Quest

Front matter

Copyright® _ l 2 jjl ,

Cqekright DEPosm

*

II

F IFTEEN of his thirty years vanished. He saw himself on a March afternoon of a year of the middle seventies, with tortured young shoulders holding, pointed into the loam of the southern Illinois prairie, a plow blade dragged by a pair of gray horses. He felt again the ache in his back, felt the rasp in his throat from vehement shouting at the team, felt the wind in his tousled, streaked hair, and the cool, moist earth into which sank his bare feet. He lost him¬ self in that former self, easily, as if no great cir¬ cumstance separated them. He stood, as he had then, motionless at the highest edge of the field, at the end of the last furrow but the one which would take him down again and to the gate, while his horses, forced no longer by the ejaculative lashing which had kept them tugging at the beam, stopped also, their necks sloping down, their fetlocks buried in the black soil.

With deliberate slowness, this boy of fifteen years past lifted the reins from over his shoulders and knotted them about the plow-handles; and, leaving the blade embedded in the earth, he leaped to the uncut sod at the fieldside, pushed through a weedy hedge which separated the field from the weedier undergrowth beyond, and so on 3 to the top of the hill on the haunch of which he had been plowing. With a curtain of freshlyleaved scrub-oak cutting him off from what lay behind, he stood still and looked out over the prairie, parcelled regularly into fields, clean save where, swept up in clumps, trees huddled together on its wide lap, rolling limitlessly into the golden haze in which the sun was setting. His wander¬ ing eyes followed the smoke of the railway, which had been put through only a year before, bringing the county up-to-date. From a distant field he could see a man driving his team homeward.

The boy raised his head and stretched his long arms exultantly. He had been disobedient and had received his reward. He had left untouched the field farther to the east which his father had commanded him to work, and he had worked the field behind him instead, all to the end that the close of the first day’s plowing might be spent on this spot. The place was his own. No one came to it or knew of it but he, and he cherished the secret of his love for it closely in his heart. Again he looked into the west. The clouds were just right. All fear of the reckoning he must make was dissipated. He would start on that other field in the morning—a day or two would make no difference to the corn which it was to raise.

He walked a few steps to an ancient stump which commanded the outlook toward the sunset, and sat down, leaning back upon his hands and straightening the weary extent of his legs in front of him. Fondly he patted the stump, in the be¬ lief, unspoken because he did not wish to have it refuted, that his grandfather’s own ax had felled the vanished tree. And with the thought of his grandfather his fancy was off upon its travels.

His grandfather he had loved before all men. He recalled his swarthy face, showing the darker for its border of white hair and beard, and his tall, broad, unbent frame. He had seen him cleave a log with miraculously few strokes and with a rifle bring down a prairie chicken on the wing. Now that he was gone, no marvel was too great to ascribe to him; but even in his life there had been about him much that was mysterious —no one knew whence he had come, and quite probably he did not know himself, for once, when the boy had asked him, he had only laughed and said he had been washed up by the river, full grown, with an ax in one hand and a bag of cornmeal in the other. He was as much a part of the country as were the forest he had cleared and the tough prairie sod he had cut. He had been on the expedition which had driven the lingering French from Peoria. He had been a friend of Ninian Edwards. He had seen Tecumseh. He was a hero.

His heart was thrilled as he felt of the stump. What a land for heroes this had been! He raised his eyes to the clouds and there, with war feathers trailing into the darkening sky, beheld the giant Black Hawk, against whose starving warriors his own father had fought, and beheld also, half enwrapt in a cream-colored flag, the brave French¬ man La Salle, whose story his grandfather had told him. And amid other wisps of flag and smoke and cannon, a hundred men and horses tramped, recalling to him his Uncle David, whose namesake he was. The boy had never seen him —the soldier’s days were ended before his own were begun—but his mind dwelt often on his uncle. He had been a hero, he knew; and, he thought, as a scowl passed over his face, he should like to trade his father for him. The sky had changed, and he was reminded of the tales old men told of Clark and Montgomery and of how La Fayette once had come to Illinois. Then too, he could discern the figure of Lincoln, whose tomb he had visited with his mother when, one time long ago, they had spent a week with his aunt in Springfield. He knew that his father did not admire Lincoln, but for that matter, he did not much admire his father.

