Then Ill Come Back to You | Page 2

lay
where he had located it, to the west of the house, moist and fragrant in
the shadow.
Caleb Hunter had been drowsing contentedly since early afternoon, his
chin on his chest and the bowl of his pipe drooping down over his

comfortably bulging, unbuttoned waistcoat. The lazy day was in his
blood and even the whine of the sawmills on the river-bank, a mile or
more to the south, tempered as it was by the distance to the drone of a
surly bumble-bee, still vaguely annoyed him. Tiny dots of men in
flannel shirts of brilliant hue, flashing from time to time out across the
log-choked space between the booms, caught his eye whenever he
lifted his head, during the passage of a green-sprayed glass from the
veranda rail to his lips, and almost reminded him of the unnatural
altitude of the mercury. He, without being analytical about it, would
have preferred it without the industry and the noise, even softened as
both were by the distance.
Morrison had changed since Caleb Hunter's father topped with the
white-columned house that hill above the river. In those days it had
been little more than a sleepy, if conservatively prosperous and
self-sufficient, community, without industry of any sort, or, it might be
added, ambition or seeming need of one. The Basin where the river
widened and ran currentless a mile or two from bank to bank, in Caleb's
father's time for weeks and weeks on end often had showed no more
signs of activity than a dawdling fisherman or two who angled now and
then and smoked incessantly. And now even the low-lying foothills in
which the elder Hunter had tried to see from homesick eyes a
resemblance to the outguard of his own Cumberlands were no longer
given over to pasturage. They had taken on an entirely different aspect.
The northern streets of the town were still dotted with the homes of
those families who had been content with just the shade and the silence
and the sheen of the river, and an ample though inaugmented income.
But the outside world, ignoring the lack of an invitation too long in the
coming, had in the last year or so grown in to meet it more than half
way. From the Hunter verandas a half-dozen red-roofed,
brown-shingled bungalows, half camps and half castles, were visible
across the land stretches where the cattle had grazed before. And just
beyond Caleb Hunter's own high box hedge, Dexter Allison's enormous
stucco and timber "summer lodge" sprawled amid a round dozen acres
of green lawn and landscape gardening, its front to the river.

To Dexter Allison's blame or credit--the nature of the verdict depending
entirely upon whether it was rendered by the older or the newer
generation--was laid the transformation of Morrison, the town proper.
Caleb Hunter had known Allison at college, where the latter had been
prominent both because of the brilliance of his wardrobe and the
reputed size of his father's steadily accumulating resources. Since that
time seven-figure fortunes such as the younger Allison had inherited,
had become too general to be any longer spectacular. But Dexter
Allison's garments had always retained their insistent note. Hunter
himself had sold Allison the ground upon which the stucco house stood;
he had heartily agreed that it was an ideal spot for a loafing place--and
the fishing was good, too! Now whenever Caleb thought of those first
conferences which had preceded the sale, and recalled Allison's
accentuation of the natural beauties of the spot, Caleb allowed himself
to smile.
The fishing was still far above reproach, a little further back
country--and Dexter Allison owned the sawmills that droned in the
valley. His men drove his timber down from the hills in the north; his
men piled the yellow planks upon his flat cars which ran in over his
spur line that had crept up from the south. His hundreds and hundreds
of rivermen already trod the sawdust-padded streets of the newer
Morrison that had sprung into being beyond the bend; they swarmed in
on the drives, a hard-faced, hard-shouldered horde, picturesque,
proficient and profane. They brought with them color and care-free
prodigality and a capacity for abandonment to pleasure that ran the
whole gamut of emotions, from raucous-roared chanties to sudden,
swift encounters which were as silent as they were deadly. And they
spent their money without stopping to count it.
The younger generation of the older Morrison was quick to point out
the virtues of this vice. And after a time, when the older generation
found that the rivermen preferred their own section of the town,
ignoring as though they had never existed the staid and sleepy
residential streets above, they heaved a sigh of partial relief and tried to
forget their proximity.

Little more than a year