Acres of Unrest Read Online Free PDF Page B

square, powerful jaw, for instance, might not look so brutally cruel and stern, if it had been fleshed over a little. And one would not have noticed the forbidding depth to which the eyes were sunk, if it had not been that beneath the brows they were blackened so tremendously by suffering and long years of gloom.
    Yes, Peter had suffered. There was no doubt of that. But it did not lighten the load on the soul of Ross Hale to know this. Certainly it would have been a sad thing if his son had turned out too great a fool even to understand how much he had lost, how much had been taken away from him by the fatal accident.
    “Tell me how it happened?” asked the father.
    “I was up in the mountains with young Bassiter…Dick Bassiter. That was the summer after my freshman year. Bassiter was in my class, and I’d seen a good deal of him at Huntley School. We were what you might call chums.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “No?”
    “No, you never wasted much time writing to me, you know, while you was away all of those years at school.”
    He felt the glance of Peter twitch aside toward his face, but, knowing that the eyes of his son were upon him, he looked steadily down the sunwhitened road before him. And he knew that his jaw was iron, and the rim of his face was iron, also, as Peter looked at it.
    “Well,” said Peter in his deep, quiet voice, “Dick and I had always been great friends. He had taken me home with him a good many times, you see? I knew his family. They knew me. We were all pretty fond of each other. One day we were all swimming in the river…a little river that runs across the Bassiter estate, you know. There’s a huge lake…with the falls tumbling in above the farther end. Dick’s little sister, Molly, was there. She said that she wanted to go in swimming above the falls, so we climbed up there with her. But we saw at once that it was no good. The current was smooth on top…smooth but very fast. It whipped things right in and under and it tore for the falls full speed. However, we hardly had time to warn Molly. She had fixed her mind on diving in and the smoothness of the surface deceived her. She plunged in and began swimming, but she’d hardly started when the current took her spinning around and drove her down the stream. Dick leaped in after her with a yell. But the current mastered him, too. I saw that there wasn’t much chance, because Dick was a better swimmer than I, by a long shot. However, I couldn’t stand there on the bank and do nothing. Anything was better than that. So I dived in.”
    “And the water, it got its grip on you, too?” asked the father darkly.
    “I was helpless in it. I couldn’t make any headway. I saw the girl shoot down toward the lip of the falls and then catch at a rock and hold herself there. I saw Dick reach for her and she managed to pullhim in to her. They were safe…the two of them. I saw that I couldn’t make it out to them. So I swung back for the shore that I had just left and tried to make the shallows. It was no good. I couldn’t handle that current for an instant. It was as strong as a team of hard-pulling mules.”
    He paused, and Ross Hale found his son looking quietly, sternly at a cloud that floated low in the sky, burning with the fire of the sunshine.
    “And then?” asked the father.
    “Why, the water snatched me down over the edge of the fall, and, when they managed to fish me out, my legs were badly done up, as you see for yourself.”
    That was all. Ross Hale, setting his teeth, waited for the harrowing details. It is an invalid’s privilege to take a bitter glory in the troubles that had stretched him in the sickbed. But to the astonishment of the rancher, his son seemed to have reached the end of his tale with this stroke. He had gone over the edge of the waterfall, and now he cared to talk about it no more.
    Ross Hale, breathing a little more deeply, turned his horses in at the gate and handed the reins to his boy. He saw the