Main-Travelled Roads Part 47

We'll take care of him. Don't worry. Bell's a good hand with sick."

Then the light came again, and he heard a robin singing, and a catbird squalled softly, pitifully. He could see the ceiling again. He lay on his back, with his hands on his breast. He felt as if he had been dead. He seemed to feel his body as if it were an alien thing.

"How are you, sir?" called the laughing, thrillingly hearty voice of William McTurg.

He tried to turn his head, but it wouldn't move. He tried to speak, but his dry throat made no noise.

The big man bent over him. "Want 'o change place a little?"

He closed his eyes in answer.

A giant arm ran deftly under his shoulders and turned him as if he were an infant, and a new part of the good old world burst on his sight. The suns.h.i.+ne streamed in the windows through a waving screen of lilac leaves and fell upon the carpet in a priceless flood of radiance.

There sat William McTurg smiling at him. He had no coat on and no hat, and his bushy thick hair rose up from his forehead like thick marsh gra.s.s. He looked to be the embodiment of suns.h.i.+ne and health. Sun and air were in his brown face, and the perfect health of a fine animal was in his huge limbs. He looked at Robert with a smile that brought a strange feeling into his throat. It made him try to speak; at last he whispered.

The great figure bent closer: "What is it?"

"Thank-you."

William laughed a low chuckle. "Don't bother about thanks. Would you like some water?"

A tall figure joined William, awkwardiy.

"h.e.l.lo, Evan!"

"How is he, Bm?"

"He's awake today."

"That's good. Anything I can do?"

"No, I guess not. An he needs is somethin' to eat."

"I jest brought a chicken up, an' some jell an' things the women sent. I'll stay with him till twelve, then Folsom will come in."

Thereafter he lay hearing the robins laugh and the orioles whistle, and then the frogs and katydids at night. These men with greasy vests and unkempt beards came in every day. They bathed him, and helped him to and from the bed. They helped to dress him and move him to the window, where he could look out on the blessed green of the gra.s.s.

O G.o.d, it was so beautiful! It was a lover's joy only to live, to look into these radiant vistas again. A catbird was singing in the currant hedge. A robin was hopping across the lawn. The voices of the children sounded soft and jocund across the road. And the surs.h.i.+ne-"Beloved Christ, Thy suns.h.i.+ne falling upon my feet!" His soul ached with the joy of it, and when his wife came in she found him sobbing like a child.

They seemed never to weary in his service. They lifted him about and talked to him in loud and hearty voices which roused him like fresh winds from free s.p.a.ces.

He heard the women busy with things in the kitchen. He often saw them loaded with things to eat pa.s.sing his window, and often his wife came in and knelt down at his bed.

"Oh, Robert, they're so good! They feed us like G.o.ds ravens."

One day, as he sat at the window fully dressed for the fourth of fifth time, William McTurg came up the walk.

"Well, Robert, how are ye today?"

"First-rate, William," he smiled. "I believe I can walk out a little if you'll help me."

"All right, sir."

And he went forth leaning on William's arm, a piteous wraith of a man.

On every side the golden June suns.h.i.+ne fell, filling the valley from purple brim to purple brim. Down over the hill to the west the light poured, tangled and glowing in the plum and cherry trees, leaving the glistening gra.s.s spraying through the elms and flinging streamers of pink across the shaven green slopes where the cattle fed.

On every side he saw kindly faces and heard hearty voices: "Good day, Robert. Glad to see you out again." It thrilled him to hear them call him by his first name.

His heart swelled till he could hardly breathe. The pa.s.sion of living came back upon him, shaking, uplifting him. His pallid lips moved. His face was turned to the sky.

"O G.o.d, let me live! It is so beautiful! O G.o.d, give me strength again! Keep me in the light of the sun! Let me see the green gra.s.s come and go!"

He turned to William with trembling lips, trying to speak:

"Oh, I understand you now. I know you all now."

But William did not understand him.

"There! there!" he said soothingly. "I guess you're gettin' tired." He led Robert back and put him to bed.

"I'd know but we was a little brash about goin' out," William said to him as Robert lay there smiling up at him.

"Oh, I'm all right now," the sick man said.

"Matie," the alien cried, when William had gone, "we knew our neighbors now, don't we? We never can hate or ridicule them again."

"Yes, Robert. They never will be caricatures again-to me."

A"GOOD FELLOW'S" WIFE

I

LIFE in the small towns of the older West moves slowly-almost as slowly as in the seaport villages or little towns of the East. Towns like Tyre and Bluff Siding have grown during the last twenty years, but very slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees. Lying too far away from the Mississippi to be affected by the lumber interest, they are merely trading points for the farmers, with no perceivable germs of boom in their quiet life.

A stranger coming into Belfast, Minnesota, excites much the same lanquid but persistent inquiry as in Belfast, New Hamps.h.i.+re. Juries of men, seated on salt barrels and nall kegs, discuss the stranger's appearance and his probable action, just as in Kittery, Maine, but with a lazier speech tune and with a shade less of apparent interest.

On such a rainy day as comes in May after the corn is planted-a cold, wet rainy day-the usual crowd was gathered in Wilson's grocery store at Bluff Siding, a small town in the "coulee country."

They were farmers, for the most part, retired from active service.

Their coats were of cheap diagonal or ca.s.simere, much faded and burned by the sun; their hats, flapped about by winds and soaked with countless rains, were also of the same yellow-brown tints.

One or two wore paper collars on their hickory s.h.i.+rts.

McIlvaine, farmer and wheat buyer, wore a paper collar and a b.u.t.terfly necktie, as befitted a man of his station in life. He was a short, squarely made Scotchman, with sandy whiskers much grayed and with a keen, in-tensely blue eye.

"Say," called McPhail, ex-sheriff of the county, in the silence that followed some remark about the rain, "any o' you fellers had any talk with this feller Sanford?"

"I hain't," said Vance. "You, Bill?"

"No; but somebody was sayin' he thought o' startin' in trade here."