Free The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter Page A

him too hard. Guide him little by little. Spring is here and soon he’ll be working in the fields, getting up an appetite for the table. One of these days he’ll notice some pretty and desirable girl. Pray God he takes a fancy to her. Then it won’t be long till he’s settled in our white way of life.”

H ARRY B UTLER stood just inside the door. This was his son’s room. It seemed curious that he hadn’t been here since Johnny was back and probably wouldn’t be now save for the boy’s sickness. What that sickness was none of them exactly knew. Dr. Childsley had been here twice, the last time this very day when he had bled the boy’s feet into a wicked-looking gallipot from his saddlebags.
    But he wouldn’t diagnose the trouble. Thebrusque Lancaster County doctor only looked grim, and muttered as he did the other time that the boy had lived too many years among the Indians, subject to their uncivilized fare, hardship and mode of life. Indians were liable to mysterious forest miasmas, he said, and at times they died like pigeons. Despite all curative knowledge, white physicians didn’t know very much about these savage ailments. Cut them up, and the heathen had the same organs and muscles as civilized peoples, even to the exact shape and size of their bones. The blood they hemorrhaged was as rich and red as any white man’s, but there were obscure primitive tendencies and susceptibilities in the aboriginal race, and they weren’t helped by the superstition lurking in the dark and hidden recesses of the untutored mind. All he knew definitely was that the boy had some unknown fever, probably a result of his long unhappy captivity. This fever had remained unchanged now for nearly a week. It had refused to yield to powerful teas and powders. Sooner or later it would reach a crisis, and send the boy either into slow recovery or the grave.
    The latter statement had shaken Harry Butler. He wished he could do something. The boy hadbeen the victim of unhappy chance. If he hadn’t taken him that day eleven years ago to play at the side of the wheat field, the Indians would never have got their heathen hands on him. Today he would be a different being, brought up on Christian precepts and the nourishing food and drink suitable to his race.
    He wished he could talk to the boy, expressing these thoughts. It might release the burden long on his breast. Of course, he himself had really not been guilty, only the unwitting means that evil had used. Just the same if he bared his heart, it would relieve him and Johnny might bare his in return, expressing filial regret for his persistent and unhealthy passion for Indian ways and for his stubborn antagonism toward the decent thrifty ways of his white people. He might even confess his part in the disappearance of the curly maple rifle and ask forgiveness. In that event Harry Butler would completely pardon him and tell him that he meant to make him a present of it anyhow.
    But for all the eager anxiety in the father’s mind, the boy remained deaf to him, lying flat in bed without benefit of a bolster, the dark eyes in his flushed face gazing straight up at the ceiling.When his father spoke to him, he gave no sign except eventually to answer. But there was little warmth or affection in it, only a kind of brief and mechanical response. The older man might as well have been a stranger with no right to invade the boy’s solitude and privacy.
    It was curious how at such a time in the shadow of death all the belongings of the helpless victim affected a father to a degree he dared not speak of even to his wife. There from a row of wooden pins on the wall hung the still and mute clothing Johnny had worn in the sunlight of health—the weekday coat and pants made over from a suit the Reading tailor had cut for the father when he was still a young man—the boy’s Sabbath clothes in which he attended divine service and listened to the word of God—also the miserable and pitiful Indian dress