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Page 24
The innkeeper proved to be a mine of general information. He knew
nothing at all specific but evinced a candid willingness to overcome
this by acquiring facts from Kenny. Nobody he knew had run away from
an uncle. Why was Kenny seeking uncles? . . . Hum . . . Joel
Ashley's boy had run away but the uncle there had been a stepmother.
Was the runaway boy anybody's long lost heir? A pity! One read such
things in the papers. Years back there had been a scandal about a girl
who ran away to be an actress.
Kenny interrupted him long enough to order anything vehicular in the
village that would go. The innkeeper shouted to a boy outside with a
bucket and asked Kenny how far the "rig" would have to travel.
"I'm going," Kenny told him shortly, "to find a river. I'll keep going
until I find it."
The innkeeper after an interval of blank astonishment identified the
river at once. Kenny felt encouraged. Pressed to further detail,
however, he admitted a confusing plentitude of woods, hills and
farmhouses. Dangerously near the state of mind Garry called "running
in circles," Kenny fumed out to wait for the hotel phaeton and climbed
into it with a shudder of disgust. It had a mustard colored fringe.
But the phaeton creaked away into a wind and world of lilacs. Kenny
forgot the inn. He forgot the village. Another gust of warm, sweet
wind, another shower of lilac stars beside a well, another lane and he
would have to paint or go mad.
He neither painted nor lost his reason. He came instead to the river
and began again to fret. The road that but a moment before had made a
feint of stopping for good and all at a dark and hilly wall of cedars,
swept around a rocky curve and revealed the glint of the river. After
that by all the dictates of convenience it should have curved again and
continued its course to Kenny's destination, pleasantly parallel with
the bends of the river. Instead it crossed the river bridge and went
off at a foolish tangent, disappearing over the crest of a hill. Wild
and wooded country swept steeply down to the river edge. Kenny, who
had made a vow of penitential speed, must continue his search on foot.
The prospect filled him with dismay.
He dismissed the phaeton at the bridge and stared up and down the river
in gloomy indecision. Upstream or downstream? Heaven alone knew!
Whichever way he elected to go would be the wrong way. Fate, who had
saddled him with Silas and the mule, would see to that.
Then, having resentfully put his mind to it, he evolved some logic.
Brian, leaving the wood by the river, would not go back the way he had
come. He would travel upstream and mail his letter when he found the
village. Kenny conversely had found the village first. Therefore he
must travel downstream to find the wood; downstream through a
disheartening tangle of bush and tree and brier and maybe snakes and
marshes.
With a groan he plunged into the wood, keeping well up the slope to
avoid the lower marshes. He must spur himself to the start or he'd
never finish. But his mind was in ferment. What if the boy had
written to his sister? Must he vagabond forth again with the morning
into a world of bucolic dawns, alarm-clock farmers, roosters, corncribs
and mules? By the powers of wildfire, no! He would buy a motorcycle.
On tires or toes he could wind Brian around his finger and he would!
In a flurry of bitter abstraction, he floundered into a marsh and
emerged mud-spattered and indignant. Briers tore at him. Below the
sun-mottled river glided endlessly on in sylvan peace. The other shore
looked better. There the wind-bent shag of trees was greener save
when, with a hint of rain, the breeze turned up an under-leaf ripple of
silver. He met no one; no one but a madman, he reflected, would
explore the tangled banks of a hermit river.
At sunset, after seven slow weariful miles downstream in the brooding
quiet of a hot afternoon murmurous with birds and the sound of the
river, he came to the end of his journey--a wood, stretching steeply up
a cliff to a farmhouse lost in trees and ivy. It was on the other side
of the river and there was no bridge.
Kenny, who believed all things of Fate when the pet or victim was
himself, refused absolutely to credit her crowning whimsy. In a fury
of exasperation he clambered down to the water's edge and washed his
face; moodily mopping it with his handkerchief he stared across the
water.
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