The Waters of Kronos Read Online Free PDF

what was his name? Even the shirt the boy had on, a design of stripes and colors he hadn’t seen for years, left the man with the strangest sensations.
    He stepped into the post office and waited till the brown eyes of Katie Gerber appeared at the high stamp window, severe at the sight of a stranger.
    “Can you tell me who that boy was?” he asked.
    The brown eyes scarcely changed.
    “I heard somebody but didn’t notice,” she said. Throughthe partition he saw her go to the mail drop, lift out the last letter, look at it and drop it back without saying anything. What she had learned was for her own information.
    The man went uncertainly back to the sidewalk and down the shadowy street. How fragrant was the air he had grown up in and never noticed, redolent of bark and leaves as of the forest! That was Unionville, he told himself, the combination of town and woods, life going on in these houses under the trees, eating, sleeping, reading, making meals in the kitchen all beneath the giant limbs. He could hear at this moment the faint sounds of a piano and horn from different houses, each pursuing a different tune, reaching him through the inexhaustible filter of leaves. He made his way past the brick house built by one of the tannery owners, and the frame house where old Josie Rehrer lived. Across the street stood the white house where his mother used to send him for milk, through the gate and around to the back porch, where he had to wait till his kettle was filled from a crock on the cellar floor.
    They called it the Markle square. You never said block in Unionville. The big Markle house, with a full third floor where the servants lived, gave it dignity. He was coming to Dan Markles’ ornamental iron fence now. The heavy gateled to a rounded portico, shaped like a Christmas cooky. There was another portico on the second floor, a conservatory wing on the first and a wonderful room with deep red leather chairs and walls lined with books enough for a lifetime of reading. The Markle square was a long square, and here in the middle of it, far from the lamppost at either end, all was swathed in muffled darkness but he could smell the rich fragrance of an expensive cigar drifting out from behind those closed yellow blinds.
    And now he felt a rising constriction. Ahead on the far side of the street he could make out the general store of Kipps, Donner and Company, known in the family as “Papa’s store,” with a broad store porch and a dozen steps the width of the building rising from the sidewalk, both store and steps unpainted but tacked with a multitude of tin advertising signs, mostly for tobacco. Faint light filtered from the old-time store windows, crude compared to those of today. Like the post office, the store was still open and would be, he knew, long after Katie Gerber closed the post office.
    John Donner stood under a tree looking across the street. He felt sure he could make out a man behind the counter. When he went over to the other side the man had disappeared but he thought he heard a familiar voice singing. He knewthen it must be his father. As a boy he had sometimes wished his father tuneless like other fathers. Or if he had to do something, why didn’t he whistle like many of the Pennsylvania Dutch? He sang incessantly, rousing Sunday-school hymns when he felt good, sad songs when “down in the mouth.” “March on, march on, for Christ counts everything but loss,” was one of the stirring kind, together with “Onward, upward till every foe is conquered and Christ is Lord indeed.” The fervor, that’s what his father liked, so he could let himself go. He used to thunder out “Peal forth the watchword, silence it never.” “True hearted, whole hearted,” was another, and “Speed Away.” It had always seemed incongruous to be with his father driving the slow heavy three-horse team with a load of groceries up the mountain and hear him ring out to the culm banks, “Speed away. Speed away. On your