I laid my hand on his arm, and explained to him as directly and simply as English words could do it, how, when he had spoken of oil for his roads, I thought of another sort of oil for another sort of roads, and when he spoke of curves in his roads I was thinking of curves in the roads I dealt with, and I explained to him what my roads were. I have never seen a man more intensely interested: he neither moved nor took his eyes from my face.
"And when I spoke of selling you a pair of spectacles," said I, "it was only a way of telling you how much I wanted to make you see my kinds of roads as well as your own."
I paused, wondering if, after all, he could be made to see. I know now how the surgeon must feel at the crucial moment of his accomplished operation. Will the patient live or die?
The road-worker drew a long breath as he came out from under the anesthetic.
"I guess, partner," said he, "you're trying to put a stone or two in my ruts!"
I had him!
"Exactly," I exclaimed eagerly.
We both paused. He was the first to speak--with some embarrassment:
"Say, you're just like a preacher I used to know when I was a kid. He was always sayin' things that meant something else and when you found out what he was drivin' at you always felt kind of queer in your insides."
I laughed.
"It's a mighty good sign," I said, "when a man begins to feel queer in the insides. It shows that something is happening to him."
With that we walked back to the road, feeling very close and friendly--and shovelling again, not saying much. After quite a time, when we had nearly cleaned up the landslide, I heard the husky road-worker chuckling to himself; finally, straightening up, he said:
"Say, there's more things in a road than ever I dreamt of."
"I see," said I, "that the new spectacles are a good fit."
The road-worker laughed long and loud.
"You're a good one, all right," he said. "I see what YOU mean. I catch your point."
"And now that you've got them on," said I, "and they are serving you so well, I'm not going to sell them to you at all. I'm going to present them to you--for I haven't seen anybody in a long time that I've enjoyed meeting more than I have you."
We nurse a fiction that people love to cover up their feelings; but I have learned that if the feeling is real and deep they love far better to find a way to uncover it.
"Same here," said the road-worker simply, but with a world of genuine feeling in his voice.
Well, when it came time to stop work the road-worker insisted that I get in and go home with him.
"I want you to see my wife and kids," said he.
The upshot of it was that I not only remained for supper--and a good supper it was--but I spent the night in his little home, close at the side of the road near the foot of a fine hill. And from time to time all night long, it seemed to me, I could hear the rush of cars going by in the smooth road outside, and sometimes their lights flashed in at my window, and sometimes I heard them sound their brassy horns.
I wish I could tell more of what I saw there, of the garden back of the house, and of all the road-worker and his wife told me of their simple history--but, the road calls!
When I set forth early this morning the road-worker followed me out to the smooth macadam (his wife standing in the doorway with her hands rolled in her apron) and said to me, a bit shyly:
"I'll be more sort o'--sort o' interested in roads since I've seen you."
"I'll be along again some of these days," said I, laughing, "and I'll stop in and show you my new stock of spectacles. Maybe I can sell you another pair!"
"Maybe you kin," and he smiled a broad, understanding smile.
Nothing brings men together like having a joke in common.
So I walked off down the road--in the best of spirits--ready for the events of another day.
It will surely be a great adventure, one of these days, to come this way again--and to visit the Stanleys, and the Vedders, and the Minister, and drop in and sell another pair of specs to the Road-worker. It seems to me I have a wonderfully rosy future ahead of me!
P. S.--I have not yet found out who painted the curious signs; but I am not as uneasy about it as I was. I have seen two more of them already this morning--and find they exert quite a psychological influence.