Once more he scowled in vexation that his father should intrude upon his thoughts, He deserved no place among them; he was no hero; and the boy was not without suspicion that he was a coward. The only worth-while thing he had done was to fight against Black Hawk, and the boy loved Black Hawk far more than him.

He did not find it unnatural that he should regard his father in this way. Neither did he remember from what his aversion had arisen, nor did he inquire why it should continue. Appar¬ ently it had always been with him. He accepted that, but he was disturbed to find that from whatever heights his dreams might take him, in the end his thoughts ever descended to this one visionless reality, as if the picture of what he aspired to be should never be clear to glow of its own colors but must always be tinctured by the fear of what he was determined not to be.

He shook his head and stood again, looking over the prairie beyond him. Darkness was now creeping in around the horizon, so that only the clouds above the sunset remained light. In the fading golden haze where earth and sky were melted together, he felt a beckoning hand and could see the face of his grandfather. Perhaps it was that call which his three oldest brothers had answered; perhaps, some day, he too should fol¬ low it into the West. He remained standing where he was until the light was gone, and then pushed back through the undergrowth and across the hedge to the place where he had left his team.

In impatient weariness, the horses had dragged the plow diagonally across the field, maiming his furrows, until they stood where the farther gate blocked their way. David ran after them, use¬ lessly shouting, and continued his berating while he drove into the adjoining field and unhitched the plow. Then, voice exhausted and temper softened, he led the team to the barnyard.

The tiredness of the day was upon him. His dreams were gone, his exultation vanished. Un¬ brightened in memory, as he sat now in the of¬ fice brooding on these old things, was the fear¬ ful dusk with which the yard had been heavy. He stood with the horses at the trough, he saw again the yellow light creeping feebly from the kitchen window, the dimmer light in the barn door in which with ghostlike suddenness had ap¬ peared his brother Will. He recalled his broth¬ er’s disquieting words, and his galloping away in the darkness. Again he stood at the kitchen door with his ear placed closely against the unbat¬ tened boards, hearing nothing. He touched the latch and then withdrew his hand, He blew out the lantern and hung it on a peg nearby. The night was very dark. He replaced his finger on the latch, which he lifted with care not to make any noise, cautiously pushed back the door into the bare room, and, still unnoticed, stood where he was and looked about him.

At one end of the room, beside the wide table, he saw his mother, with apron tied over a woolen dress of dark color, arranging the dishes for the evening meal. At the other stood his father, still in riding boots and long, black cloak, bent over the stove warming himself; and David felt in his naked legs a resentful shiver at his father’s boots.

Between the two in the kitchen no word passed. His mother went quietly, unhurriedly about her work, moving from table to sideboard and back, not looking at all at his father. The latter stood impatiently clasping and unclasping his hands be¬ hind him and scraping his heavy soles upon the floor. His head was bent down. David could not see his face; but he knew his expression— worn and sullen, though with another element also, indescribable, which prevented him from hating him as he wished to, or from fearing him as he might, and made him pity him instead.

Suddenly, out of the necessity of displaying his ill-humor, his father half-turned, and with a ges¬ ture of irritation and a voice dull and hard, de-

IO manded, “What’s the matter to-night, Sarah? Why’s supper so late?”

“I’ve told you,” Sarah replied, “I’ve been keep¬ ing things warm for Will and David.”

The husband’s vexation swelled to the crack¬ ing point. “Will and David; always Will and David,” he said curling his lip. “I do believe that you care more for them than you do for me.”

“Indeed, Thomas Bullard, it is true.”

