Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

“ Whether it was in his blood or not, as they say it is in the blood of some wild animals which invariably, sooner or later, revert to utter savagery, or whether he was unduly restrained by the conditions of his life, which made a reaction inevitable, Adam Andersen, at a time of life when most men have settled into the calm of acquiescence with fate which is to endure until death, broke his bonds. ”

“ Then, too, the desire of discovery is as old as the world, and Andersen in setting himself free had become at once as old and as young as the world. It was therefore that he went on with the men to the mines. But he was the one of them all who made a rich find, although it was not for a year's time, and in the mean time there had been hardships which he had borne lightly, since he had not born them with his soul. Frost-bites which do not affect the soul have little sting in them, and neither has hunger under burning suns. ”

“ One afternoon, slouching along in the shadows of the woods, he saw his wife and his slender daughters and eldest boy trying to plough the fields with an old horse which they had hired. That was too much for him. There was a man in the settlement who had owed him money for years. Andersen had returned to the simplest notions of right and wrong. That night he went to the great barn of the man who owed him, and got out two stout horses, and he worked all night ploughing his fields. ”

“ As the summer advanced he built himself a rude shack under the shag of a hill, and laid in a stock of fire-wood. It began to be known in the settlement that there was a wild man living in the woods, but as he always paid for his raids upon the provisions of the place, no rancor was aroused against him, and wild things awakened no particular surprise or curiosity in that vicinity, so frequent they were, not even that wildest of all wild things — a wild man. ”

“ The day after Andersen disappeared, leaving no trace, — for he had planned his escape well, — and his wife appealed to the people in the scattered settlement to aid her, there had been no lack of volunteers, and there had been fierce blame for the man, although he had left his family in easy circumstances, and his wife was considered to have the brain of a man and to be as competent to run the farm as Adam. ”

“ But he knew that the time was come when he must return to the trammels of love and happiness and anxiety, which his day and generation had made incumbent upon him, and which, although his soul after a manner delighted in them, were yet not the best for a man of his kind who had in him the memory of the old which is the new. ”

“ It is true that some mothers lately from the East forbade their children to stray far into the woods in the locality where the wild man had been seen, but the children themselves, more fearless, made little raids in large companies for mutual protection, and boasted that they had seen the wild man and the wild man's house, and astonishing tales, tinctured with their childish fancy, they told of both. ”

“ Then he left his shack, and went along the road toward his old home. He stopped at the house of a man who owned a mule, a half-mile from his own home, and found the man's wife at home, and bargained with her, with a little money he had left, for the hire of the mule for a few days. These people were newcomers in the settlement and did not know him, but the woman looked at him wonderingly when he told her what fields he wished to plough.
“But,” she said, “I thought that man was dead. I thought he ran away and died.”
“No,” said Adam, “he is alive.” ”

“ On the third night he stole up to the barn of the neighbor whose horses he had borrowed, and caught the gleam of a lantern from the wide-open doors. They, too, were on the watch. They had discovered that their horses had been used. ”