Part 71 (2/2)

To the Captain's protest he answered, ”Oh, yes, I know that--but that would be charity. My pencils and shoestrings and collar b.u.t.tons and coat hangers keep me in spending money. I couldn't take charity even from you men. And Jasper's money,” the gray poll wagged, and he cried, ”Oh, no--not Ahab Wright's and Kyle Perry's--not that money. Kenyon is forever slipping me fifty. But I don't need it. John Dexter keeps a room always ready for me, and I like it at the Dexters' almost as much as I do at the county home. So I don't really need Kenyon's money, however much joy he takes in giving it. And I raise the devil's own fuss to keep him from doing it.”

The Doctor puffed, and the Captain in his regal garments paraded the long room, with his hands locked under his coattails.

”But, Amos,” cried the Captain, ”under the law, no man wearing that b.u.t.ton,” and the Captain looked at the tri-color of the Loyal Legion, proudly adorning the s.h.i.+ny coat, ”no soldier under the law, has to go out there. They've got to keep you here in town, and besides you're ent.i.tled to a whopping lot of pension money for all these unclaimed years.”

The white old head shook and the pursed old lips smiled, as the thin little voice replied, ”Not yet, Ezra--not yet--I don't need the pension yet. And as for the Home--it's not lonesome there. A lot of 'em are bedfast and stricken and I get a certain amount of fun--chirping 'em up on cloudy days. They like to hear from Emerson and John A. Logan, and Sitting Bull and Huxley and their comrades. So I guess I'm being more or less useful.” He stroked his scraggy beard and looked at the fire. ”And then,” he added, ”she always seems nearer where there is sorrow. Grant, too, is that way, though neither of 'em really has come.”

The Captain finding that his money was ashes in his hands, and not liking the thought and meditation of death, changed the subject, and when the evening was old, Amos Adams called a taxi-cab, and at the county's expense rode home.

At the end of a hard winter day, descending tardily into the early spring, they missed him at the farm. No one knew whether he had gone to visit the Dexters, as was his weekly wont, or whether he was staying with Captain Morton in town, where he sometimes spent Sat.u.r.day night after the Grand Army meeting.

The next day the sun came out and melted the untimely snow banks. And some country boys playing by a limestone ledge in a wide upland meadow above the Wahoo, far from the smoke of town, came upon the body of an old man. Beside him was strewn a meager peddler's kit. On his knees was a tablet of paper; in his left hand was a pencil tightly gripped. On the tablet in a fine, even hand were the words: ”I am here, Amos,” and his old eyes, stark and wide, were drooped, perhaps to look at the tri-color of the Loyal Legion that shone on his shrunken chest and told of a great dream of a nation come true, or perhaps in the dead, stark eyes was another vision in another world.

And so as in the beginning, there was blue sky and suns.h.i.+ne and prairie gra.s.s at the end.

CHAPTER LII

NOT EXACTLY A CHAPTER BUT RATHER A Q E D OR A HIC FABULA DOCET

”And the fool said in his heart, there is no G.o.d!” And this fable teaches, if it teaches anything, that the fool was indeed a fool. Now do not think that his folly lay chiefly in glutting his life with drab material things, with wives and concubines, with worldly power and glory. That was but a small part of his folly. For that concerned himself. That turned upon his own little destiny. The vast folly of the fool came with his blindness. He could not see the beautiful miracle of progress that G.o.d has been working in this America of ours during these splendid fifty years that have closed a great epoch.

And what a miracle it was! Here lay a continent--rich, cra.s.s, material, beckoning humanity to fall down and wors.h.i.+p the G.o.d of gross and palpable realities. And, on the other hand, here stood the American spirit--the eternal love of freedom, which had brought men across the seas, had bid them fight kings and princ.i.p.alities and powers, had forced them into the wilderness by the hundreds of thousands to make of it ”the homestead of the free”; the spirit that had called them by the millions to wage a terrible civil war for a great ideal.

This spirit met the G.o.d of things as they are, and for a generation grappled in a mighty struggle.

And men said: The old America is dead; America is money mad; America is a charnel house of greed. Millions and millions of men from all over the earth came to her sh.o.r.es. And the world said: They have brought only their greed with them. And still the struggle went on. The continent was taken; man abolished the wilderness. A new civilization rose. And because it was strong, the world said it was not of the old America, but of a new, soft, wicked order, which wist not that G.o.d had departed from it.

Then the new epoch dawned; clear and strong came the call to Americans to go forth and fight in the Great War--not for themselves, not for their own glory, nor their own safety, but for the soul of the world.

And the old spirit of America rose and responded. The long inward struggle, seen only by the wise, only by those who knew how G.o.d's truth conquers in this earth, working beneath the surface, deep in the heart of things, the long inward struggle of the spirit of America for its own was won.

So it came to pa.s.s that the richness of the continent was poured out for an ideal, that the genius of those who had seemed to be serving only Mammon was devoted pa.s.sionately to a principle, and that the blood of those who came in seeming greed to America was shed gloriously in the high emprise which called America to this new world crusade. Moses in the burning bush speaking with G.o.d, Saul on the road to Damascus, never came closer to the force outside ourselves which makes for righteousness,--the force that has guided humanity upward through the ages,--than America has come in this hour of her high resolve. And yet for fifty years she has come into this holy ground steadily, and unswervingly; indeed, for a hundred years, for three hundred years from Plymouth Rock to the red fields of France, America has come a long and perilous way--yet always sure, and never faltering.

To have lived in the generation now pa.s.sing, to have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord in the hearts of the people, to have watched the steady triumph in our American life of the spirit of justice, of fellows.h.i.+p over the spirit of greed, to have seen the Holy Ghost rise in the life of a whole nation, was a blessed privilege. And if this tale has reflected from the shallow paper hearts of those phantoms flitting through its pages some glimpse of their joy in their pilgrimage, the story has played its part. If the fable of Grant Adams's triumphant failure does not dramatize in some way the victory of the American spirit--the Puritan conscience--in our generation, then, alas, this parable has fallen short of its aim. But most of all, if the story has not shown how sad a thing it is to sit in the seat of the scornful, and to deny the reality of G.o.d's purpose in this world, even though it is denied in pomp and power and pride, then indeed this narrative has failed. For in all this world one finds no other place so dreary and so desolate as it is in the heart of a fool.

THE END

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