploded in a burst of harsh laughter. “Oh, yes, I reckon you knowed him well—when you seen him.”
This singular assault on his innocent pretensions had a marked and chilling effect on the driver. He edged away from the stranger, and there was a long pause; but silence was not to be where Mr. Bartlett was concerned. He now asked, pointing to the sleeping child, “Ain't you going to wake him up? He'll feel as if he'd missed something.”
“I guess he'll have a chance to see all there is to see when we get there. He's clean tired out. You say the Landray boys have the mill? The old general used to own a distillery across the race from it; what became of that?”
“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.
“I don't know about that;” said Mr. Bartlett quickly. “I guess it's going to be a right smart while before we hit on anything to beat hosses; the railroads is all right as far as they go, but the stages is here to stay. I reckon folks will always be in a hurry for the mail.”
“Well, I'd hate to think anything would ever interfere with you,” said the stranger with an ugly grin.
“How far did you say you'd come?” inquired Mr. Bartlett casually.
“I allow I didn't say,” said the other briefly.
“I reckon you ain't come any further than Pittsburg,” urged Mr. Bartlett tentatively.
“You reckon not?” and the stranger smiled.
“Philadelphia?” queried the driver.
“No.”
“New York, maybe?” cautiously.
“I been there, but that ain't a patch on the distance I've come.”
“Sailoring, maybe?”
“Not any. I seen all the salt water I want to.”
“Sick?” inquired Mr. Bartlett deeply interested.
“I like to throw up my toes.”
“You don't say!”
Here the boy awoke with a start. “Are we there yet, Pop?” he asked, rubbing his eyes sleepily.
The man's lips parted in a smile. “That's Benson ahead of us, son; we're almost there. Them's the church spires; and that round, dome-like thing's the court-house that you've heard me tell about.” There was not much of the town to see beyond the roofs of a few buildings which here and there showed among the trees, but the child was deeply impressed.
“Is that the place where you was a little boy, Pop?” he questioned in an awestruck tone. He was quite overcome by the sight of it; he stretched his tired limbs with a sense of freedom and physical relief.
It's a pretty gay looking town, ain't it? remarked Mr. Bartlett, with ponderous playfulness.
The child nestled closer to his father's side. “Is that the crick off yonder?” he asked.
“That's what it is, son, but the banks are pretty well grown up with willows since my time.”
“Where's the sheep-wash, Pop, where you swum the lambs?” He was a grave little boy, and he had come a great way to see all these wonders.
His father turned a trifle shame-facedly to Mr. Bartlett:
“I been trying to hearten him up a bit on the trip,” he explained; then he added, “You can't see the sheep-wash from here, son; it's off to the other side of the town.”
“Oh! Where's the sugar bush, where you and Grandpap made the long sweetening, and where you killed the timber-wolf, have we passed that?”
The man glanced back over his shoulder, “I reckon from the look of things that's been cleaned up,” he said regretfully. “I laid off to show it to you as we come along.”
“I wish she was here, don't you, Pop?” said the boy in a whisper, and he tucked his small hand into that of his father. The latter made no answer to this.
“Do you plan to locate in Benson?” asked Mr. Bartlett.
“Eh?” said the stranger, roused from the revery into which the child's words had thrown him. “No, I guess not; I ain't come back to stop. I reckon I need more elbow room than you got left in this part of the country.”
The boy nudged his father, and then placing a small hand with elaborate caution over his own lips as if to signify the need of reticence, smiled with deep cunning. The stranger lapsed into a moody silence and withdrew his eyes from the reach of valley into which they were descending, while Mr. Bartlett returned his undivided attention to the four horses he was driving. At intervals the child raised his eyes to his father's face as if to ask some question, but respecting his silence turned away again with the question unasked.
Having by his time reached the foot of Landray's Hill, Mr. Bartlett deftly released the brake, shook out his lines, and the stage made its rapid entry into Benson.
