Gettysburg… Brant’s Mill… the country that I came from is there!… Now I shall never see it any more,” he said. “I’m an old man and I’m dying…. The big farms… the orchards… the great barns bigger than houses…. You must go back, son, someday to see the country that your father came from…. I was a boy there,” the old man muttered. “Now I’m an old man…. I’ll come back no more…. No more… it’s pretty strange when you come to think of it,” he muttered, “by God it is!”
“Wy, wy, P-p-p-papa,” Luke said nervously, “I… I fink if he’s g-g-going to get his train wy we’d better—”
“Good-bye, son,” Gant said quietly again, giving the boy the pressure of his great right hand. “Be a good boy, now.”
But already all the fires of life, so briefly kindled by this memory of the past, had died away: he was an old sick man again, and he had turned his dead eyes away from his son and was staring dully out across the city.
“Good-bye, Papa,” the boy said, and then paused uncertainly, not knowing further what to say. From the old man there had come suddenly the loathsome stench of rotting death, corrupt mortality, and he turned swiftly away with a feeling of horror in his heart, remembering the good male smell of childhood and his father’s prime—the smell of the old worn sofa, the chairs, the sitting-room, the roaring fires, the plug tobacco on the mantelpiece.
At the screen door he paused again and looked back down the porch. His father was sitting there as he had left him, among the other old dying men, his long chin loose, mouth half open, his dead dull eye fixed vacantly across the sun-hazed city of his youth, his great hand of power quietly dropped upon his cane.
Down in the city’s central web, the boy could distinguish faintly the line of the rails, and see the engine smoke above the railroad yards, and as he looked, he heard far off that haunting sound and prophecy of youth and of his life—the bell, the wheel, the wailing whistle—and the train.
Then he turned swiftly and went to meet it—and all the new lands, morning, and the shining city. Upon the porch his father had not moved or stirred. He knew that he should never seehim again.