Thomas Bullard stamped the floor with his heavy boot, wheeled about, and took a step for¬ ward. Then his eye caught the boy in the door¬ way, and he balanced himself while he stared at him.

“What are you standing there for? Come on in,” he growled with a commanding shake of his head.

The voice of the father made the mother aware of the boy’s presence. She turned, glanced kindly, and shifted her eyes to her husband with a look full of meekness, but with enough con¬ tempt and authority commingled to make him halt where he stood and then, shrugging his shoulders, retreat to his former position by the stove. Sarah turned again to her son.

“Hurry, Davie, and wash up. We’ve been waiting things for you.”

While she spoke she poured water from a pail into the wash basin and gave the boy soap and a towel. The father faced slowly around and gazed at the two. David averted his eyes, but he could feel the heavy gaze boring into him. He smiled, just a little, but he did not let his smile be seen.

“Where’s Will?” the father asked sharply.

“Will’s gone to town.”

“Gone to town?” repeated the mother. “And without his supper?”

“Walked, I suppose?”

“What horse did he take?” the father pressed.

“Belle.”

“You know, Thomas,” the mother interposed, “there’s no other riding horse left.”

A taunt in her voice chafed the sufficient wound of her interruption. Bullard lowered his brows, breathed unevenly, and spread his shoulders. “I forbade him to go,” he roared, “I forbade him ever to ride Belle! Sarah, you’ve— I’ll have no more of it, I say!” He grumbled inaudibly and, flinging off his cloak, strode with pounding heels across the room, seated himself at the table, placed one fist at his hip, and laid the other with obvious threat across his thigh. “Boy, fetch me my slippers,” he commanded.

Their eyes met. David hesitated and then obeyed. His father lifted one leg from the floor.

“Here, pull it off.”

David pulled off the one boot and then the other.

“Put them there by the wood-box,” said his father with a wave of his head.

Again the boy obeyed.

Reassured in his authority, the father dragged his chair around, placed his feet under the table, and picked up his knife and fork. The mother brought the food from the stove to the table, served it herself, and sat down. For a while the three ate in silence, with eyes lowered.

“Why were you so late, David?” the father asked abruptly.

“I don’t know.”

“What were you doing?”

“Plowing.”

“Where? In the east field, I suppose?”

David shook his head.

“Where then?” His eyes glowed; his lips seemed whetted.

“In the one west.”

The father pushed back his chair.

“What? As if it weren’t enough for that hog Martin to cheat me out of that field without you plowing it for him. I’ll teach you to plow other men’s land!”

He leapt up, almost falling backwards as he did so, and unclasped his leathern belt. David rose also and, with fists clenched to control the anger and rebellion which would have shaken his body, stood face to face with his father.

“If you hit me, I’ll knock you down,” the boy threatened; and, for the moment, his cold, de¬ termined voice and his mountainous impudence balked and bewildered his father. The latter did not advance; but his eyes continued to glare, and his cheeks puffed with anger. His hands re¬ mained clasping the strap, though they did not move.

“You whelp,” he growled, finally, and the growl brought the boy’s turn to quail. His eyes dropped before the greater size and strength of the other, and the habit of obedience broke his rebellion. He weakened, backed suddenly away, and fled toward the end of the room.

At the instant of his turning, his father was upon him. A chair was interposed. The boy dodged; the father stumbled, then regained his balance, and, cursing, made for the door, to find there his path barred by his wife. She stood motionless, her two hands outstretched against the jambs, her face, pale and stern, uplifted to her husband’s.

“You’ll not touch him, Thomas Bullard.”

Bullard was stopped again, and his anger doubled by its second repulse. He seized his wife’s wrist. “Out of the way, or I’ll—”

Sarah let her arm be taken, but remained un¬ moved. “You’ll not do that either,” she replied. “Go and sit down.”

Bullard looked down at his wife; but his trem¬ bling lips, his red, puffing cheeks, and his blazing glance did not terrify her. He saw how relent¬ lessly her calm eyes regarded him. For a while, he stood where he was; and then he loosed her arm, ringed with the marks of his fingers, and walked back to the table.

