He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled by trees--locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky, nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.
"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.
Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little banners, Timothy flashed his light, first on tufted grass, then on red-tasselled sorrel, then--lying there as simply as if it belonged there--on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little cry.
"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."
"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.
"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie--thank you!"
"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.
She gave a little skipping step beside him.
"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."
"That's what we _will_ do!" he cried joyously.
He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon, of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to dust; and this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and where Strange Things had closed them round.
The influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. For that tranquil meadow, long haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles, expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and colour and life and the beating of wild hearts--and was it not certain that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? The field bore the semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark, it was inarticulate once more. But something was stirring there, something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps, something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in the blood.