CHAPTER TWO
THE old stage road became the Main Street at Benson. Daily over its surface, beneath the thick shade of maples and oaks, creaked and rumbled the huge stages Northward and Southward bound. The drivers on these stages, a tanned and whiskered fraternity, were wont to get the most out of the short half mile that went to make up the distance between the covered bridge south of town and Levi Tucker's red brick tavern on the square. Much pure display was achieved in the way of galloping horses and cracking whips, as well as some extra speed.
The arrival of each stage was the cause of a lively, if temporary excitement. No merchant was so busy, but he found time to hurry to his door to note its passing. Dogs barked shrilly; hens, vocal with fright, driving their panic-stricken broods before them, would scurry across the cool bricks of the checkered, grass-grown pavement, to seek safety under some lilac hedge. Even the idlers on the courthouse steps, rose wearily, as men swayed by a strong but repellant sense of duty, and slouched silently across the square. They were chary of words; for much sitting on those steps had given them the wasted speech of men who are talked out.
Previous to this sudden awakening, Levi Tucker would anticipate by his frequent appearance before his tavern, the coming of the stage. He would stand looking off down the road, nervously snapping the lid of his massive silver watch. A wait of five minutes sent him to the barn to Jim, the stableman, for a theory that would explain this extraordinary occurrence. A delay of ten minutes sent him to the bar for a drink. When, finally he heard the distant rumble of wheels, he would return his watch to the fob pocket of his drab trousers, and call to Jim: “Here she comes!” as the stage, reeling awkwardly from side to side, thundered through the covered bridge and out into the dusty sunlight.
The teamsters, loading their freight wagons at the warehouses along the river front, followed these arrivals with the easy flow of impartial criticism. As men possessing profoundly subtle views on horse flesh, no little detail escaped them. They, too, were a part of the life of that great artery of pioneer existence; and the road and its happenings, were to each one of them, as something intimate and personal. A change of horses or a change of drivers, were matters that could not be lightly banished.
The stage road followed in its general direction, over hills and through valleys and across long reaches of level land, what had been an Indian trail at the waning of the eighteenth century, when Andrew Ballard, of Pennsylvania, the first ripple in a vast wave of emigration, pushing manfully out into the wilderness, built his cabin among the hazel-bushes and scrub-oak south of Benson, where he lived for perhaps a year, the only white man in all that region.
The next settler, a solitary Jersey man, penetrated some five miles further into the wilderness to the west of Benson, and set up a forge, from which he supplied the Indians with knives and hatchets.
Another year elapsed, and Colonel Stephen Landray of Oxen Hill, Westmoreland County, Virginia, surveyor and soldier, with horses, wagons and a few slaves, following the Indian trail, found his way into the country. He wintered with the Jersey axe-maker, after sending his wagons back to Baltimore, loaded with ginseng for the Chinese trade.
The fourth settler was a lone Yankee, Jacob Benson, who came down the trail from the lakes. With chain and compass he layout the town, with its large public green, its Main Street, its North Street, and South Street, and its Front and Water Streets, together with one hundred and sixty lots in Section number five, Township eight, Range five, United States Military District. Then, with his town plot in his pocket, he made his way on foot to the nearest land office, eighty-five miles distant, and before a Justice of the Peace, acknowledged this important instrument; whereupon Andrew Ballard, feeling that he had been crowded out of the country, got together his half-breed family and moved over into Indiana, where there was nothing but echoes to answer the crack of his rifle.
The country round about Benson was soon parcelled out in what were known as tomahawk rights. The pioneer cut his name with hatchet or hunting knife on some convenient tree, and thus marked his claim. Jacob Benson built his cabin of hewn logs on the south side of the public square and opened a store, selling guns, ammunition, cheap trinkets, and poor whisky to passing whites and Indians, at a fabulous profit to himself.