He dropped into his chair; his fist fell deadly upon the cloth; his chin sank on his chest. Sarah walked slowly after and stood at the opposite side of the table, silently, almost compassionately re¬ garding him. “Did you say you sold that west field, Tom?” she asked.

Bullard’s eyes raised slowly, met hers, and dropped again. “I did, Sarah.”

“Why did you sell that land?” she repeated; and in her voice was no longer anger or stern¬ ness, but only disappointment.

Bullard shrugged his shoulders, but did not look up.

“I had to, Sarah. We had no corn last year —you know that—and we kept our wheat too long. Martin was pressing me, hard. I had no money. I had to sell, Sarah; I couldn’t save it.”

Sarah’s hands fell to her sides; and into her face crept the haggard lines of a despair, com¬ plete and crushing. She walked around to the front of her chair and sat down. With one hand she smoothed the checkered tablecloth. The other lay in her lap.

“You know, Thomas, that bit of land was the last of the farm of your brother David, whom we named our own David after. You remember how it was your father’s wish that you always keep that farm together with this, the first he took up on the prairie, as a kind of monument to them both. And now you have let it go piece by piece until nothing is left.”

She glanced up, but the appeal in her eyes was lost. Her husband’s head was bent down. He sat slouched with doglike immobility, not a finger changed since first he had taken his seat. Her head, too, bent down, and her lips parted for a sigh. For a long time no word was spoken. Then her heartbreak overwhelmed its bounds, and her voice rose up in the chant of her despair.

“Your father, Thomas, moved up here to the open prairie, when other men clung tim¬ idly to the cleared land and dared not fol¬ low him. On this spot he built his first house, the one you were born in. With four oxen yoked together he broke the thick sod; and by great labor he fenced his fields, Ten miles he carted his wood for his buildings, his fuel, and his fences. He guarded his stock against wolves and fought the snows and the summer’s flies, that he might leave wealth for his children. Your mother, think of her too, bearing seven sons and three daughters here on the prairie with no doc¬ tor nor even a neighbor’s wife to help her, rais¬ ing them up, watching over them all and the wdiole farm together, alone on the long days when your father drove far to his market.

“Of such a father and of such a mother came! you. They are gone now, their lands separated, their children scattered. You only remain, and of the lands which were given you—enough to keep your sons forever and ever, all is spent but this little farm, which will hardly outlast you. Nothing will you leave to your sons. Three are gone now, we know not where; the other two you will drive after them. Your father’s name will cease to be heard in the country he founded.”

Bullard straightened up. His hands clasped the arms of his chair, and he sat as if seeing a bad dream, or as if having been suddenly awakened from one. His sobered eyes were riveted on his wife. An expression of wonder and fear lay upon his opened lips.

“It’s not true, Sarah. It can’t be true. All is not gone. We have this farm, my father’s own farm, and—our boys.”

“Our boys,” repeated Sarah with a hard laugh. “Bring back John and Zack and Henry if you can. I’ve prayed my tongue dry that I might look on them again before I am dead, but they do not come. Keep Will from going as they did, if you can. Keep this farm, yes, your father’s own farm, if you can. I tell you that if David is here —and it shall take the last blood from my life if he is not—there will be not so much as the tools left to him.”

Thomas Bullard lay back, his face toward the ceiling and his eyes closed. “You are right,” he spoke from his parched mouth. “Not so much as the tools will be left, not a plow, not an ax. But don’t reproach me, Sarah; even the best corn will burn in an August sun.”

“You are not like that,” said Sarah, relentless in her sorrow. “You are the corn which in Sep¬ tember has not tasseled.”

“You’re right. That’s what I am.”

His head sank farther back, and his voice came like a child’s wailing in the dark, and then died away: “I am a failure, a hopeless, miserable, failure; drunken, shiftless, a failure.”

