It was somewhat inconsistent to add, "There's a bully place--sneak in

and let her get past me again. But she won't catch me following next

time!"

While he tried to keep up his virtuous anger, he was steering into an

abandoned farmyard, parking the car behind cottonwoods and neglected

tall currant bushes which would conceal it from the road.

The windows of the deserted house stared at him; a splintered screen

door banged in every breeze. Lichens leered from the cracks of the

porch. The yard was filled with a litter of cottonwood twigs, and over

the flower garden hulked ragged weeds. In the rank grass about the slimy

green lip of the well, crickets piped derisively. The barn-door was

open. Stray kernels of wheat had sprouted between the spokes of a rusty

binder-wheel. A rat slipped across the edge of the shattered manger. As

dusk came on, gray things seemed to slither past the upper windows of

the house, and somewhere, under the roof, there was a moaning. Milt was

sure that it was the wind in a knothole. He told himself that he was

absolutely sure about it. And every time it came he stroked Vere de Vere

carefully, and once, when the moaning ended in the slamming of the

screen door, he said, "Jiminy!"

This boy of the unghostly cylinders and tangible magnetos had never

seen a haunted house. To toil of the harvest field and machine shop and

to trudging the sun-beaten road he was accustomed, but he had never

crouched watching the slinking spirits of old hopes and broken

aspirations; feeble phantoms of the first eager bridegroom who had come

to this place, and the mortgage-crushed, rust-wheat-ruined man who had

left it. He wanted to leap into the bug and go on. Yet the haunt of

murmurous memories dignified his unhappiness. In the soft, tree-dimmed

dooryard among dry, blazing plains it seemed indecent to go on growling

"Gee," and "Can you beat it?" It was a young poet, a poet rhymeless and

inarticulate, who huddled behind the shield of untrimmed currant bushes,

and thought of the girl he would never see again.

He was hungry, but he did not eat. He was cramped, but he did not move.

He picked up the books she had given him. He was quickened by the

powdery beauty of Youth's Encounter; by the vision of laughter and

dancing steps beneath a streaky gas-glow in the London fog; of youth not

"roughhousing" and wanting to "be a sport," yet in frail beauty and

faded crimson banners finding such exaltation as Schoenstrom had never

known. But every page suggested Claire, and he tucked the book away.

In Vachel Lindsay's Congo, in a poem called "The Santa Fe Trail," he

found his own modern pilgrimage from another point of view. Here was

the poet, disturbed by the honking hustle of passing cars. But Milt

belonged to the honking and the hustle, and it was not the soul of the

grass that he read in the poem, but his own sun-flickering flight: Swiftly the brazen car comes on.

It burns in the East as the sunrise burns.

I see great flashes where the far trail turns.

Butting through the delicate mists of the morning,

It comes like lightning, goes past roaring,

It will hail all the windmills, taunting, ringing,

On through the ranges the prairie-dog tills--

Scooting past the cattle on the thousand hills.

Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn,

Ho for the gay-horn, bark-horn, bay-horn.




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