Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/722

670 he started. In reality, hardships had not injured him in the least. They had rather served as a tonic to a peculiar nervous nature which civilization had been rasping beyond endurance.

When he reached the outskirts of the settlement in which he had lived before his exit, he slunk cautiously, as if he had been a beast of prey with designs upon the folds. However, he was really in no danger of discovery. Before his departure he had gone clean shaven, and now so hirsute was he that his own wife and children could not have recognized him. There was about the settlement a great growth of forest, and in this he concealed himself. The weather was quite warm, and he had no trouble about living in the open; all his trouble was the lack of food. He had been obliged by necessity to overcome his dislike to slaughter for the sake of food, but even now he had a repugnance to it. At last he hit upon a plan. Under cover of night he stole into the village and robbed a baker's shop, leaving on the counter gold sufficient to twice pay for what he had taken. He also in the same fashion appropriated the contents of hen-coops.

As the summer advanced he built himself a rude shack under the shag of a hill, and laid in a stock of fire-wood. It began to be known in the settlement that there was a wild man living in the woods, but as he always paid for his raids upon the provisions of the place, no rancor was aroused against him, and wild things awakened no particular surprise or curiosity in that vicinity, so frequent they were, not even that wildest of all wild things—a wild man. It is true that some mothers lately from the East forbade their children to stray far into the woods in the locality where the wild man had been seen, but the children themselves, more fearless, made little raids in large companies for mutual protection, and boasted that they had seen the wild man and the wild man's house, and astonishing tales, tinctured with their childish fancy, they told of both. The man, in particular, was described as being in appearance something like a prehistoric giant. Nobody in the settlement dreamed of the true state of the case, and yet Adam Andersen had been away only a little over a year. Once it happened that his own two young children came with the exploring party, and both gazed at him round-eyed, from a flowering thicket, and neither dreamed that he had ever seen him before.

That night Andersen had a bad hour. The hunger of natural affections was upon him again, and crowded out that hunger of the soul which kept him in the wild. Those two utterly common little faces, those young of his flesh and blood, but not of his true self which he had let loose, had filled him with a torture of yearning. He wanted his wife and his children and his home. Once he started up to try to put himself in fitting trim to go home, and then it was over. The smell of the damp spring earth, and the multitude of young growing things which were the music of the first man, were loud in his senses, and his own spirit awakened to the life which satisfied him. Again, while he loved and longed for his wife, he resented his bonds, for in bonds she had held him, and the children, which were all like her rather than like him. He had cut the knot of his conditions of life, and he realized that not yet could the break be made entirely whole, and yet he never for one moment lost sight of his family, or lost his sense of care over them. He slunk on the borders of the fields, to make sure that his wife kept the men to their work; many a night the house-dog barked and howled and strained at his leash because he was under the windows, and they did not know who was there, although the youngest boy suggested fearfully that it might be the wild man, and Andersen heard the grate of the bolt in the door.

It was doubtful, when Andersen went away that night, moving with a curious free padding lope, like a wild animal, which he had acquired since he had left home, if he had ever in his life loved as he did then his wife and children and home. But they had become to him as the angel with whom Jacob wrestled for the sake of a mystery which was more than earth and life and all the natural affections thereof. As Andersen retraced his steps to his shack deep in the heart of the wood, he even wept a little, like child. It was a damp night, and the wind came from the south full of