For a time he lay thus. Then after Sarah had got up from her chair and put herself to collect¬ ing the supper dishes, he sat up a little and, slowly shaking his head, watched her movements.

“I’ve done ill by you, I know,” he said, “I’m sorry for you.” He paused. “What shall I do, Sarah?”

“Go to bed and get up in the morning and plow.”

He staggered up, and with stiff joints walked unsteadily away from the table. At the door he stopped and looked around at his wife.

“You will come?” he asked.

An expression of weariness and indifference came into her face. She nodded her head and looked away from him.

“Yes, when I have finished the work,” she replied.

She took the apron from the back of her chair and tied it again about her waist.

All this had David seen and heard from where he crouched beyond the door at which his father had been stopped. All this he saw as a man, with perspective unlengthened, except that he realized, as he could not have realized then, the bitter resignation of his mother’s last sentence and ges¬ ture. One other sentence, however, burned more strongly in his mind, from emphasis first marked later on that same boyhood night.

He had awakened from an uneasy sleep. The room was black. From the house came no sound, nor from the out-of-doors, because it was the stillest of the seasons, when there were neither the winds of winter nor the locusts and the whippoor¬ wills of summer. In his mind’s eye he saw as plainly as, a few hours before, he had seen hiding behind the door of the kitchen, his father lying back in his chair with his face upturned to the ceiling. And through the night’s silence came the father’s words, “A failure, a hopeless, miser¬ able failure.”

David had stopped his ears against the cry, but still he had heard it. He had tried to drive it away with thoughts of his grandfather, of his mother, of his plowing, of anything to which his frightened mind would turn; but the voice would not go.

He had counted, sung to himself, repeated things he had read; but through all that one pic¬ ture remained and followed him into his sleep.

Ill

T HE words had haunted him on more nights than that one, and now, years after, as he mused in the dark office they rang in his mind with terrifying plainness. He tried to ban¬ ish them as he had upon their first return, but he could not more than he could then, except to exchange for them thoughts no pleasanter than they. His memory was loosed—even its tor¬ tures were respite from the more painful self¬ search he had thought to inflict on himself— and in the riot of recollection another night ap¬ peared for him to follow through, a night in winter, more than three years after the first.

Again he was caught by the past. In the three years separating the points in his reverie, his father’s fortunes had varied; but the degrada¬ tion which he had inaugurated years before was beyond control by his influence or that of any temporary relief. To Thomas Bullard came the conviction that a curse was upon him. The soil soured beneath his plow, and, as he gathered the grain in the harvest, the smut sprang from his fingers. His lands were pared away; his stock disappeared from disease or from forced sale; his crops mocked him; his leaning, gaping barns, once gorged with the wealth of his father, cried out at 20 his improvidence. In the summer of the third year, he had a quarrel of particular violence with his son Will; and Will in anger left home to fol¬ low his older brothers into the unknown West. For a month after, Bullard mourned his depart¬ ure in despondent silence and then his resentment grew against his remaining son for remaining to taunt his wretchedness. With the determination which was left him, he fought on vigorously in his futile way to keep his hold on what was left, aware of the black end before him; and all his struggling seemed only to bring him nearer to that end.

In these years had David, already heavy in mind at the one certainty of his life, the doom of his parent, bent his youth to assuage that fate, at work more profitable than that which his father’s farm could offer. Each year with the ripening of summer he had come, as thresherman’s helper, to follow the harvest from farm to farm with lumbering train of engine and sep¬ arator and supply wagons, and at the end of the harvest to work his way homeward at plowing and sowing of wheat, at corn picking and fodder cutting and other autumnal labors. On the par¬ ticular year which was now alive in his memory, the end of this arduous pilgrimage had found him parted from home by a little over thirty miles. No word had reached him during his four months away; and the worry which ever lay close, keeping him the harder at his toiling out of fear of its torments, bestirred itself and him at the approach of idleness, so that he lost no time in beginning his return.

