And it was with indignation and self-pity that I climbed out in the hot sun at last beside the driver and small Billy.
"I know this road," piped Billy, on the box
"'I camped here with father when mother was off that time. You can take a left-hand trail by those cottonwoods and strike the mountains."
So I inquired what game he had then shot.
"Ah, just a sage-hen. Lin's a-going to let me shoot a bear, you know. What made Lin marry mother when father was around?"
The driver gave me a look over Billy's head, and I gave him one; and I instructed Billy that people supposed his father was dead. I withheld that his mother gave herself out as Miss Peck in the days when Lin met her on Bear Creek.
The formidable nine-year-old pondered. "The geography says they used to have a lot of wives at Salt Lake City. Is there a place where a woman can have a lot of husbands?"
"It don't especially depend on the place," remarked the driver to me.
"Because," Billy went on, "Bert Taylor told me in recess that mother'd had a lot, and I told him he lied, and the other boys they laughed and I blacked Bert's eye on him, and I'd have blacked the others too, only Miss Wood came out. I wouldn't tell her what Bert said, and Bert wouldn't, and Sophy Armstrong told her. Bert's father found out, and he come round, and I thought he was a-going to lick me about the eye, and he licked Bert! Say, am I Lin's, honest?"
"No, Billy, you're not," I said.
"Wish I was. They couldn't get me back to Laramie then; but, oh, bother! I'd not go for 'em! I'd like to see 'em try! Lin wouldn't leave me go. You ain't married, are you? No more is Lin now, I guess. A good many are, but I wouldn't want to. I don't think anything of 'em. I've seen mother take 'pothecary stuff on the sly. She's whaled me worse than Lin ever does. I guess he wouldn't want to be mother's husband again, and if he does," said Billy, his voice suddenly vindictive, "I'll quit him and skip."
"No danger, Bill," said I.
"How would the nice lady inside please you?" inquired the driver.
"Ah, pshaw! she ain't after Lin!" sang out Billy, loud and scornful. "She's after her brother. She's all right, though," he added, approvingly.
At this all talk stopped short inside, reviving in a casual, scanty manner; while unconscious Billy Lusk, tired of the one subject, now spoke cheerfully of birds' eggs.
Who knows the child-soul, young in days, yet old as Adam and the hills? That school-yard slur about his mother was as dim to his understanding as to the offender's, yet mysterious nature had bid him go to instant war! How foreseeing in Lin to choke the unfounded jest about his relation to Billy Lusk, in hopes to save the boy's ever awakening to the facts of his mother's life! "Though," said the driver, an easygoing cynic, "folks with lots of fathers will find heaps of brothers in this country!" But presently he let Billy hold the reins, and at the next station carefully lifted him down and up. "I've knowed that woman, too," he whispered to me. "Sidney, Nebraska. Lusk was off half the time. We laughed when she fooled Lin into marryin' her. Come to think," he mused, as twilight deepened around our clanking stage, and small Billy slept sound between us, "there's scarcely a thing in life you get a laugh out of that don't make soberness for somebody."
Soberness had now visited the pair behind us; even Lin's lively talk had quieted, and his tones were low and few. But though Miss Jessamine at our next change of horses "hoped" I would come inside, I knew she did not hope very earnestly, and outside I remained until Buffalo.
Journeying done, her face revealed the strain beneath her brave brightness, and the haunting care she could no longer keep from her eyes. The imminence of the jail and the meeting had made her cheeks white and her countenance seem actually smaller; and when, reminding me that we should meet again soon, she gave me her hand, it was ice-cold. I think she was afraid Lin might offer to go with her. But his heart understood the lonely sacredness of her next half-hour, and the cow puncher, standing aside for her to pass, lifted his hat wistfully and spoke never a word. For a moment he looked after her with sombre emotion; but the court-house and prison stood near and in sight, and, as plain as if he had said so, I saw him suddenly feel she should not be stared at going up those steps; it must be all alone, the pain and the joy of that reprieve! He turned away with me, and after a few silent steps said, "Wasted! all wasted!"
"Let us hope—" I began.
"You're not a fool," he broke in, roughly. "You don't hope anything."
"He'll start life elsewhere," said I.
"Elsewhere! Yes, keep starting till all the elsewheres know him like Powder River knows him. But she! I have had to sit and hear her tell and tell about him; all about back in Kentucky playin' around the farm, and how she raised him after the old folks died. Then he got bigger and made her sell their farm, and she told how it was right he should turn it into money and get his half. I did not dare say a word, for she'd have just bit my head off, and—and that would sure hurt me now!" Lin brought up with a comical chuckle. "And she went to work, and he cleared out, and no more seen or heard of him. That's for five years, and she'd given up tracing him, when one morning she reads in the paper about how her long-lost brother is convicted for forgery. That's the way she knows he's not dead, and she takes her savings off her railroad salary and starts for him. She was that hasty she thought it was Buffalo, New York, till she got in the cars and read the paper over again. But she had to go as far as Cincinnati, either way. She has paid every cent of the money he stole." We had come to the bridge, and Lin jerked a stone into the quick little river. "She's awful strict in some ways. Thought Buffalo must be a wicked place because of the shops bein' open Sunday. Now if that was all Buffalo's wickedness! And she thinks divorce is mostly sin. But her heart is a shield for Nate."
"Her face is as beautiful as her actions," he added.
"Well," said I, "and would you make such a villain your brother-in-law?"
He whirled round and took both my shoulders. "Come walking!" he urged. "I must talk some." So we followed the stream out of town towards the mountains. "I came awful near asking her in the stage," said he.
"Goodness, Lin! give yourself time!"
"Time can't increase my feelings."
"Hers, man, hers! How many hours have you known her?"
"Hours and hours! You're talking foolishness! What have they got to do with it? And she will listen to me. I can tell she will. I know I can be so she'll listen, and it will go all right, for I'll ask so hard. And everything'll come out straight. Yu' see, I've not been spending to speak of since Billy's on my hands, and now I'll fix up my cabin and finish my fencing and my ditch—and she's going to like Box Elder Creek better than Shawhan. She's the first I've ever loved."
"Then I'd like to ask—" I cried out.
"Ask away!" he exclaimed, inattentively, in his enthusiasm.
"When you—" but I stopped, perceiving it impossible. It was, of course, not the many transient passions on which he had squandered his substance, but the one where faith also had seemed to unite. Had he not married once, innocent of the woman's being already a wife? But I stopped, for to trench here was not for me or any one.
And my pause strangely flashed on him something of that I had in my mind.
"No," he said, his eyes steady and serious upon me, "don't you ask about the things you're meaning." Then his face grew radiant and rather stern. "Do you suppose I don't know she's too good for me? And that some bygones can't ever be bygones? But if you," he said, "never come to look away up to a woman from away down, and mean to win her just the same as if you did deserve her, why, you'll