The little crowd dispersed quietly; Lige
Willetts plucked to his horse and cantered away to overtake the buckboard;
William Todd took his courage between his teeth, and, the song ringing in
his ears, made a desperate resolve to call upon Miss Bardlock that
evening, in spite of its being a week day, and Caleb Parker gently and
stammeringly asked Cynthia if she would wait till he shut up the shop, and
let him walk home with her and Bud.
Soon the Square was quiet as before, and there was naught but peace under
the big stars of July.
That day the news had come that Harkless, after weeks of alternate
improvement and relapse, hazardously lingering in the borderland of
shadows, had passed the crucial point and was convalescent. His recovery
was assured. But from their first word of him, from the message that he
was found and was alive, none of the people of Carlow had really doubted
it. They are simple country people, and they know that God is good.
CHAPTER XV
NETTLES
Two men who have been comrades and classmates at the Alma Mater of John
Harkless and Tom Meredith; two who have belonged to the same dub and
roomed in the same entry; who have pooled their clothes and money in a
common stock for either to draw on; who have shared the fortunes of
athletic war, triumphing together, sometimes with an intense triumphancy;
two men who were once boys getting hazed together, hazing in no unkindly
fashion in their turn, always helping each other to stuff brains the night
before an examination and to blow away the suffocating statistics like
foam the night after; singing, wrestling, dancing, laughing, succeeding
together, through the four kindest years of life; two such brave
companions, meeting in the after years, are touchingly tender and
caressive of each other, but the tenderness takes the shy, United States
form of insulting epithets, and the caresses are blows.
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