Beneath the cold and heavy clouds of a De¬ cember afternoon, he began his journey, the most memorable of his life, in memory at once vivid and obscure, as had been the journey itself. He puzzled upon this. Then he sank back and let things be revived as they would—his impatience; his apprehension of snow; his horse eager-nostriled; his hand, with loosened rein, resting on the laboring withers; the road reaching on and on, hill after hill, in race with the hoofs which beat upon its frozen dirt. Gaunt trees marked the sites of lonely farm groups; and the houses with black windows stared at him down the long road until, passing them, he quaked a little, and wished that the next ones would not stare so. On every side, billowing away unevenly into the horizon, lay the prairie, its summer beauty stripped from it—bearing no life, not even a foraging horse, seemingly despairing of life, hopeless, desolate.

David’s heart was like the prairie; and, under the load of his worry and the premonitions which arose from it, felt all the weight of youth’s heavy gloom. His head was as dull as his heart was weighted down. He did not try to think, he hardly dared to think, but rode and rode; and his rhythmic rise and fall in the saddle beat him into numbness ever more complete. Night finding easy conquest beneath the low clouds came the sooner upon him; and with the night came the snow, at first uncertain and light, and then in bold flakes which hid from his view tree and barn and straw-stack and took the friendly sound of the hoof-beats from his ears. He was alone between earth and sky with two dimly perceived fence lines to guide him.

The intermittent galloping of the horse was stopped by the coming of the snow; and David resigned himself to the delay he had feared. He tried to determine his position on the road. He knew that the village through which he had passed just before the storm struck him was about ten miles from the four-corners where he would turn east from the main road, and that be¬ yond the turn there were five miles more. The village, he decided, was now three miles behind, making twelve miles yet to ride, which he would hardly do in less than four hours. He pulled his cap down close above his ears and drew his chin deep into his muffler. Now and then he shook the snow from his shoulders. The horse’s mane and flanks were white.

He relapsed once more into the comforting numbness of body and mind and rode on, vaguely dreaming in the manner of his sunset musings on his favorite hill-top, until, looking up, he saw, or thought he saw, another horseman, white with snow as himself, coming abreast of him. To David in reflection there had oftentimes come doubt of the reality of this lank, mufflered com¬ panion whose approach had been silenced by the snow—doubt which had arisen almost at their separation an hour or so later. To one as imag¬ inative and superstitious as he knew himself to be, and strove to keep from being, and as lonely as he had been that night, such an apparition s would have been easy of invention; and the character of the figure, resembling more than faintly the ever-present image of his grandfather, made the likelihood of invention more plausible. The firmness of the impression, on the other hand, and the strangeness to him of the stranger’s words—far beyond thoughts which normally he could have granted to himself—argued for real¬ ity; and, in unconscious lapse into superstition, he had come to regard it as such.

Remarkable as these words of the stranger were granted to have been, they were, however, more dim than anything in his memory. He puz¬ zled again, straining after recollection, for the old man had assumed a significant place in his life, as a sort of masculine, prairie-grown Nemesis whose persistence in his mind he could not alto¬ gether explain.

A few things were clear. David had spoken impulsively of his desire to be a hero like his grandfather, had spoken out, unreserved and un¬ afraid, as he would not have dared to admit to a chiding elder; but the old man had not chidden. There were words of approbation and of sugges¬ tion, embroidered words characteristic of the prairie preachers whom often he had heard with his mother, with trite allusions comparing life to the storm in which they were riding, sentences then vaguely heard and repeated now without thought of meaning; but, now as then, he felt the exalta¬ tion with which they had filled him, felt his own earnestness and determination, and an apprehen¬ siveness which grew to be the strongest feeling of any. Little else he remembered save what was spoken at the four-corners at which they had parted. David repeated his resolution; the stranger called to him: “Forget not; yet you will forget, or do what is worse than forgetting.” Then another sentence, the most uncertain of any, a promise, more like warning, he thought, to keep him from forgetting; and that was all.