The stage was passing the motionless figure. David drew
a deep painful breath, and swung out his whip with a vicious sweep.
His pride, however, returned when he drove into Crabapple, down the
familiar street, past the familiar men and women turning to watch him,
with a new automatic measure of attention, in his elevated position. He
walked back to his dwelling with a slight swagger of hips and
shoulders, and, with something of a flourish, laid down the two dollars
he had been paid for the trip to Beaulings.
"I'm to drive again to-morrow," he stated to his mother and Allen;
"after that Priest has a regular man. I suppose, then, I'll have to go
into the store."
The last seemed doubly difficult now, since he had driven stage. As he
disposed of supper, eating half a pie with his cracklings and greens,
his mother moved from the stove to the table, refilled his plate, waved
the paper streamers of the fly brush above his head, exactly as she had
for his father. Already, he assured himself, he had become a man.
The journey to Beaulings the following day was an unremarkable replica
of the one before. He saw no Hatburns; the sun wheeled from east to
west at apparently the same speed as the stage; and Beaulings held its
inevitable surge of turbulent lumbermen, the oil flares made their
lurid note on the vast unbroken starry canopy of night.
The morning of his return was heavy with a wet low vapor. The mail
bags, as he strapped them to the rear rack, were slippery; the dawn was
a slow monotonous widening of dull light.
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