III

At the breakfast table the next morning his father looked at him neutrally.  “This day you shall go to salt the sheep in the Miller lot,” he announced, “and you may have until the hour before sundown to walk in the wood.”

“Oh, father, really!”

“That is what I said,” repeated the minister dryly, pushing away from the table.

After the boy had gone, carrying the bag of salt and the little package of his noonday meal, the minister sighed heavily.  “I fear my weak heart inclines me to too great softness to our son.”  To his wife he cried out a moment later, “Oh, that some instance of the wrath of Jehovah could come before us now, while our son’s spirit is softened.  Deacon Truitt said yesterday that one more visitation would save him.”

Nathaniel walked along soberly, his eyes on the road at his feet, his face quite pale, a sleepless night evidently behind him.  He came into the birches without noticing them at first, and when he looked up he was for a moment so taken by surprise that he was transfigured.  The valley at his feet shimmered like an opal through the slender white pillars of the trees.  The wood was like a many-columned chapel, unroofed and open to the sunlight.  Nathaniel gave a cry of rapture, and dropped the bag of salt.  “Oh!” he cried, stretching out his arms, and then again, “Oh!”

For a moment he stood so, caught into a joy that was almost anguish, and then at a sudden thought he shrank together, his arm crooked over his eyes.  He sank forward, still covering his eyes, into a great bed of fern, just beginning to unroll their whitey-green balls into long, pale plumes.  There he lay as still as if he were dead.

Two men came riding through the lane, their horses treading noiselessly over the leaf-mold.  They had almost passed the motionless, prostrate figure when the older reined in and pointed with his whip.  “What is that, LeMaury?”

At the unexpected sound the boy half rose, showing a face so convulsed that the other horseman cried out alarmed, “It ees a man crazed!  Ride on, mon colonel!” He put spurs to his horse and sprang forward as he spoke.

The old soldier laughed a little, and turned to Nathaniel.  “Why, ’tis the minister his son.  I know you by the look of your father in you.  What bad dream have we waked you from, you pretty boy?”

“You have not waked me from it,” cried Nathaniel.  “I will never wake as long as I live, and when I die—!”

“Why, LeMaury is right.  The poor lad is crazed.  We must see to this.”

He swung himself stiffly from the saddle and came limping up to Nathaniel.  Kneeling by the boy he brought him up to a sitting position, and at the sight of the ashen face and white, turned-back eyeballs he sat down hastily, drawing the young head upon his shoulder with a rough tenderness.  “Why, so lads look under their first fire, when they die of fear.  What frights you so?”