The Girl at the Halfway House | Page 9

built, well set up, with the self-respecting carriage of the soldier and the direct eye of the gentleman, there was a swing in his step not commonly to be found behind a counter, and somewhat in the look of his grave face which caused men to listen when he spoke. As his hand had fitted naturally a weapon, so his mind turned naturally to larger things than those offered in these long-tilled fields of life. He came back from the war disillusionized, irreverent, impatient, and full of that surging fretfulness which fell upon all the land. Thousands of young men, accustomed for years to energy, activity, and a certain freedom from all small responsibility, were thrust back at once and asked to adjust themselves to the older and calmer ways of peace. The individual problems were enormous in the aggregate.
Before Franklin, as before many other young men suddenly grown old, there lay the necessity of earning a livelihood, of choosing an occupation. The paternal arm of the Government, which had guided and controlled so long, was now withdrawn. The young man must think for himself. He must choose his future, and work out his way therein alone and unsupported. The necessity of this choice, and the grave responsibility assumed in choosing, confronted and oppressed Edward Franklin as they did many another young man, whose life employment had not been naturally determined by family or business associations. He stood looking out over the way of life. There came to his soul that indefinite melancholy known by the young man not yet acquainted with the mysteries of life. Franklin had been taken away at the threshold of young manhood and crowded into a rude curriculum, which taught him reserve as well as self-confidence, but which robbed him of part of the natural expansion in experience which is the ordinary lot of youth. He had seen large things, and had become intolerant of the small. He wished to achieve life, success, and happiness at one assault, and rebelled at learning how stubborn a resistance there lies in that perpetual silent line of earth's innumerable welded obstacles. He grieved, but knew not why he grieved. He yearned, but named no cause.
To this young man, ardent, energetic, malcontent, there appeared the vision of wide regions of rude, active life, offering full outlet for all the bodily vigour of a man, and appealing not less powerfully to his imagination. This West--no man had come back from it who was not eager to return to it again! For the weak and slothful it might do to remain in the older communities, to reap in the long-tilled fields, but for the strong, for the unattached, for the enterprising, this unknown, unexplored, uncertain country offered a scene whose possibilities made irresistible appeal. For two years Franklin did the best he could at reading law in a country office. Every time he looked out of the window he saw a white-topped wagon moving West. Men came back and told him of this West. Men wrote letters from the West to friends who remained in the East. Presently these friends also, seized upon by some vast impulse which they could not control, in turn arranged their affairs and departed for the West. Franklin looked about him at the squat buildings of the little town, at the black loam of the monotonous and uninviting fields, at the sordid, set and undeveloping lives around him. He looked also at the white wagons moving with the sun. It seemed to him that somewhere out in the vast land beyond the Missouri there beckoned to him a mighty hand, the index finger of some mighty force, imperative, forbidding pause.
The letter of Battersleigh to his friend Captain Franklin fell therefore upon soil already well prepared. Battersleigh and Franklin had been friends in the army, and their feet had not yet wandered apart in the days of peace. Knowing the whimsicality of his friend, and trusting not at all in his judgment of affairs, Franklin none the less believed implicitly in the genuineness of his friendship, and counted upon his comradeship as a rallying point for his beginning life in the new land which he felt with strange conviction was to be his future abiding place. He read again and again the letter Battersleigh had written him, which, in its somewhat formal diction and informal orthography, was as follows:
"To Capt. Edw. Franklin, Bloomsbury, Ill.
"MY DEAR NED: I have the honour to state to you that I am safely arrived and well-established at this place, Ellisville, and am fully disposed to remain. At present the Railway is built no further than this point, and the Labourers under charge of the Company Engineers make the most of the population. There is yet but one considerable building completed, a most