The Girl at the Halfway House | Page 9

cause in his mind
a feeling of distress equivalent at times to absolute abhorrence. The
perspective of all things had changed. The men who had once seemed
great to him in this little world now appeared in the light of a wider
judgment, as they really were--small, boastful, pompous, cowardly,
deceitful, pretentious. Franklin was himself now a man, and a man
graduated from that severe and exacting school which so quickly
matured a generation of American youth. Tall, finely 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and controlled so long, was now withdrawn.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,