Free From Sea to Shining Sea by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom Page A

silver stream.
    Edmund snugged the gunstock against his shoulder. There was just enough light to see the gunsights by and he lined them up on a place just behind the deer’s shoulder. He had been shivering but he put a control over it and the rifle was steady. Then he thought the words of his Papa’s prayer.
Dear Father, have mercy on this poor beast.
    He squeezed the trigger and saw the orange flash and then thegun cracked open the silence of the morning, jolting his shoulder. He smelled the powder and heard hundreds of waterfowl and small birds squawk and splash and flutter and saw them disperse against the predawn light beyond the drifting veil of gunsmoke, and when the smoke thinned, he could see the buck collapsing into the river’s edge.
    Edmund was sad in the way it always made him sad to kill a beautiful thing, but the buck had died quickly and suffered only a moment because of Edmund’s skill, and Edmund had fulfilled his promise and this would be what he would add to Annie’s wedding feast.
    J ONATHAN C LARK, ELDEST OF THE SIX SONS, WAS FEELING THE pull of home. From the next rise, he knew, he would be able to see the roof of the house. The October afternoon sun was on his back and he rocked with the horse’s easy canter. It had been fine weather for riding and he was almost there. Down amidst the dry grasses and reddening sumac of the roadside stood a zigzag fence of split rails that he and his father had built so long ago, when Jonathan was a boy of ten, to mark the corner of the family land. The wood of the fence was silver-gray now from thirteen years in sun and rain, and the bottom rails were rotting, returning to earth as wood must do, but Jonathan could remember the work of that long-ago day: the thud of the maul on the splitting wedges, the tannic tang of the new-riven oak, the pale grain, the sweat, the grunting, the swinging and lifting, and the cheerful voice of his father musing aloud on how a man should live. There was hardly an acre of these hundreds upon which Jonathan had not poured sweat, changing the look of the land, making things grow. Now he was a man old enough at twenty-three to sense the cadence of seasons, the accretion of labors, the erosions of time on the countryside. For four years now he had lived away from here, but he had not forgotten anything. Annie had been six when that fence was built, and tomorrow she would become a wife. Jonathan sucked an eyetooth and shook his head.
    The hooves beat rhythmically on the packed dirt, the horse’s muscular barrel breathed and rocked between Jonathan’s thighs. He rode past a man he didn’t know, an old man driving an ox that pulled two rolling hogsheads of tobacco. The man waved, and Jonathan touched the peak of his three-cornered hat in reply.
    And now he was on the top of the rise, and there ahead in a flat, broad bottomland lay the Clark family seat: the stone house, the outbuildings and barns, the short row of one-story dependenciesin which the servants and field hands dwelt, the pastures and woodlots, the grainfields and tobacco plots and vegetable and herb gardens, the stables and the paddock, the symmetrical crowns of the big, red-leaved oaks and yellow-leaved maples that lined the drive and surrounded the house, all aglow in late sunshine.
    There was his home, that solid, orderly piece of the world, to which he always returned with a sense of mellow longing, however much he might grumble about having had to interrupt his work to go and visit as a dutiful son must do. Jonathan was an ambitious man, who hoped to rise by law and public service up to and beyond the place his father held in life, and he aimed to do it without building fences and pulling stumps and raising and selling livestock and crops for the rest of his days. It was his intention to become a magistrate. But in Caroline County certain royally favored families, such as Taliaferros, Taylors, and Buckners, always got those appointments, and so Jonathan had moved to