His high color had already fled except for a spot on either cheek-bone that lent a brightness to his eyes.He glanced around the cabin.It looked familiar and yet strange.Rather, it looked strange BECAUSE still familiar, and therefore incongruous with the new atmosphere that surrounded it--discordant with the echo of their last meeting, and painfully accenting the change.There were the four "bunks," or sleeping berths, of his companions, each still bearing some traces of the individuality of its late occupant with a dumb loyalty that seemed to make their light-hearted defection monstrous.In the dead ashes of the Judge's pipe, scattered on his shelf, still lived his old fire; in the whittled and carved edges of the Left Bower's bunk still were the memories of bygone days of delicious indolence; in the bullet-holes clustered round a knot of one of the beams there was still the record of the Right Bower's old-time skill and practice; in the few engravings of female loveliness stuck upon each headboard there were the proofs of their old extravagant devotion--all a mute protest to the change.
He remembered how, a fatherless, truant schoolboy, he had drifted into their adventurous, nomadic life, itself a life of grown-up truancy like his own, and became one of that gypsy family.How they had taken the place of relations and household in his boyish fancy, filling it with the unsubstantial pageantry of a child's play at grown-up existence, he knew only too well.But how, from being a pet and protege, he had gradually and unconsciously asserted his own individuality and taken upon his younger shoulders not only a poet's keen appreciation of that life, but its actual responsibilities and half-childish burdens, he never suspected.He had fondly believed that he was a neophyte in their ways, a novice in their charming faith and indolent creed, and they had encouraged it; now their renunciation of that faith could only be an excuse for a renunciation of HIM.The poetry that had for two years invested the material and sometimes even mean details of their existence was too much a part of himself to be lightly dispelled.
The lesson of those ingenuous moralists failed, as such lessons are apt to fail; their discipline provoked but did not subdue; a rising indignation, stirred by a sense of injury, mounted to his cheek and eyes.It was slow to come, but was none the less violent that it had been preceded by the benumbing shock of shame and pride.
I hope I shall not prejudice the reader's sympathies if my duty as a simple chronicler compels me to state, therefore, that the sober second thought of this gentle poet was to burn down the cabin on the spot with all its contents.This yielded to a milder counsel--waiting for the return of the party, challenging the Right Bower, a duel to the death, perhaps himself the victim, with a crushing explanation in extremis, "It seems we are ONE too many.No matter;it is settled now.Farewell!" Dimly remembering, however, that there was something of this in the last well-worn novel they had read together, and that his antagonist might recognize it, or even worse, anticipate it himself, the idea was quickly rejected.
Besides, the opportunity for an apotheosis of self-sacrifice was past.Nothing remained now but to refuse the proffered bribe of claim and cabin by letter, for he must not wait their return.He tore a leaf from a blotted diary, begun and abandoned long since, and essayed to write.Scrawl after scrawl was torn up, until his fury had cooled down to a frigid third personality."Mr.John Ford regrets to inform his late partners that their tender of house, of furniture," however, seemed too inconsistent with the pork-barrel table he was writing on; a more eloquent renunciation of their offer became frivolous and idiotic from a caricature of Union Mills, label and all, that appeared suddenly on the other side of the leaf; and when he at last indited a satisfactory and impassioned exposition of his feelings, the legible addendum of "Oh, ain't you glad you're out of the wilderness!"--the forgotten first line of a popular song, which no scratching would erase--seemed too like an ironical postscript to be thought of for a moment.He threw aside his pen and cast the discordant record of past foolish pastime into the dead ashes of the hearth.
How quiet it was.With the cessation of the rain the wind too had gone down, and scarcely a breath of air came through the open door.