But the stage road had been a great highway long before Jacob Benson's day—a highway when the eighteenth century was younger, and Jacob Benson not at all. From time immemorial the Indians had used it in their passings to and fro between the Great Lakes on the north, and the Ohio River on the south. They were using it when the first white man set his foot upon the Western World. They were following its windings beneath the broad arches of the forest by summer and winter; when the sunlight lay in golden patches on the mossy mould of its surface; when snow and frost clung thick to bough and bush, and the sunlight glistened white and blinding among its pale shadows; and even further back than this, the trail had been there, a means of human intercourse between the North and the South. Strange earth-works and mounds rudely outlined its course, showing plainly that it had been known to the Indians predecessors. But the Mound Builder had vanished, and tall trees thrived at amplest girth on the mounds of his building. He had gone his way upon the trail, had stepped from it as silently as the sunlight faded over its length at evening to become as intangible as a myth; and the Indian had gone his way upon it too, leaving not even the print of his moccasin among the dead leaves rotting beneath the old trees.
Following the Mound Builders and the Indians, came the superior race to occupy the soil. Their first need was a road, so they felled a few trees at the trail-side, or blew out a few stumps with gunpowder, and the state established it as a post route between the lake ports and river points. Cabins sprang up along it and were occupied by the pioneers who made their living partly from their land; partly by hunting or in trading with the Indians.
As emigration increased, inns and taverns dotted the road; for it was destined to know the passing of those, who, impelled by the earth hunger, were pushing west, always west; on foot, on horseback, by wagon and by stage, to found states in the wilderness beyond. The blacksmith, gun-maker, wheelwright, cooper, and cobbler, plied their trades beside it; there was the busy hum of their ceaseless primitive industry.
It soon became a place of wonderful fascination and romance; with its own abundant life, its traders, teamsters, and drovers; its home-seekers, hunters, Indian fighters, and adventurers of every conceivable description. Up it went the first rumour of war in 1812, and back down it swept the first news of Hull's defeat. It saw the passing of General Winchester's troops north to the Lake in the dead of winter; many of them barefoot and all in tattered buckskin or ragged homespun, with their long, brown rifles held in their frosted fingers; and later it echoed to the news of Harrison's victory on the Thames, when bonfires blazed at every cross-road station, and live trees were split with gunpowder.
And now the road had seen half a century of use. It was heavy with dust in summer from the almost continual trampling of the herds of horses and cattle, or droves of white, bleating sheep; and axle-deep with mud in spring and fall between frost and thaw; or rutted deep in winter where the wheels of the lumbering coaches and slow-moving freight wagons had cut.
In Jacob Benson's day, the fine old taste for classic learning still survived; men having the time as well as the inclination for such things; and many a land owner in plotting his town site, gave it some name culled from Greek or Roman history. The Athens, Romes, Homers, and Spartas, dotted the map; but old Jacob Benson, with the egotism of rude and satisfied ignorance, when he lay out his town, and dug or burnt a few stumps from the centre of what he hoped would some day be a street, named it after himself; and so it has stood to this very day, growing steadily and with no apparent haste, but growing always.
In the course of time the cabins, built by the early settlers, of unbarked logs with outside chimneys of mud and sticks, clapboard roofs, and puncheon floors, were replaced by more pretentious dwellings of hewn logs, with shingled roof, having sawed lumber for doors, window sash, and floors. These survived as stables, loom-houses, and shops of various sorts; for they in their turn gave way to substantial and often spacious homes of frame and brick. Indeed, as early as 1815, the town boasted a brick court-house which men came from afar to see. In their reckless pride the townspeople declared that it was one of the finest public buildings in the state.
They had been wonderfully patient in industry, these pioneers. They had built schools, churches, roads and mills; they had driven out the Indians; and had waged incessant conflict against the wild life of their woods. They had fought the forest back from their doors foot by foot, and from clearing to clearing; until their rail and stump fences were everywhere in the landscape, climbing every hillside or reaching out across every stretch of fertile bottom land. Nor had their activities stopped here. They had played their part in the war of 1812, a part men still spoke of with pride; Colonel Landray recruiting a band of riflemen from among the sparse population. They had sent a company of fifty men to aid Texas in her struggle for independence, they had furnished and equipped two companies of volunteers for the war with Mexico, and all this while, year by year, beckoning to them in the West was the wilderness, with its compelling mystery that drew them on to its subduing; that made them leave their homes when they were built, their fields when they were cleared.
