Читать книгу Sunlight Patch - Credo Fitch Harris - Страница 4

Table of Contents

He appeared an odd figure, sitting loosely on an old white mare which held her nose to the ground and cautiously single-footed over the uneven road. Unconcerned, perhaps unconscious that he bestrode a horse, his head was thrown back and his gaze penetrated the lace-work of branches to a sky exquisite blue where a few white, puffy clouds were aimlessly suspended. And, like these clouds, his thoughts hovered between unrealized hopes and the realistic mountains he was leaving; thoughts interwoven with ambitions which had obsessed his waking hours and glorified his dreams—dreams, desires, ambitions, always before his eyes but out of reach. His hair fell to the opened collar of a homespun shirt, and homespun were his trousers, tucked into a pair of homemade boots. His saddle bore an obscure brand of the United States army, for it had carried one of his people through the War of the States fifty years before, and across its pummel balanced a long, ungainly rifle of an earlier period.

It was an afternoon of that month when the spirit of Kentucky arises from the loamy soil after a recreating sleep of winter. The fragrance of the earth was everywhere. Overhead the trees met in great, silent arches—Nature's Gothic, re-frescoed now in the delicate tints of spring by the brush of Nature's Master—beneath which all life seemed breathlessly poised as though in this dim-lit, sun-dappled cathedral of the forest a mute service were in progress. But the man—he did not seem to see, or feel, or be. Thus, without a sound except for the muffled shuffle of the old mare's unshod hoofs, he rode.

They were coming down the mountain, he and the old white mare; coming down into the valley, into the "settlements"; and to-day marked the last stage of his journey from the center of those wild giants which had bounded the territory of his twenty-two years' existence. To-day he would emerge from the foothills into the open country; into the smiling country of his imagination, from somewhere in whose expanding fields now came the call of a toiling plowboy. It was this which finally brought him from his reverie in the sky, from his lofty dreams to the smell of earth.

Drawing down his gaze, he saw that here, indeed, was the open threshold of a new world, and his eyes distended with a veritable glory of sight. They had seen distance, but not like this. They had ranged from mountain peak to mountain peak, or across the scarred tops of intervening peaks to a skyline untamed even by the coaxing tints of rose and purple sunsets; but before him now lay distance of another kind: hills upon hills, 'twas true, yet low; and whose once rough lines were mellowed by the patient surgery of a hundred years of plowshares. Gentle slopes, and shallow valleys, and slopes again—not standing like his graven monsters of the Cumberlands, but lolling in peace and lazy unconcern, melting into the azure west so artfully that he could not be definitely sure where earth left off and sky began. And between these softly molded forms was no towering harshness at whose contemplation his eyes would intuitively have narrowed, but a subdued carpet of many fields, with here and there a nestling home. A grand, sweeping canvas, it might have been, whose browns of new-turned soil, whose light green tints of reborn orchards and sprouting wheat, were gracefully interrupted by the deeper tones of clustered trees—those remnants of primeval forest which the unintentional landscape gardeners of pioneer days had chanced to leave standing in this picturesque Kentucky valley.

A welcome seemed to rise from it like soothing fingers laid upon his brow and his frame drooped in extreme contentment; for it portrayed the country he had come to seek from his home back in that wilderness where bridle-paths are boulevards and primitive log cabins the mansions of his people. So he continued to sit spellbound, held between the satisfaction of lingering and the impulse to ride down into it, and to rest there as everything seemed to be resting in a soft growth of plenty. This was decided by the mare which, of her own accord, turned and started on.

He did not again draw rein for many miles. The needle of his nature urged him forward, straight along a narrow valley lane that ambled between mildewed fences and their inclosed fields; between untouched walls of wild-grape, red-bud and blossoming dog-wood; and he knew that his intuition was not sending him astray. This sweet-smelling road was now making another turn which ushered him directly upon a frame schoolhouse, set slightly back in a grove of trees. Quickly, he brought the old mare to a stop.

That it was a schoolhouse—the very schoolhouse which had been the reliquary of his dreams—he never doubted, so accurately did it fit the description given by a mountain preacher; and to be actually facing it in the material form filled him with a nameless fascination. Sitting rigid, in an attitude bent forward, his tense stare directed on its partly open door, he suggested a Marathon runner crouched for the start of that great trial; and somewhere in his subconsciousness a voice whispered that this day, this hour, marked the beginning of his mortal race. He comprehended a certain vague significance to which analysis was denied.

Then slowly dismounting he led the mare deep into an opposite thicket. There was no necessity for doing this, no reason, except the latent sense of caution a wild creature feels in strange places; and, having concealed his rifle beneath a fallen log, he turned back to the road. But now he hesitated, putting one hand against a tree for support. A close observer might have seen that his body was swaying slightly from side to side with a curious movement, not unlike the restive motion of a caged beast; and a glance at his face would have confirmed the existence of some overwhelming emotion. In a deep, drawling voice, he spoke:

"Wall, Ruth, I reckon hyar hit air, 'cause hit looks jest like the preacher said! Now help my arms ter keep hit with me, 'n' pray the Lawd ter make my haid larn all the larnin' hit's got shet up in thar! 'N' tell Him ter give my eyes the fu'st sight of ary danged skunk that'll try ter crowd me outen hit, so's I kin kill 'im till he rots in hell; 'n' I'll be the Christian ye asked me ter!"

A gentle, almost a childish smile of satisfaction played across his mouth, and the next moment he was walking forward, carefully and reverently, as though the little schoolhouse were on holy ground.

The afternoon was waning, and the declining sun cast a genial glow upon the weatherboarded front; gilding, too, the near side of a crooked flag-pole set jauntily in the yard. Except for evidences of recent life the place seemed utterly deserted, and emboldened, even though disappointed by this, he went up to the door. Here again he hesitated, for some one within was speaking. It was a woman's voice, raised in command and fear.