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“Well, I’ll be goin’,” he said, getting up and looking strangely about him.”I guess she didn’t come here after all. She went over to the Murrays’, I guess. I’ll not wait any longer, Mis’ Race. There’s a lot to do over to the house to-day.” And out he marched in the face of her protests taking to the dusty road again in the warm spring sun, his cane striking the earth as he went.

It was two hours later that this pale figure of a man appeared in the Murrays’ doorway, dusty, perspiring, eager. He had tramped all of five miles, and it was noon. An amazed husband and wife of sixty heard his strange query, and realized also that he was mad. They begged him to stay to dinner, intending to notify the authorities later and see what could be done; but though he stayed to partake of a little something, he did not stay long, and was off again to another distant farmhouse, his idea of many things to do and his need of Phmbe impelling him. So it went for that day an
d the next and the next, the circle of his inquiry ever widening.

The process by which a character assumes the significance of being peculiar, his antics weird, yet harmless, in such a community is often involute and pathetic. This day, as has been said, saw Reifsneider at other doors, eagerly asking his unnatural question, and leaving a trail of amazement, sympathy, and pity in his wake. Although the authorities were informed-the county sheriff, no less-it was not deemed advisable to take him into custody; for when those who knew old Henry, and hadnfpr so long, reflected on the condition of the county insane asylum, a place which, because of the poverty of the district, was of staggering aberration and sickening environment, it was decided to let him remain at large; for, strange to relate, it was found on investigation that at night he returned peaceably enough to his lonesome domicile there to discover whether his wife had returned, and to brood in loneliness until the morning. Who would lock up a thin, eager, seeking old man with iron-gray hair and an attitude of kindly, innocent inquiry, particularly when he was well known for a past of only kindly servitude and reliability? Those who had known him best rather agreed that he should be allowed to roain at large. He could do no harm. There were many who were willing to help him as to food, old clothes, the odds and ends of his daily life-at least at first. His figure after a time became not so much a common-place as an accepted curiosity, and the replies, “Why, no, Henry; I ain’t see her,” or “No, Henry; she ain’t been here to-day,” more customary.

For several years thereafter then he was an odd figure in the sun and rain, on dusty roads and muddy ones, encountered occasionally in strange and unexpected places, pursuing his endless search. Undernourishment, after a time, although the neighbors and those who knew his history gladly contributed from their store, affected his body; for he walked much and ate little. The longer he roamed the public highway in this manner, the deeper became his strange hallucination; and finding it harder and harder to return from his more and more distant pilgrimages he finally began taking a few utensils with him from his home, making a small package of them, in order that he might not be compelled to return, in an old tin coffee-pot of large size he placed a small tin cup, a knife, fork, and spoon, some salt and pepper and to the outside of it, by a string forced through a pierced hole, he fastened a plate, which could be released, and which was his woodland table. It was no trouble for him to secure the little food that he needed and with a strange, almost religious dignity, he had hesitation in asking for that much. By degrees his hair became longer and longer, his once black hat became an earthen brown, and his clothes threadbare and dusty.