Leonidas understood her perfectly. Mercury was the other name for quicksilver—and that was lively, you bet! He had often spilt some on the floor to see it move. She must be awfully cute to have noticed it too—cuter than his sisters. He was quite breathless with pleasure.
“I put your letter in the box all right,” he burst out at last.
“Without any one seeing it?” she asked.
“Sure pop! nary one! The postmaster stuck out his hand to grab it, but I just let on that I didn’t see him, and shoved it in myself.”
“You’re as sharp as you’re good,” she said smilingly. “Now, there’s just ONE thing more I want you to do. Forget all about this—won’t you?”
Her voice was very caressing. Perhaps that was why he said boldly: “Yes, ma’am, all except YOU.”
“Dear me, what a compliment! How old are you?”
“Goin’ on fifteen,” said Leonidas confidently.
“And going very fast,” said the lady mischievously. “Well, then, you needn’t forget ME. On the contrary,” she added, after looking at him curiously, “I would rather you’d remember me. Good-by—or, rather, good-afternoon—if I’m to be remembered, Leon.”
“Good-afternoon, ma’am.”
She moved away, and presently disappeared among the laurels. But her last words were ringing in his ears. “Leon”—everybody else called him “Lee” for brevity; “Leon”—it was pretty as she said it.
He turned away. But it so chanced that their parting was not to pass unnoticed, for, looking up the hill, Leonidas perceived his elder sister and little brother coming down the road, and knew that they must have seen him from the hilltop. It was like their “snoopin’”!
They ran to him eagerly.
“You were talking to the stranger,” said his sister breathlessly.
“She spoke to me first,” said Leonidas, on the defensive.
“What did she say?”
“Wanted to know the eleckshun news,” said Leonidas with cool mendacity, “and I told her.”
This improbable fiction nevertheless satisfied them. “What was she like? Oh, do tell us, Lee!” continued his sister.
Nothing would have delighted him more than to expatiate upon her loveliness, the soft white beauty of her hands, the “cunning” little puckers around her lips, her bright tender eyes, the angelic texture of her robes, and the musical tinkle of her voice. But Leonidas had no confidant, and what healthy boy ever trusted his sister in such matter! “YOU saw what she was like,” he said, with evasive bluntness.
“But, Lee”—
But Lee was adamant. “Go and ask her,” he said.
“Like as not you were sassy to her, and she shut you up,” said his sister artfully. But even this cruel suggestion, which he could have so easily flouted, did not draw him, and his ingenious relations flounced disgustedly away.
But Leonidas was not spared any further allusion to the fair stranger; for the fact of her having spoken to him was duly reported at home, and at dinner his reticence was again sorely attacked. “Just like her, in spite of all her airs and graces, to hang out along the fence like any ordinary hired girl, jabberin’ with anybody that went along the road,” said his mother incisively. He knew that she didn’t like her new neighbors, so this did not surprise nor greatly pain him. Neither did the prosaic facts that were now first made plain to him. His divinity was a Mrs. Burroughs, whose husband was conducting a series of mining operations, and prospecting with a gang of men on the Casket Ridge. As his duty required his continual presence there, Mrs. Burroughs was forced to forego the civilized pleasures of San Francisco for a frontier life, for which she was ill fitted, and in which she had no interest. All this was a vague irrelevance to Leonidas, who knew her only as a goddess in white who had been familiar to him, and kind, and to whom he was tied by the delicious joy of having a secret in common, and having done her a special favor. Healthy youth clings to its own impressions, let reason, experience, and even facts argue ever to the contrary.
So he kept her secret and his intact, and was rewarded a few days afterwards by a distant view of her walking in the garden, with a man whom he recognized as her husband. It is needless to say that, without any extraneous thought, the man suffered in Leonidas’s estimation by his propinquity to the goddess, and that he deemed him vastly inferior.
It was a still greater reward to his fidelity that she seized an opportunity when her husband’s head was turned to wave her hand to him. Leonidas did not approach the fence, partly through shyness and partly through a more subtle instinct that this man was not in the secret. He was right, for only the next day, as he passed to the post-office, she called him to the fence.
“Did you see me wave my hand to you yesterday?” she asked pleasantly.
“Yes, ma’am; but”—he hesitated—“I didn’t come up, for I didn’t think you wanted me when any one else was there.”
She laughed merrily, and lifting his straw hat from his head, ran the fingers of the other hand through his damp curls. “You’re the brightest, dearest boy I ever knew, Leon,” she said, dropping her pretty face to the level of his own, “and I ought to have remembered it. But I don’t mind telling you I was dreadfully frightened lest you might misunderstand me and come and ask for another letter—before HIM.” As she emphasized the personal pronoun, her whole face seemed to change: the light of her blue eyes became mere glittering points, her nostrils grew white and contracted, and her pretty little mouth seemed to narrow into a straight cruel line, like a cat’s. “Not a word ever to HIM, of all men! Do you hear?” she said almost brusquely. Then, seeing the concern in the boy’s face, she laughed, and added explanatorily: “He’s a bad, bad man, Leon, remember that.”
The fact that she was speaking of her husband did not shock the boy’s moral sense in the least. The sacredness of those relations, and even of blood kinship, is, I fear, not always so clear to the youthful mind as we fondly imagine. That Mr. Burroughs was a bad man to have excited this change in this lovely woman was Leonidas’s only conclusion. He remembered how his sister’s soft, pretty little kitten, purring on her lap, used to get its back up and spit at the postmaster’s yellow hound.
“I never wished to come unless you called me first,” he said frankly.
“What?” she said, in her half playful, half reproachful, but wholly caressing way. “You mean to say you would never come to see me unless I sent for you? Oh, Leon! and you’d abandon me in that way?”
But Leonidas was set in his own boyish superstition. “I’d just delight in being sent for by you any time, Mrs. Burroughs, and you kin always find me,” he said shyly, but doggedly; “but”—He stopped.
“What an opinionated young gentleman! Well, I see I must do all the courting. So consider that I sent for you this morning. I’ve got another letter for you to mail.” She put her hand to her breast, and out of the pretty frillings of her frock produced, as before, with the same faint perfume of violets, a letter like the first. But it was unsealed. “Now, listen, Leon; we are going to be great friends—you and I.” Leonidas felt his cheeks glowing. “You are going to do me another great favor, and we are going to have a little fun and a great secret all by our own selves. Now, first, have you any correspondent—you know—any one who writes to you—any boy or girl—from San Francisco?”
Leonidas’s cheeks grew redder—alas! from a less happy consciousness. He never received any letters; nobody ever wrote to him. He was obliged to make this shameful admission.
Mrs. Burroughs looked thoughtful. “But you have some friend in San Francisco—some one