Acres of Unrest Read Online Free PDF Page A

each of these two young men. Others went in haste. Voices were raised with a sham cheerfulness. People recalled a thousand-odd bits of business, anything that might furnish them with a decent pretext for turning and hurrying away.
    Yet they did not go unnoticed. Here and there a deep, quiet voice spoke, as Peter Hale noticed and recognized one face and then another. He paused to speak with each and to shake hands with each. He had a clever way of shifting all his weight and his right crutch onto the left arm and the iron-braced left leg. Then, balanced a little precariously in this fashion, he had his whole right hand and arm free for shaking hands.
    People thought that he looked very white and sick. His eyes were quite hollowed and shadowed. But his voice was perfectly cheerful. He had something to say to each one who he knew, and so he came with a surprising ease through their midst and out to the steps at the back of the platform. By this time, there were few people left. Everyone had started off at full speed. Consequently there were not so many eyes to see the little calamity that followed.
    Peter, fumbling for the steps with his crutches, hardly noticed that one of the concrete steps hadcrumbled away. There was a grunt, the crutches plunged down through thin air, and the heavy body of Peter lurched to the ground and rolled in the dust.
    Two or three ran to help him up. But he managed himself with a surprising adroitness. He had not lost the crutches, and now one had a chance to estimate the immense strength that must have belonged to him once. One could believe those old tales of how Peter had crushed through opposing football lines and come at the ball carriers with an incredible, cruel force, merely from seeing the lightness with which his long, powerful arms heaved him up out of the dust and the cinders and balanced him erect upon the crutches again.
    His father, looking back, saw the commotion and its cause but did not hurry to the rescue. He felt an insane desire to throw back his head and burst into laughter, and he felt that if he ran to Peter, he would run with laughter that must not be heard.
    Besides, there were plenty of others to brush the dirt from Peter’s clothes. He thanked them gravely and calmly. It seemed to Ross Hale that his son had no shame and accepted the ministrations of the others with a pleasant smile, like one accustomed to the pity of the world. Ah, well, after this day the world might just as well end.
    Only one thing was amazing—that the blow could have fallen so suddenly. One instant, he was like a king, above the rest of the people of Sumnertown and of Sumner Country. The next instant, there was the cause of his elevation reduced to a horrible mockery of manhood.
    When the hulk of a man reached the buckboard, his father stood by. He would not offer help untilit was asked, although he wondered how Peter would go about getting into the vehicle. But the moment was not so clumsy as it might have been, for Peter, balancing himself on the iron-braced left leg, put his crutches away in the back of the buckboard. Then he grasped the upper rim of the front wheel tire with one hand and the side of the seat with the other. He gave himself a swing and a lurch, and there he was, sitting in the seat, breathing a little hard with quivering nostrils.
    It did not seem like a very great thing, except to one who knew something about the limitations of human strength. But Ross Hale knew. He had been crippled once for nearly eighteen months by the kick of a refractory mule that he was harnessing by the semilight of a lantern, before dawn. And he knew what it means to take the drag of a heavy body upon the arms alone. As Ross gathered up the reins and climbed into the buckboard, he rebuilt for himself the picture of Peter Hale as he might have been—as he once had been.
    Once strength of foot had matched the strength of hand. Then he had been a veritable giant, indeed. Oh, to have had him only once come