VII

The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper.

Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun.  She had a first lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with pointing the gun.  She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had fired together.

She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark’s drawling comments on nothing.  The brown dusk was still.  Behind them were dark marshes.  The plowed acres smelled fresh.  The lake was garnet and silver.  The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear in the cool air.

“Mark left!” sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call.

Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line.  The guns banged, and a duck fluttered.  The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished lake, disappeared beyond the reeds.  Their cheerful voices and the slow splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness.  In the sky a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor.  It dissolved; the lake was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, “Well, old lady, how about hiking out for home?  Supper taste pretty good, eh?”

“I’ll sit back with Ethel,” she said, at the car.

It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street.

“I’m hungry.  It’s good to be hungry,” she reflected, as they drove away.

She looked across the silent fields to the west.  She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile.  Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia.

“Let’s all go to the movies tomorrow night.  Awfully exciting film,” said Ethel Clark.

“Well, I was going to read a new book but——­All right, let’s go,” said Carol.

VIII

“They’re too much for me,” Carol sighed to Kennicott.  “I’ve been thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance.  But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)—­he’s kidnapped my idea.  He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician ‘give an address.’  That’s just the stilted sort of thing I’ve tried to avoid.  He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him.”

Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they tramped up-stairs.