CHAPTER THREE
MR. Bartlett drew rein before the tavern and greeted Mr. Tucker with a bluff “Good-morning.”
He looked as a man may look who has accomplished some great thing, for so he had, he had brought the news of the world to Benson's door; and what matter if that news had been stale for a week or better; if it chanced to be politics from Washington, or fashions from New York, these slight delays did not disturb Benson in the least, for the news had not always come so quickly.
Colonel Sharp, the editor of the American Pioneer, with his inevitable volume of the “Odes of Horace,” protruding from his coat pocket; and Captain Gibbs, editor of The True Whig, with his inevitable cigar protruding from his lips, hurried across the square from their respective offices, each intent upon receiving his bundle of Eastern papers.
Mr. Bendy, the postmaster, appeared, accompanied by a half-grown boy carrying a mail sack; and Jim, the stableman, led out the four fresh horses that were to take the place of Mr. Bartlett's jaded teams.
The child gathered up the small bundle which contained his own and his father's few belongings, and climbed quickly down from the box.
Before he left his seat, the stranger turned to Mr. Bartlett and tapping him on the chest with a long forefinger, said: “You're mighty curious, you are, but just you remember what I said about the graveyards and the fools; or maybe you'd better ask some friend's opinion—he'll see the point.”
He seemed to fling the words at him with an insolence that was indifferent of consequences, and before the astonished driver could make any reply, stepped to the wheel and from thence to the ground, and the coach an instant later rolled up Main Street.
The stranger stood like a man in a dream in the centre of the dusty road. He was a tall gaunt man of thirty-eight or forty, and, judging from the cheap decency of his attire, he might have been a mechanic or superior sort of a labourer in his best, for his clothes fit him illy, and he wore them as one accustomed to some other dress. He glanced across the hot square and on beyond it to the vista of shaded streets, where lay the spell of the summer's heat and lethargy. His appearance was that of one seeking out some familiar object, and seeking in vain.
After a moment's hesitation Mr. Tucker stepped to his side and touched him on the arm. The stranger turned on him with a frown of displeasure.
“Well?” he said shortly.
Mr. Tucker regarded him with amiable interest.
“Are you expecting to meet any one?” he inquired, smiling genially.
The stranger shook his head sadly. “No, I guess not,” he said slowly. “You don't happen to know a man by the name of Silas Rogers about here, do you? He used to run a blacksmith shop.”
“Why! Man, he's been dead near about eight years. It was all of eight years ago that we buried Silas, wa'n'. it, boys?” and he turned to the group of idlers before the inn.
“Going on nine,” corrected one of these laconically.
“He was well liked,” said Mr. Tucker.
The stranger made an impatient gesture.
“Maybe you know Tom Rogers?” he said.
“He's been dead about ten years,” answered the innkeeper promptly. “It was all of ten years ago that we buried Tom, wa'n'. it boys?” and again he turned to the idlers before the inn.
The stranger interrupted him quickly and resentfully.
“Seems to me you take a right smart interest in burying people; I reckon you have never thought how us that are left will feel when we come to plant you.”
At this, Mr. Tucker's mouth opened in silent wonder. He was a man of few ideas, and these did not yield themselves readily to words; but it occurred to him afterward that the stranger's chance of being present on the occasion alluded to, was highly problematical.
The latter stood for a moment scowling at the innkeeper, then he drew his tall form erect and taking his son's hand, turned abruptly on his heel and strode firmly off across the Square.
“Touchy, ain't he?” said Mr. Tucker, still amiably smiling.
Conscious that the eyes of the idlers were upon him, the stranger gained the centre of the Square before his pace slackened and his shoulders drooped again.
“It's everywhere!” he muttered to himself.
The boy looked up into his face with a glance of mute inquiry. He could not understand what the trouble was, but to him their homecoming was already a tragic failure. At last he said.
“Ain't this Benson, Pop?”
