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"Yes; but it delays them and makes easier our defense and they do not know which of all the holes you see are deep enough for pegs the others are made to confuse our enemies and are too shallow to hold a peg." At the top of the cliff beside the gnarled tree Tarzan again took up the trail.
Before and around lies a broad stretch of glimmering water, dotted here and there with great stumps, and lined about the shore with dead trees. Dams built in the river beyond have raised the level of the lake, and hundreds of trees have died. On every side is a network of gnarled and knotted roots.
The fairest, topmost blossom on the family tree had set itself to swaying in the gentle breezes of sentiment, regardless of the dotings of the gnarled old root, of the indifference of the sturdy trunk, of the solicitous rustlings of the foliage.
"More than three hundred years have passed since that silly little squirrel dropped the nut from which this tree grew!" said the old, rough Stone to himself. Then men came with axes and cut up the tree and carried all of it away. When the hot summer days came the sun beat down upon the old, rough Stone and he missed the shade of the gnarled tree. "My!
"Do you hold with a man sacrificing his life for his country?" He looked at me for a moment or two, in his dour, crabbed way. "I've got a couple of sons in France, trying their best to do it," he replied. That was the first I had ever heard of it. I had always regarded him as a gnarled old bachelor without human ties.
Tall and thin, gnarled and twisted like a vine-stock, he rested his hands on the tribune as if to support his bent figure, and his speech was often interrupted by the little dry cough which came from the tuberculosis that was burning him.
He cut, and carried, and shaped and fitted, sometimes in blinding snow, stopping during daylight hours only to hunt, or to look over what had been done. Because he had no choice. And slowly the shelter went up. Pine and birch and gnarled oak, he laid them down and made a refuge of their bones, as dark thoughts tormented him. But the shelter went up.
There is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant.
"Let him larn, pretty, let him larn. He'll be worth twice as much at fifty as he is to-day, an' so will you for that matter. They're fools that say love is for the young, Molly, don't you believe 'em." Sarah, meanwhile, passed slowly down the flagged walk under the gnarled old apple trees in the orchard.
In his wealth of hair; in his wide eyes, like the mysterious blanks of a marble statue; in his huge frame, gnarled and wasted to the strange, impressive, powerful age-quality of Phidias's old men, he seemed to us to deserve a wreath and a marble seat with strange inscriptions and the graceful half-draperies of another time and a group of old Greeks like himself with whom to exchange slow sentences on the body politic.
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