Free The End of the Story by Clark Ashton Smith Page A

dust, which had settled like a dun pall on the bordering chaparral and pines. Since he had walked all the way from Auburn without securing a single lift, the man who was trudging along the road with the broiling afternoon sun on his back was hardly less dusty than the trees. He paused now and then to mop his face with a discolored handkerchief, or to peer rather wistfully at the occasional cars which passed him without offering to stop. His clothing, though not actually ragged, was old and worn, and had the indescribable shapelessness of clothing that has been slept in. He was very thin, stoop-shouldered, and discouraged-looking; his general aspect was almost that of a professional tramp, and the people of the country-side were suspicious of tramps.
    “Well, I guess I’ll have t’ walk all the way,” he said to himself, whining a little even in his thoughts. “But it ain’t much further now… Gosh, but things is hot an’ dry.” He looked about him at the familiar landscape of parched grass, brushwood and yellow pines with an appraising eye. “Wonder there ain’t been more fires—there alluz is at this time o’ year.”
    The man was Jonas McGillicuddy, and he was on his way home after a somewhat prolonged absence. His return was unannounced, and would prove as unexpected to his wife and three children as his departure had been. Tired of trying to extort a living from a small vineyard and pear-orchard of rocky El Dorado land, and tired also of the perennial nagging of his frail, sensitive-nerved and sorely disappointed wife, Jonas had left abruptly, three years before, after a quarrel of more than customary bitterness and acerbity with his helpmeet. Since then, he had heard nothing from his family, for the good and sufficient reason that he had not sought to communicate with them. His various attempts to earn a livelihood had proven scarcely more successful than the fruit-ranching venture, and he had drifted aimlessly
    and ineffectually from place to place, from situation to situation—a forlorn and increasingly desperate figure. For a man of such shifting, unstable temperament, when all else had failed him, and he had wearied of the hopeless struggle, it was not unnatural to think of returning. Time had softened his memory of his wife’s undependable temper, of her shrewish outbursts; but he had not forgotten her motherly ways when she was in a more tractable humor, nor her excellent cooking.
    Now, with empty pockets, since his last money had sufficed merely to pay his train-fare to Sacramento, Jonas was nearing the hills in which lay his forest-surrounded ranch beyond Georgetown. The country through which he tramped was sparsely-peopled, and there were great stretches of softly-rolling hills and low valleys that had not known the touch of cultivation. The ranches were often quite isolated. Beyond all, in the hazy blue of the distance, were the vague and spectral snows of the Sierras.
    “Gosh, but one of Matilda’s pear pies’ll taste good,” thought the wanderer. His mouth began to water. He was not reflective enough, however, to wonder just what his reception would be, beyond an uneasy surmise that Matilda might give him a terrific scolding for his absence. “But mebbe she’ll be mighty glad t’see me, after all,” he consoled himself. Then he tried to picture his children, the five-year-old boy and the girl-babies of three and two respectively whom he had last seen.
    “Guess they’ll have forgotten they had a papa,” he mused.
    The afternoon had been utterly still and airless, with a sultry brooding in its silence. Now, from the north-east, along the road he was traveling, there came a gust of wind, and with it the unmistakable acrid odor of burnt grass and trees.
    “Hell, there has been a fire after all,” muttered Jonas, with an uneasy start. He peered anxiously ahead, but could see no smoke above the dun and grey-green hills. “Guess it’s all out now, anyway.”
    He came to the top of the