“Yes, it's Benson, sure enough, son.”
He glanced down at the child, and saw that his eyes were filled with tears. A spasm of pain crossed his own face.
“We'll find them presently, son; and they'll be mighty glad to see us when we tell them why we have come back; and we mustn't forget to ask about that pony I've laid off to get you when our ship comes in.”
But the child had ceased to care. He scarcely raised his eyes as they went down the street.
The maples cast cool shadows about them. It was very still, for the town seemed sleeping in the sultry warmth of that June day. Once, twice, the stranger paused, and glanced about him as if to make sure of his surroundings, and then went on unhesitatingly, leading the child by the hand.
“There was a many of us once, son,” he was moved to say in a voice of reminiscent melancholy. “Your grandpap built a cabin down on the crick bank.”
They had already left the centre of the town, and were approaching a region of grass-grown side streets.
“There, yonder, you can see it—that old log house through the trees!”
He had quickened his pace, and presently they came to a yard, neglected and overgrown with jimson-weed and pokeberry, and with here and there a tall hollyhock nodding above the rank vegetation. The ground fell way abruptly from the street level, and at the foot of a steep incline flowed the Little Wolf River. The house was an utter ruin. The windows were gone, and the huge stone chimney, built of flat rocks gathered from the bed of the Little Wolf, leaned dangerously. Like the windows the doors were gone too; the heavy hand-rived shingles were moss-grown; while daylight showed through the wide gaping chinks between the logs from which the clay had long since fallen. Nailed to the trunk of a great elm that stood near the street, was a sign with “For Sale,” painted on it in a palpably unprofessional hand.
The stranger surveyed the desolation with something very like dismay.
“I reckon twenty years is a right smart of a spell after all, son. It seemed like yesterday to me—coming back.”
But they were not unobserved. An old man had been watching them, and now he crossed the street, moving slowly with the aid of a heavy cane. He was close upon them before either became aware of his presence; then they turned, hearing his shuffling step upon the path, and saw that he was regarding them with eager curiosity out of a pair of beady black eyes.
“Maybe you are thinking of buying?” he said shrilly.
“No, I reckon not,” said the stranger; then his face changed with a look of quick recognition. “Why, you're old Pap Randall!” he cried. He seemed about to extend his hand, but the other gave him a blank stare; then he screwed his weazened wrinkled old face into a grin.
“I reckon I been old Pap Randall a heap longer than your memory lasts,” he said, chuckling. “Your father might a called me that, if he'd knowed me. The Rogers lived there onct, a do-less tribe outen the mountings of Virginia. Old Tom Rogers and me was soldiers in Colonel Landray's company in the second war agin the British; afore that, I'd fit under General Washington in the fust war—”
“What's come of the family?” asked the stranger.
“Gone—scattered like a bevy of pa'tridges as soon as they could fly. The oldest boy's dead; the second's gone back to Virginia; two of the girls married and moved west to Illinoy; and the youngest boy's in Texas or somewheres outen that ways. Old Tom was one of the fust settlers in Benson. He might a owned four hundred acres of land right about here if he'd a mind to, but he never held title to more'n this here scrap of an allotment, and a bit of an out lot up the crick, where Appleseed Johnny onct had one of his orchards; I reckon you've heard tell of him? He thought he had a call to kiver this here country with fruit trees; they say there ain't a county in the state but what's got its orchards that Appleseed Johnny planted.”
The stranger laughed shortly.
“I've heard you tell all this before, Pap.” he said, “and about when the first stage come through here from across the mountains.”
The old man caught eagerly at his last words. “Yes, and I rid on it too! I rid on the fust stage coach from across the mountings, and I'm a going to live to ride on the fust railroad. They're building the 'butments for the new bridge down by the old kivered bridge now.” His beady eyes were wonderfully brilliant. “I reckon you're a stranger here?”
“Well, no, I'm old Tom Rogers's son.”
And by nightfall, all Benson knew that Truman Rogers, who had gone to Texas, a raw stripling some twenty years before, had returned home from California.