His Family - Ernest Poole [46]
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The next Saturday evening, with Deborah, he started for the mountains. And Bruce came down to see them off.
"Remember, son," said Roger, as the two walked on the platform. "Come up this year for a month, my boy. You need it." The train was about to start.
"Oh, I'll be all right," was the answer. "My friend the Judge, who has hay fever, tells me he has found a cure."
"Damn his cure! You come to us!"
"Hold on a minute, live and learn. The Judge is quite excited about it. You drink little bugs, he says, a billion after every meal. They come in tall blue bottles. We're going to dine together next week and drink 'em till we're all lit up. Oh, we're going to have a hell of a time. His wife left town on Tuesday."
"Bruce," said Roger sternly, as the train began to move, "leave bugs alone and come up and breathe! And quit smoking so many cigarettes!" He stepped on the car.
"Remember, son, a solid month!" Bruce nodded as the train moved out.
"Good luck--good-bye--fine summer--my love to the wife and the kiddies--" and Bruce's dark, tense, smiling face was left behind. Roger went back into the smoker.
"Now for the mountains," he thought. "Thank God!"
CHAPTER XIV
A few hours later Roger awakened. His lower berth was still pitch dark. The train had stopped, and he had been roused by a voice outside his window. Rough and slow and nasal, the leisurely drawl of a mountaineer, it came like balm to Roger's ears. He raised the curtain and looked out. A train hand with a lantern was listening to a dairy man, a tall young giant in top boots. High overhead loomed a shadowy mountain and over its rim came the glow of the dawn. With a violent lurch the train moved on. And Roger, lying back on his pillow, looked up at the misty mountain sides all mottled in the strange blue light with patches of firs and birches and pines. In the narrow valley up which the train was thundering, were small herds of grazing cattle, a lonely farmhouse here and there. From one a light was twinkling. And the city with its heat and noise, its nervous throb, its bedlam nights, all dropped like a fever from his soul.
Now, close by the railroad track, through a shallow rocky gorge a small river roared and foamed. Its cool breath came up to his nostrils and gratefully he breathed it in. For this was the Gale River, named after one of his forefathers, and in his mind's eye he followed the stream back up its course to the little station where he and Deborah were to get off. There the narrowing river bed turned and wound up through a cleft in the hills to the homestead several miles away. On the dark forest road beside it he pictured George, his grandson, at this moment driving down to meet them in a mountain wagon with one of the two hired men, a lantern swinging under the wheels. What an adventure for young George.
Presently he heard Deborah stirring in the berth next to his own.
At the station George was there, and from a thermos bottle which Edith had filled the night before he poured coffee piping hot, which steamed in the keen, frosty air.
"Oh, how good!" cried Deborah. "How thoughtful of your mother, George. How is she, dear?"
"Oh, she's all right, Aunt Deborah." His blunt freckled features flushed from his drive, George stood beaming on them both. He appeared, if anything, tougher and scrawnier than before. "Everything's all right," he said. "There ain't a sick animal on the whole farm."
As Roger sipped his coffee he was having a look at the horses. One of them was William, his cob.
"Do you see it?" inquired his grandson.
"What?"
"The boil," George answered proudly, "on William's rump. There it is--on the