Home from the Hill Read Free Page A

comfort. He was always very trim and sleek. His pockets never bulged. They were empty. He carried nothing on him. He put no lock on anything he owned and so did not carry keys. He could go anywhere he wanted to go without need of money. He did not carry a watch. Time would wait on him. He was punctual to appointments, however; his years in the woods and work fields, watching the sun and sky, having given him a fine sense of time, and he knew when you were as much as five minutes late to an appointment—though probably that came less from his fine time-sense than from the likelihood that anyone arriving late for an appointment with him would wear a shamefaced and apologetic look. But whether or not you had an appointment, meeting him you always felt late, behindhand. Even in town he kept, not farmer’s hours, for though a farmer would be up that early in the morning, he was asleep long before that at night: he kept hunter’s hours.
    The Captain had the center place in that circle of men where you will find us all on any Saturday afternoon, on one of the corners of the square, squatting in a ring, watching the girls stroll by, swapping the same but never old tales of famous shots and cunning animals, of dogs better remembered than the men who owned them, of game stands so rich that men were killed disputing the rights to them. There you will find town men and country men and, on the fringes, town boys and country boys, and in the innermost ring you may find one or two of those special few who come to town not every Saturday, but often not for six months at a time: the year-round hunters, not farmers, the men from Sulphur Bottom, silent-footed and quick-eyed as the game they hunt and trap, gaunt, sallow men, skin dyed sulphur yellow from malaria and from that water where no fish but mudcat, and nothing else but mosquitoes can live. These are the men for whom the rest of us make place, and who—and not just because he was rich—moved over to make place for just one man—“the Cap’n.” For they lived upon the edge of and spent their lives fighting against that vast tract which by common consent belonged as a private preserve to him (who owned the rest of the county anyway), the only man known to have gone in one side of it and out the other, and who brought out of there game of kinds otherwise extinct in this hunted-out land: deer and wild turkey and once a wild boar.
    The Captain was also the deadliest hunter of another kind of game—in town; and divided his spare time about equally between the two sports. And, as he took the right to cross any man’s fences in pursuit of furred or feathered game, and as he would often return with as many as forty or fifty quail or ducks (which he would have his man Chauncey distribute with his compliments to all the pretty young housewives in town, a mess or a brace to each impartially), so in his other sport he was equally unmindful of property lines, bag limits, and no-trespassing signs.
    He made neither a secret nor a spectacle of his escapades, supposing, no doubt—if he thought about it at all—that people would sooner be out having adventures of their own than talking about somebody else’s. Only once, and we were all young then, did one of us try to joke with him about his latest conquest. Not that Wade was gallantly avenging the lady in question. It was himself he was avenging. He had not kept pigs with any man.
    Yet he seemed to have no eyes for women at all. It was like his still-hunting: he let the game come to him. He seemed to know without looking that a squirrel sat in the second fork of the third slippery-elm; so it was with women. He could look them up and down so quick they hardly could be sure they had been noticed, much less appraised.
    Others might come home empty-handed, but for him the woods were full. As his man Chauncey put it, he had to fight the women off with a wet towsack. But his taste ran to married ones. Maybe