Time and Again

XXXIV

The land was wild…wilder than anything Sutton had ever seen on the lawn-mowered, trimmed and watered parks of his native Earth. The land tilted upward, as if it rested on a knife edge, and it was littered by great clumps of stone which appeared to have been flung down in godlike anger by a giant hand out of forgotten time. Stark bluffs speared upward, soaring massively, masked by mighty trees that seemed to have strived, at one time, to match the height and dignity of the rocky cliffs. But now they stood defeated, content to be less than the very cliffs, but with a certain dignity and patience learned, no doubt, through their ancient striving.

Summer flowers huddled in the spaces between the strewn rocks or clung close to the mossy root-mounds of the larger trees. A squirrel sat on a limb somewhere and chattered half in anger, half in rapture at the rising sun.

Sutton toiled upward, following the rock-filled ravine from the river road. At times he walked, but more often he went on hands and knees, clawing his way up the slope.

He stopped often and stood with heels dug in and back resting against a tree, wiping the perspiration from his dripping face. In the valley below, the river that had seemed roiled and muddy as he walked along it on the road had assumed a blueness that challenged the very blueness of the sky which it reflected. And the air was crystal clear above it, clearer than air had ever seemed before. A hawk dived down across the gulf of space between the blueness of the sky and the blueness of the river and it seemed to Sutton that he could see each separate feather in the folded wings.

Once, through the trees, he glimpsed the break in the cliffs ahead and knew that he was at the place that old John Sutton had mentioned in his letter.

The sun was only a couple of hours high and there still was time. There still would be time, for John Sutton had talked to the man only a couple of hours or so and then had gone to dinner.

From there on, with the cleft of the cliff in sight, Sutton took his time. He reached the top and found the boulder that his old ancestor had spoken of and it was appropriate for sitting.

He sat upon it and stared across the valley and was grateful for the shade.

And there was peace, as John Sutton had said there was. Peace and the quieting majesty of the scene before him…the strange third-dimensional quality of the space that hung, as if alive, above the river valley. Strangeness, too, the strangeness of expected…and unexpected…happenings.

He looked at his watch and it was half past nine, so he left the boulder and lay down behind a patch of brush and waited. Almost as he did, there was a soft, smooth swish of motor-noise and a ship came down, a tiny one-man ship, slanting across the trees, to land in the pasture just beyond the fence.

A man got out and leaned against the ship, staring at the sky and trees, as if he were satisfying himself that he had reached his destination.

Sutton chuckled quietly to himself.

Stage setting, he said. Dropping in unexpectedly and with a crippled ship…no need to explain your presence. Waiting for a man to come walking up and talk to you. Most natural thing in all the world. You didn't seek him out, he saw you and came to you and of course he talked.

You couldn't come walking up the road and turn in at the gate and knock at the door and say:

"I came to pick up all the scandal and the dirt I can about the Sutton family. I wonder if I might sit down and talk with you."

But you could land in a pasture with a crippled ship and first you'd talk of corn and pasture, of weather and of grass, and finally you'd get around to talking about personal and family matters.

The man had gotten out his wrench now and was tinkering at the ship.

It must almost be time.

Sutton lifted himself on his arms and stared through the close-laced branches of the hazel brush.

John H. Sutton was coming down the hill, a big-bellied man with a trim white beard and an old black hat, and his walk was a waddle with some swagger in it.