Stanley Waterloo

“ And, one evening, there was a man in deep trouble, and in the morning he sat beside a bed in which was his small wife and beside her a tiny red thing, "rather underdone," he said, in the buoyant reaction which came upon him, for that was Harlson's way when he had emerged from trouble; and the small red thing was the son of the two of them. And who can tell what the man said to the woman. There are precious, sacred overflows of love, sweet outbursts of what makes life worth the living, never yet in words for all, never yet written in black upon some white surface. There is a sanctuary. ”

“ A good thing is the wild turkey, but even a better thing, when his numbers and quality are considered, is the ruffed grouse, the partridge of the North, the pheasant of the South. How, in the lake region, he dawdles among the low-land thornberry bushes in autumn, how he knows of many things to eat beside the thorn-apples, and how plump he gets, and how cunning! How watchful he is, how knowing of covert, and with what a burst he lifts himself from his hiding-place and whirls away between the tree-trunks! ”

“ The out-door conscience is strong, but seldom retrospective.
Grant Harlson swung his maul and delighted in what was about him, and breathed the crisp October air, scented with the spice bushes he cut to clear the way, and pondered less and less upon the puzzles of the Hindoo king. His mood was all robust, and when he visited the town he was a wonder to Mrs. Rolfston, who was infatuated with the savagery of his wooing and madly discontent with the certainty that she must lose him. She made wild propositions, which he laughed at. She would remove to the city; she would do many things. ”

“ Have you followed the deer in the dense forest, clinging doggedly to his track upon the fresh snow from the dusk of early morning, startling him again and again from covert, and shooting whenever you caught even so much as a glimpse of his gray body through distant interstices of tree and brush, until, late in the afternoon, human endurance, which always surpasses that of the wild beast, overcame him, and he leaped less strongly with each new alarm and grew more reckless before twilight, and came within easy range and fed his enemies on the morrow? ”

“ I have seen many people, and many strange faces, but never such a person nor such a face as of an old woman who sat at that early hour of the morning at a table near us. The figure was a warped and withered caricature, the face that of a hag, a creature vixenish and viperish, and mean and crafty. It was the face of a procuress of the lowest and most desperate type, of a deformed she-wolf of the slums, of the worst there is in all abandoned human nature, and Harlson was as interested as I was disgusted and repelled. ”

“ It seemed to me that the hard lines in Grant Harlson's face became, week by week and month by month, less harshly and clearly defined, while upon the face of his wife grew that new look of a content and ownership which marks the woman who sleeps in some man's arms, the one who owns her—the same look which Grant, with his broader experience and keener insight, used to recognize when he puzzled me so in telling whimsically, in the street cars, who were wedded, without looking at their rings. ”

“ But he tossed off most things lightly, and had that vitality which is of heredity, not built up with a single generation, though sometimes lost in one. Forest and farm-bred, college-bred, city-fostered and broadened and hardened. A man of the world, with experiences, and in his quality, no doubt, the logical, inevitable result of such experiences—one with a conscience flexile and seeking, but hard as rock when once satisfied. One who never, intentionally, injured a human being, save for equity's sake. ”

“ He had not slept beneath the stars alone, he said, since the family had left the farm. And there was much laughing, and Harlson took home the servant girl, and she, growing bold as they approached the house, ran up the path ahead of him. The lawn between the better house and street in the lake country town is often a little forest, so dense the trees and their foliage. And added to the fragrance of the leaves in later midsummer are the mingled odors of petunias and pinks and rosemary and bergamot and musk, for all these flourish late. ”

“ In the rear of the wagon crouched or stood upright, or laid down, as the mood came upon his chestnut-colored grandness, a great Irish setter, loved of the man because of many a day together in stubble or over fallow, loved of the woman because he, the setter, had already learned to love and regard the woman as an arbitrator, as queen of something he knew not what. ”

“ From that time till the end she never left his bedside.
Murderous Death has certain kindnesses in his killings. Just before the end is peace. The struggles of this strong man became something fearful as the lungs congested, and the most powerful of anti-pyretics ceased to have effect, and then came the peace which follows nature's virtual surrender, the armistice of the moment. What trick of reversion to first impressions comes, and what causes it, none have yet explained, but long before the time of Falstaff men, dying, had babbled o' green fields. Grant Harlson, now, was surely dying. ”

“ Jean would explain to some curious person, that she herself had shot the original wearer of the skin, and that her husband was up a tree at the time, and there would be odd looks, and he would explain nothing, and then she, woman-like, must needs spoil the mystery by telling all about it, as if any one would not comprehend some jest in the matter! It was a home of rugs and books, and very restful. I liked to go there, where they both spoiled me, and where the softness and the perfume of it all made me useless and dissatisfied after I had come away. There is no reason in the average man. ”

“ What if our souls are but nurture
For lives that are greater than ours?
When the fish swims out of the water,
When the birds soar out of the blue,
Man's thoughts may transcend man's knowledge,
And your God be no reflex of you!
One night in after life I sat with Grant Harlson, in his rooms in a great city, and he told me of this, his time of doubt and tribulation, and repeated to me the poem. ”

“ Harlson said, one day:
"I believe that an old proverb should be changed. 'He laughs best who laughs last,' is incorrect. It should be: 'He laughs best who laughs with some one else.' And that is what will make us strong in life, my love. Some trying times may come, but we shall be brave. We'll just look at each other, and laugh, because we shall understand. We know. We, somehow, comprehend together. ”

“ There was a struggle in his mind between the instinct to be honorable and straight-forward and fair, and to do what was right, and the impulse, on the other hand, to refuse anything demanded by an assailant. But the would-be murderer was not a murderer, after all. He was only a temporary lunatic whom Harlson himself had driven mad. That was the just way to look at it. As for Jenny, she would not suffer much. There had not been time enough. Not in a day does a man or woman have that effect produced upon the heart which lasts forever. ”

