By chance David’s father knew that he had disappeared.  On the street he had met the farm hand from the Bentley place and knew of his son’s return to town.  When the boy did not come home an alarm was set up and John Hardy with several men of the town went to search the country.  The report that David had been kidnapped ran about through the streets of Winesburg.  When he came home there were no lights in the house, but his mother appeared and clutched him eagerly in her arms.  David thought she had suddenly become another woman.  He could not believe that so delightful a thing had happened.  With her own hands Louise Hardy bathed his tired young body and cooked him food.  She would not let him go to bed but, when he had put on his nightgown, blew out the lights and sat down in a chair to hold him in her arms.  For an hour the woman sat in the darkness and held her boy.  All the time she kept talking in a low voice.  David could not understand what had so changed her.  Her habitually dissatisfied face had become, he thought, the most peaceful and lovely thing he had ever seen.  When he began to weep she held him more and more tightly.  On and on went her voice.  It was not harsh or shrill as when she talked to her husband, but was like rain falling on trees.  Presently men began coming to the door to report that he had not been found, but she made him hide and be silent until she had sent them away.  He thought it must be a game his mother and the men of the town were playing with him and laughed joyously.  Into his mind came the thought that his having been lost and frightened in the darkness was an altogether unimportant matter.  He thought that he would have been willing to go through the frightful experience a thousand times to be sure of finding at the end of the long black road a thing so lovely as his mother had suddenly become.

* * *

During the last years of young David’s boyhood he saw his mother but seldom and she became for him just a woman with whom he had once lived.  Still he could not get her figure out of his mind and as he grew older it became more definite.  When he was twelve years old he went to the Bentley farm to live.  Old Jesse came into town and fairly demanded that he be given charge of the boy.  The old man was excited and determined on having his own way.  He talked to John Hardy in the office of the Winesburg Savings Bank and then the two men went to the house on Elm Street to talk with Louise.  They both expected her to make trouble but were mistaken.  She was very quiet and when Jesse had explained his mission and had gone on at some length about the advantages to come through having the boy out of doors and in the quiet atmosphere of the old farmhouse, she nodded her head in approval.  “It is an atmosphere not corrupted by my presence,” she said sharply.  Her shoulders shook and she seemed about to fly into a fit of temper.  “It is a place for a man child, although it was never a place for me,” she went on.  “You never wanted me there and of course the air of your house did me no good.  It was like poison in my blood but it will be different with him.”