Montour American

The Prisoner's Return.

When I enlisted, I thought I'd go and say goodby to Dr. Miller's daughter. I was only a common farmer, and she had another beau, a student at Amherst, but I remembered once at a party when she had to choose a partner she selected me instead of Jim, so I thought I'd go and tell her I was off for Dixie in the morning. I didn't stay long, for Jim was there. Martha went with him out to the gate. I reached out my big sunburned hand, and she took it in both her own and held it quite a bit, and she said: "Bennie, I'm sorry you're going to the war. You're too young a man and too good a man to stand up and be shot at." Then Jim appeared on the scene, and I went away half cursing my honest hand for being so big and so brown, while Jim's was as white as a lily, with a great flashing diamond on the smallest of his slender fingers.

Talk about standing up as a target for bullets! That's nothing, nothing at all compared with lying down to starve in a foul prison. As the days passed into weeks, and the weeks, so long, into months so much longer that I lost all count, how many and many a time I looked at my white, bony hands and wished they were as big and as tanned as they used to be, and when I would have prayed for an ending of my misery, how well I remembered that Martha had said I was too young to die, and the way she had held my hand still thrilled me and kept me alive, and I said over and over to myself a thousand times, with grim determination, what Dr. Miller had so often repeated, "While there is life there is hope," and at last I was exchanged and discharged. Oh, how happy I was to be set free! A great joy buoyed me up for the long, weary journey home.

When at last the stage set me down in the familiar village postoffice, I was so weary and wasted no one seemed to recognize me, but looked at me in a pitying way I could not understand, and so I did not speak to any one, but staggered down the hill to the old farmhouse, trying in vain to scent the supper or the clove pinks. I did not know my precious mother had been dead almost a year, but when I reached the gate I felt the change. It hung by one hinge and swayed and creaked with a dismal sound that seemed to me like the groaning of a ghost. It weakened me so that I had to rest awhile before going down the long walk, still lined by my mother's flower beds. But, oh, how neglected they looked! As I neared the porch I saw a red calf tied to a lilac bush, one that my mother had herself planted on the day she was a bride, and then I seemed to know that she was gone. War kills women as well as men. She thought her only boy was dead, and she had nothing to live for.

That was too good a house to be long unoccupied, and Dr. Miller had rented it to a needy family of foreigners, requesting that my room should be left just as my mother had last arranged it. The woman who occupied it allowed me to go right up to my own airy chamber, where everything was sacredly familiar. How deliciously soft and clean the bed seemed, and I cried myself to sleep.

The first thing I heard in the morning was not the chirping of the robins, as in the olden time, but the loud bawling of that steer calf under my window. I covered my head with the bedclothes, and was the poor, weak baby over again. When I awoke later in the day, good Dr. Miller was sitting by my bedside. He helped me dress and took me home to breakfast, where the talking as well as the cooking was all United States, but somehow I wasn't hungry and longed to ask what had become of Martha.

I soon found out. Her father was going to Holyoke the next day to hear her valedictory, and he took me along with him. It was a long drive, but we took it slow and easy, and I had my fill of fresh air and recovered my appetite. We were a little late to the exhibition and found the chapel already crowded, but the good doctor finally succeeded in getting a seat well up in front, and there, right before us, was Amherst Jim, just as slim and white as ever. He fingered his watch chain and petted his mustache and made his diamond glisten and devoured the platform with his eyes, just as he used to in the old red schoolhouse when Martha was going to speak her piece. Now he was a full fledged physician and Dr. Miller's partner. We had a long time to wait. The essays were lengthy and learned, and Martha's was the last. The other graduates wore white, but she was all in black, with a crape collar. I looked questioningly into her father's face. He put his arm around me and whispered, "She wears mourning for your mother—and for you."

For my mother and for me—oh, the pain of it! Oh, the joy of it! And, whether it was the pain or the joy or the crowded room or the way Jim looked at Martha, I cannot tell, but somehow everything slipped away into nothingness.

When I came back to consciousness the folks were all gone, all but Dr. Miller and his daughter, and Martha was holding me as handily as she is holding that blessed baby now, and I was just as quiet and submissive.