Way Station Read Free

…”
    “I recognize the type,” said Hardwicke. “I was born and raised in the southern mountains.”
    “They were the ones who told me about the team and mower. So one day I
    went up in that corner of the Wallace pasture and did some digging. I found a horse’s skull and some other bones.”
    “But no way of knowing if it was one of the Wallace horses.”
    “Perhaps not,” said Lewis. “But I found part of the mower as well. Not much left of it, but enough to identify.”
    “Let’s get back to the history,” suggested Hardwicke. “After the father’s death, Enoch stayed on at the farm. He never left it?”
    Lewis shook his head. “He lives in the same house. Not a thing’s been changed. And the house apparently has aged no more than the man.”
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    “You’ve been in the house?”
    “Not in it. At it. I will tell you how it was.”

3
    He had an hour. He knew he had an hour, for he had timed Enoch Wallace during the last ten days. And from the time he left the house until he got back with his mail, it had never been less than an hour. Sometimes a little longer, when the mailman might be late, or they got to talking. But an hour, Lewis told himself, was all that he could count on.
    Wallace had disappeared down the slope of ridge, heading for the point of rocks that towered above the bluff face, with the Wisconsin River running there below. He would climb the rocks and stand there, with the rifle tucked beneath his arm, to gaze across the wilderness of the river valley. Then he would go back down the rocks again and trudge along the wooded path to where, in proper season, the pink lady’s-slippers grew, and from there up the hill again to the spring that gushed out of the hillside just below the ancient field that had lain fallow for a century or more, and then along the slope until he hit the almost overgrown road and so down to the mailbox.
    In the ten days that Lewis had watched him, his route had never varied.
    It was likely, Lewis told himself, that it had not varied through the years.
    Wallace did not hurry. He walked as if he had all the time there was. And he stopped along the way to renew acquaintances with old friends of his-a tree, a squirrel, a flower. He was a rugged man and there still was much of the soldier in him-old tricks and habits left from the bitter years of campaigning under many leaders. He walked with his head held high and his shoulders back and he moved with the easy stride of one who had known hard marches.
    Lewis came out of the tangled mass of trees that once had been an orchard and in which a few trees, twisted and gnarled and gray with age, still bore their pitiful and bitter crop of apples.
    He stopped at the edge of the copse and stood for a moment to stare up at the house on the ridge above, and for a single instant it seemed to him the house stood in a special light, as if a rare and more distilled essence of the sun had crossed the gulf of space to shine upon this house and to set it apart from all other houses in the world. Bathed in that light, the house was somehow unearthly, as if, indeed, it might be set apart as a very special thing. And then the light, if it ever had been there, was gone and the house shared the common sunlight of the fields and woods.
    Lewis shook his head and told himself that it had been foolishness, or perhaps a trick of seeing. For there was no such thing as special sunlight and the house was no more than a house, although wondrously preserved.
    It was the kind of house one did not see too often in these days. It was rectangular, long and narrow and high, with old-fashioned gingerbread along the eaves and gables. It had a certain gauntness that had nothing to do with age; it had been gaunt the day it had been built-gaunt and plain and strong, like the people that it