Chapter IV

We puffed at our pipes in silence for a little while; and one of the dogs rose to lay his chin upon my knee. “I can’t help feeling sorry for his father, too,” I said at last.

Chet nodded. “He was wrong all the time,” he replied. “But no one ever regretted it more, when it was too late, and he saw what he had done to Jim.” He was still for a moment, then wrote a swift “finis” to the tale.

“The last time I saw Jim,” he said, “was down on the wharf at East Harbor. He was drunk that day, and his father and his brother Charley were trying to get him home. Jim was a big man then; and when he was drunk, he was strong as a bull. I remember he took Charley around the waist and threw him right off the edge of the wharf into the mud flats, and Charley landed on his face in them.

“His father tried to catch Jim’s arm, and Jim turned around and hit him in the mouth and mashed his lips so they bled, and knocked him down.

“That seemed to sober Jim a little, and he sat down with his back against a pile and cried; and his father got up and came and was kneeling down with his arm around Jim; and he was crying, too. They were both crying. And it may have been the drink in Jim; but the old man hadn’t been drinking.

“That’s the last time I ever saw him. Crying there, with his father. Probably they both saw, then, how bad things had gone.

“But it was too late for anything to change Jim. The next year, I think it was, he died.”

A DREAM

I

Barnard became conscious that he was dreaming. It was a bad dream, a nightmare.

He had been dreaming for a long time; but at first he had not understood that it was all a dream. It had been too real. When he realized that it was only a dream, he began, as dreamers do, to fight for wakefulness. But sleep held him stubbornly.

His dream was long; it dragged interminably. An endless procession of scenes and events harassed his troubled slumbers. He appeared in these scenes, participated in these events. He was at the same time an actor in his dream, and a spectator.

Some portions of the dream were gay, some were somber; some were happy, some were tragic. But over gay and somber, happy and tragic, there hung an uneasy Cloud. It haunted and harassed him. He tried to escape from this dark Cloud, but he could not. Thus his dream was one long, futile struggle....