Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/721

Rh thought, it is true, of his wife and his children, and, paradoxical as it may seem, with intense love, yet still with exultation that he had broken away from that love and its terrible monotony of demand. The going to bed every night to sleep in his carved bedstead underneath the patchwork quilts which his wife had made, to realize beside him that other personality which had become a part of him, and which he had realized as extraneous, even while he loved it; the invariable rising in the morning and going about his tasks; the three meals a day; the sound of his daughters' pounding on the piano which he had purchased for them, and in which he himself took the greatest pride; the sight of his wife about her household tasks; the smell of the bread baking and the sweet cake; the wrangling and playing of the younger children in which he delighted,—he was free from now, and instead was an infinite preciousness of renewed individuality.

"I was being tore to pieces betwixt them all," he said to himself as he leaped along, "and soon there would have been nothing at all left of me." He looked up at the stars, and a sense of his own soul which he had lost for a long time was over him, and along with it, as a matter of sequence, was the sense of God. In his belt were pistols and a hunting-knife; over his shoulder, a rifle. He meant to hunt and trap the valuable game farther off, but when he reached the hunting-fields the desire left him. He was not a man of sentiment. It simply did not appeal to him to hunt, for the sake of profit, his fierce brothers of the out-of-doors. Once he had a good chance to shoot at a deer, and levelled his rifle, but did not fire. Instead of shooting the deer, he made his way to the nearest settlement and purchased some venison which another man had shot. He wore a money-belt. Once, even, he might have killed a bear and had a valuable skin, but let the great shaggy free thing lumber away. That was in the spring, when he had been on the tramp for six months.

At last he fell in with some men on their way to the mines, and he fared along with them. They were not the kind usually seen on such roads, but a meek set rather intimidated by their own adventure, and they had come from the East. They all rather feared Andersen, who kept himself to himself even while with them, and they had a theory that he was some escaped criminal. Andersen understood, and it filled him with the grim humor that a wild animal might have had. He knew himself that he would not hurt these men, that in reality he had never hurt anything, and the suspicion as to his evil doings seemed to him a fine joke. He listened to the innocent prattle of his companions concerning the gold they would dig out of the earth, and what they would do with it, and he had a sort of wonder concerning his own motives for joining them.

He was too simple to understand that the thirst for gold is in itself as primeval a thing as the thirst for freedom, inasmuch as gold is often the price of it. Then, too, the desire of discovery is as old as the world, and Andersen in setting himself free had become at once as old and as young as the world. It was therefore that he went on with the men to the mines. But he was the one of them all who made a rich find, although it was not for a year's time, and in the mean time there had been hardships which he had borne lightly, since he had not born them with his soul. Frost-bites which do not affect the soul have little sting in them, and neither has hunger under burning suns. Several of the party succumbed, and Andersen surprised them all by his roughly tender care of them, although they still feared him. They called him the wild man. Indeed, he had let his hair and beard grow, and was as shaggy as a bear, and almost as speechless. He never talked with his companions, and none of them knew anything of his antecedents.

When he made his great find it was in the early spring, and he struck out toward home. He did not know why he did so, but it seemed a part of his freedom, the natural impulse of a living thing which has discovered, toward a hole of hiding. It was a long and arduous journey, but he went on doggedly, his pistols in his belt, his rifle over shoulder. Except for the general wildness of his aspect, largely owing to the great growth of his hair and beard, he looked no more worn nor old than when