Towards one o’clock that night Gant fell asleep and dreamed that he was walking down the road that led to Spangler’s Run. And although he had not been along that road for fifty years everything was as fresh, as green, as living and familiar as it had ever been to him. He came out on the road from Schaefer’s farm, and on his left he passed by the little white frame church of the United Brethren, and the graveyard about the church where his friends and family had been buried. From the road he could see the line of family gravestones which he himself had carved and set up after he had returned from serving his apprenticeship in Baltimore. The stones were all alike: tall flat slabs of marble with plain rounded tops, and there was one for his sister Susan, who had died in infancy, and one for his sister Huldah, who had died in childbirth while the war was on, and one for Huldah’s husband, a young farmer named Jake Lentz who had been killed at Chancellorsville, and one for the husband of his oldest sister, Augusta, a man named Martin, who had been an itinerant photographer and had died soon after the war, and finally one for Gant’s own father. And since there were no stones for his brother George or for Elmer or for John, and none for his mother or Augusta, Gant knew that he was still a young man, and had just recently come home. The stones which he had put up were still white and new, and in the lower right-hand corner of each stone, he had carved his own name: W. O. Gant.
It was a fine morning in early May and everything was sweet and green and as familiar as it had always been. The graveyard was carpeted with thick green grass, and all around the graveyard and the church there was the incomparable green velvet of young wheat. And the thought came back to Gant, as it had come to him a thousand times, that the wheat around the graveyard looked greener and richer than any other wheat that he had ever seen. And beside him on his right were the great fields of the Schaefer farm, some richly carpeted with young green wheat, and some ploughed, showing great bronze-red strips of fertile nobly-swelling earth. And behind him on the great swell of the land, and commanding that sweet and casual scene with the majesty of its incomparable lay was Jacob Schaefer’s great red barn and to the right the neat brick house with the white trimming of its windows, the white picket fence, the green yard with its rich tapestry of flowers and lilac bushes and the massed leafy spread of its big maple trees. And behind the house the hill rose, and all its woods were just greening into May, still smoky, tender and unfledged, gold-yellow with the magic of young green. And before the woods began there was the apple orchard half-way up the hill; the trees were heavy with the blossoms and stood there in all their dense still bloom incredible.
And from the greening trees the bird-song rose, the grass was thick with the dense gold glory of the dandelions, and all about him were a thousand magic things that came and went and never could be captured. Below the church, he passed the old frame-house where Elly Spangler, who kept the church keys, lived, and there were apple trees behind the house, all dense with bloom, but the house was rickety, unpainted and dilapidated as it had always been, and he wondered if the kitchen was still buzzing with a million flies, and if Elly’s half-wit brothers, Jim and Willy, were inside. And even as he shook his head and thought, as he had thought so many times, “Poor Elly,” the back door opened and Willy Spangler, a man past thirty, wearing overalls and with a fond, foolish witless face, came galloping down across the yard toward him, flinging his arms out in exuberant greeting, and shouting to him the same welcome that he shouted out to everyone who passed, friends and strangers all alike —“I’ve been lookin’ fer ye! I’ve been lookin’ fer ye, Oll,” using, as was the custom of the friends and kinsmen of his Pennsylvania boyhood, his second name — and then, anxiously, pleadingly, again the same words that he spoke to everyone: “Ain’t ye goin’ to stay?”
And Gant, grinning, but touched by the indefinable sadness and pity which that kind and witless greeting had always stirred in him since his own childhood, shook his head, and said quietly:
“No, Willy. Not today. I’m meeting someone down the road”— and straightway felt, with thudding heart, a powerful and nameless excitement, the urgency of that impending meeting — why, where, with whom, he did not know — but all-compelling now, inevitable.
And Willy, still with wondering, foolish, kindly face followed along beside him now, saying eagerly, as he said to everyone:
“Did ye bring anythin’ fer me? Have ye got a chew?”
And Gant, starting to shake his head in refusal, stopped suddenly, seeing the look of disappointment on the idiot’s face, and putting his hand in the pocket of his coat, took out a plug of apple-tobacco, saying:
“Yes. Here you are, Willy. You can have this.”
And Willy, grinning with foolish joy, had clutched the plug of tobacco and, still kind and foolish, had followed on a few steps more, saying anxiously:
“Are ye comin’ back, Oll? Will ye be comin’ back real soon?”
And Gant, feeling a strange and nameless sorrow, answered:
“I don’t know, Willy”— for suddenly he saw that he might never come this way again.
But Willy, still happy, foolish, and contented, had turned and galloped away toward the house, flinging his arms out and shouting as he went:
“I’ll be waitin’ fer ye. I’ll be waitin’ fer ye, Oll.”
And Gant went on then, down the road, and there was a nameless sorrow in him that he could not understand and some of the brightness had gone out of the day.
When he got to the mill, he turned left along the road that went down by Spangler’s Run, crossed by the bridge below, and turned from the road into the wood-path on the other side. A child was standing in the path, and turned and went on ahead of him. In the wood the sunlight made swarming moths of light across the path and through the leafy tangle of the trees: the sunlight kept shifting and swarming on the child’s golden hair, and all around him were the sudden noises of the wood, the stir, the rustle, and the bullet thrum of wings, the cool broken sound of hidden water.
The wood got denser, darker as he went on and coming to a place where the path split away into two forks, Gant stopped, and turning to the child said, “Which one shall I take?” And the child did not answer him.
But someone was there in the wood before him. He heard footsteps on the path, and saw a footprint in the earth, and turning took the path where the footprint was and where it seemed he could hear someone walking.
And then, with the bridgeless instancy of dreams, it seemed to him that all of the bright green-gold around him in the wood grew dark and sombre, the path grew darker, and suddenly he was walking in a strange and gloomy forest, haunted by the brown and tragic light of dreams. The forest shapes of great trees rose around him, he could hear no bird-song now, even his own feet on the path were soundless, but he always thought he heard the sound of someone walking in the wood before him. He stopped and listened: the steps were muffled, softly thunderous; they seemed so near that he thought that he must catch up with the one he followed in another second, and then they seemed immensely far away, receding in the dark mystery of that gloomy wood. And again he stopped and listened, the footsteps faded, vanished, he shouted, no one answered. And suddenly he knew that he had taken the wrong path, that he was lost. And in his heart there was an immense and quiet sadness, and the dark light of the enormous wood was all around him; no birds sang.