Free Butcher's Crossing by John Williams

decide, he let his feet carry him vaguely along the wagon tracks to the main road; there he hesitated for a moment, to turn first one way and another, as the needle of a compass, slow to settle, discovers its point. He believed—and had believed for a long time—that there was a subtle magnetism in nature, which, if he unconsciously yielded to it, would direct him aright, not indifferent to the way he walked. But he felt that only during the few days that he had been in Butcher’s Crossing had nature been so purely presented to him that its power of compulsion was sufficiently strong to strike through his will, his habit, and his idea. He turned west, his back toward Butcher’s Crossing and the towns and cities that lay eastward beyond it; he walked past the clump of cottonwoods toward the river he had not seen, but which had assumed in his mind the proportions of a vast boundary that lay between himself and the wildness and freedom that his instinct sought.
    The mounded banks of the river rose abruptly up, though the road ascended less steeply in a gradual cut. Andrews left the road and went into the prairie grass, which whipped about his ankles and worked beneath his trouser legs and clung to his skin. He paused atop the mound and looked down at the river; it was a thin, muddy trickle over flat rocks where the road crossed it, but above and below the road deeper pools lay flat and greenish brown in the sun. He turned his body a little to the left so that he could no longer see the road that led back to Butcher’s Crossing.
    Looking out at the flat featureless land into which he seemed to flow and merge, even though he stood without moving, he realized that the hunt that he had arranged with Miller was only a stratagem, a ruse upon himself, a palliative for ingrained custom and use. No business led him where he looked, where he would go; he went there free. He went free upon the plain in the western horizon which seemed to stretch without interruption toward the setting sun, and he could not believe that there were towns and cities in it of enough consequence to disturb him. He felt that wherever he lived, and wherever he would live hereafter, he was leaving the city more and more, withdrawing into the wilderness. He felt that that was the central meaning he could find in all his life, and it seemed to him then that all the events of his childhood and his youth had led him unknowingly to this moment upon which he poised, as if before flight. He looked at the river again. On this side is the city, he thought, and on that the wilderness; and though I must return, even that return is only another means I have of leaving it, more and more.
    He turned. Butcher’s Crossing lay small and unreal before him. He walked slowly back toward the town, on the road, his feet scuffing in the dust, his eyes watching the puffs of dust that his feet went beyond.

V
    Late on the sixth day following his departure from Butcher’s Crossing, Miller returned.
    In his room, Andrews heard shouts on the street below him and heard the thump of heavy feet; above these sounds, muffled by the distance, came the crack of a whip and the deep-throated howl of a driver. Andrews came to his feet and strode to the window; he leaned out over the ledge and looked toward the eastern approach to the town.
    A great cloud of dust hung upon the air, moved forward, and dissipated itself in its forward movement; out of the dust plodded a long line of oxen. The heads of the lead team were thrust downward, and the two beasts toed in toward each other, so that occasionally their long curving horns clashed, causing both beasts to shake their heads and snort, and separate for a few moments. Until the team got very near the town—the lead oxen passing Joe Long’s barber shop—the wagon was scarcely visible to the townspeople who stood about the sidewalks and to Will Andrews who waited above them.
    The wagon was long and shallow, and it curved downward toward the center