The Slip of the Leash
WHETHER it was in his blood or not, as they say it is in the blood of some wild animals which invariably, sooner or later, revert to utter savagery, or whether he was unduly restrained by the conditions of his life, which made a reaction inevitable, Adam Andersen, at a time of life when most men have settled into the calm of acquiescence with fate which is to endure until death, broke his bonds. In other words, he went wild, he freed himself from all which had hitherto held him, and was for himself alone,—or perhaps for that which was in reality greater than himself or anything which had held him. Perhaps in returning to nature he also returned, in a sense, to God, although he broke, to the execration of all who knew of it, like the woman of the Scriptures, his jar of precious ointment.
Adam Andersen was over forty when he left a wife and four children, and a comfortable home, and went, not to the bad—that was not the word for it—but to that which is outside the good or the bad, to freedom from all cords and weights of civilized life. He lived, anyway, on the outskirts of civilization, where he could hear and see, and smell with his sharpened nostrils, that which was outside. He lived in one of the far Western States, on a fine farm which he himself had wrested from the wild. He had a house which was in those parts considered sumptuous, and furniture in those parts considered luxurious. There was a piano, and his daughters took music lessons. In the yard was a croquet set, and he used to watch his children playing the game with a sort of whimsical and admiring contempt. When he had been the age of his eldest boy—eight—he had played with a shovel and a hoe in grim earnest for his bread and butter. The eldest boy was eight, the next was five, then there were two girls, one ten, the other nine. Andersen's wife was still good to see—large, and blonde, with a seeming decision of character which, some said, had driven her husband afield. However, people, for the most part, were on her side. The day after Andersen disappeared, leaving no trace,—for he had planned his escape well,—and his wife appealed to the people in the scattered settlement to aid her, there had been no lack of volunteers, and there had been fierce blame for the man, although he had left his family in easy circumstances, and his wife was considered to have the brain of a man and to be as competent to run the farm as Adam.
Adam Andersen had simply attired himself in some stout clothes and put a few necessaries in the rude old knapsack which he had borne over his shoulders when he first came to those parts, and one night when his wife and family were at a Christmas gathering in the schoolhouse, three miles away, he had stepped—or rather leaped, so glad was the new sense of freedom in him—over the indefinite barrier which kept the settlement from the wild, the civilized man from the savage, and in a trice he was what he had been before he had known himself. He loped like a young wolf along the road farther west. He was a small and wiry man, and his muscles had still the strength and suppleness of youth. He had chosen a strange time for his exit, a night of intense cold, when the stars overhead swarmed in myriads seemingly laced together in a net of frost; but he was warmly clad, and besides he did not mind the cold. He loved it with a fierce animal yearning, for his forefathers had come of a cold climate, and it was the spur of their old impulses which now urged him on. He forged ahead as a Viking might have done at a battle-call, although before him were only wastes of land, instead of sea. He did not seem to feel the cold at all. He
