Page:O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories for 1919.pdf/45

Rh hand he held a brown velour hat, in the other a thorn stick without a ferrule. Nor was there anything more worthy of note in his face, an average-long face with hollowed cheeks, sunken gray eyes, and a high forehead, narrow, sallow, and moist.

No, it was not the stranger that troubled Christopher. It was his mother’s look at his own blundering entrance, and, when the man was out of hearing, the tremulous haste of her explanation.

“He came about some papers, you know.”

“You mean our Morning Post?” Christopher asked her.

She let her breath out all at once and colour flooded her face.

“Yes,” she told him. “Yes, yes.”

Neither of them said anything more about it.

It was that same day, toward evening, that Christopher broke one of his long silences, reverting to a subject always near to them both.

“Mother, you’ve never told me where it is—on the map, I mean.”

She was looking the other way. She did not turn around.

“I—Chris—I—I haven’t a map in the house.”

He did not press the matter. He went out into the back yard presently, under the grape-trellis, and there he stood still for a long time, staring at nothing in particular.

He was growing up.

He went away to boarding-school not long after this, taking with him the picture of his adored mother, the treasured epic of his dark, strong fathers, his narrow shoulders, his rare, blind bursts of passion, his newborn wonder, and his violin. At school they thought him a queer one.

The destinies of men are unaccountable things. Five children in the village of Deer Bay came down with diphtheria. That was why the academy shut up for a week, and that was what started Christopher on his way home for an unexpected holiday. And then it was only by one chance in a thousand that he should glimpse