“ She had smiled upon Grant Harlson, and smiled upon young Maitland, so early in her years is the female a coquette, and they looked askance upon each other, though they were the best of friends. Had they not together defied the big George Appleton, and vanquished him in running fight, and were they not sworn allies, come any weal or woe! But woman, even at the age of ten, has ever been the cause of trouble between males, and those two had, on her account, a mortal feud. ”

“ In each man's mind was a different immediate aim. Woodell wanted Harlson on the ground and underneath him; he wanted his hand upon his throat, and to clutch that throat so savagely and so long that the man's face would blacken and his tongue protrude, and his limbs finally relax, and the work attempted on the hay-mow be done completely! Harlson had but one thought: to overmaster in some way his assailant. ”

“ He must be broiled, split open neatly and well larded with good butter, for not so juicy even as the quail is the ruffed grouse, and he must have aid. But, broiled and buttered and seasoned, well, what a bird he is!
There were woodcock, too, in the lowlands, and Harlson found with them such buoyant life as we men find in sudden death of those small, succulent creatures. To stop a woodcock on the wing as it pitches over the willows is no simple thing, and he who does it handily is, in one respect, greater than he who ruleth a kingdom. ”

“ Harlson had circumstance for thought. Only the hard labor cleared his blood and brain, and helped him.
Could fortune come to him who had such a load upon his conscience? Was not he a violator of all law, as he had learned it,—law of both God and man? Had he an excuse at all, and what was the degree of it? He could not endure the time when it became too dark in the wood for work, and when he drove the jaded oxen out into the field and to the barn, and it was yet too early for seeking the hay-mow, which was of clover, and there seeking sleep. A clover mow is a wonderful sleep-compeller. ”

“ He took her to the lake and taught her not to fear it, and they frolicked in its waves together, and she learned to swim as well as he, and to dive as smoothly as a loon or otter, and was a water nymph such as the creatures of the wood had never seen. He was very vain of her art acquired so swiftly, though in conversation he gave vast credit to her teacher. And in the catching of the black bass there came eventually to the nine-ounce split bamboo in her little hands as many trophies as to his heavier lancewood. ”

“ He was a boy still, in the freshness of his appetite, yet his demands in quantity were manly, to a certainty. Six feet of maul-swinging humanity had eaten much, even in midsummer. That same six feet required more now, when the temperature was low and the system needed carbon. Perhaps he got all that was good for him; it is well to train down a little occasionally; but Harlson wandered about sometimes with a feeling of sympathy for the wolf of the forest, the hawk of the air, and the pickerel of the waters, all hungry ever and all refusing to live by bread alone. ”

“ More than once in later life Grant Harlson felt himself very near the line which men who have crossed once may not repass, but never later came to him the feeling of this moment. It was but a flash of thought, for the physical being's upheaval followed in an instant, but it was a flash of horror. Then began an awful struggle.
Borne down deeply in the yielding clover, Harlson had little chance to exert his strength, which, with that grip upon his throat, could not last long at most ”

“ They were what you would call religious, Grant and Jean. They liked the same church—it doesn't matter which it was—and attended regularly, and worshiped without much regard for its more narrow legends. They did not trouble themselves with the idea of the everlasting punishment of babes, nor the fate of the untutored heathen. They had, somehow, a simple idea that the human being who tried to do right according to his or her views was all right as to the future. ”

“ The doctors have much to say about pneumonia. Doubtless they know of what they talk, but pneumonia comes nevertheless, and defeats the strong man and the doctors. The strong man it strangles. The doctors it laughs at.
All that medical science could command was brought to the bedside of Grant Harlson. The doctor, his friend, called in the wisest of associates in consultation, and as for care—there was Jean! He was cared for as the angels might care for a wandering soul. But the big man in the bed tossed and muttered, and looked at Jean appealingly, and grew worse. ”

“ The bear and wolverine had gone forever. The fox rarely barked at night; the deer and wild turkey were far less plentiful, though the ruffed grouse still drummed in the copses, and the quail whistled from the fences. Different, even, were the hunters in their methods. The boy, whose single-barreled shot-gun had known no law, now carried a better piece, and scorned to slay a sitting bird. Both he and Alf became great wing shots, and clever gentlemen sportsmen from the city who sometimes came to hunt with them could not hope to own so good a bag at the day's end. ”

“ And of this more reckless, hopeless people Harlson learned much. With them he was; of them he could never fully be. The extent to which a man is permanently defiled by pitch-touching cannot, of course, be known. It depends upon the pitch and upon the man. It was not a quiet life the young man led! On the contrary, it was a very feverish one, for he labored hard in the office by day—he never for an instant abandoned his ambitions and his plans—and at night he drifted into the land where were warmth and light and lawlessness. ”

“ She stood there, not uninterested altogether, for, no doubt, Harlson had been telling her already of his closest friend, his lieutenant in many things, and I had an opportunity to study her with all closeness as we exchanged the commonplaces. I understood, when I saw her, how it was that he had referred to her so absurdly as a little brown streak of a thing. Little she was, assuredly, and brown, and so slender, that his simile was not bad, but the brownness and the slenderness were by no means all there was noticeable of her. She was not imposing, this woman, but she was not commonplace. ”

“ He found a place in some old women's home for that aged demon, and one day he made me go with him to see her. Maybe it was the different dress and the different surroundings, but, it seemed to me, her eyes were not as they were in the low restaurant. The hand that wore the thin gold ring was clean in its pitiful shrunkenness. The creature looked neither hunted nor hunting. She was but an old woman going to the grave so near her, and going, I could not but imagine, to find the one who had given her that gold circlet some half century ago. I rather fancied Harlson's fad. ”