Lin McLean

PART IV

Over at Separ, Jessamine Buckner had no more stockings of Billy's to mend, and much time for thinking and a change of mind. The day after that strange visit, when she had been told that she had hurt a good man's heart without reason, she took up her work; and while her hands despatched it her thoughts already accused her. Could she have seen that visitor now, she would have thanked her. She looked at the photograph on her table. “Why did he go away so quickly?” she sighed. But when young Billy returned to his questions she was buoyant again, and more than a match for him. He reached the forbidden twelfth time of asking why Lin McLean did not come back and marry her. Nor did she punish him as she had threatened. She looked at him confidentially, and he drew near, full of hope.

“Billy, I'll tell you just why it is,” said she. “Lin thinks I'm not a real girl.”

“A—ah,” drawled Billy, backing from her with suspicion.

“Indeed that's what it is, Billy. If he knew I was a real girl—”

“A—ah,” went the boy, entirely angry. “Anybody can tell you're a girl.” And he marched out, mystified, and nursing a sense of wrong. Nor did his dignity allow him to reopen the subject.

To-day, two miles out in the sage-brush by himself, he was shooting jack-rabbits, but began suddenly to run in toward Separ. A horseman had passed him, and he had loudly called; but the rider rode on, intent upon the little distant station. Man and horse were soon far ahead of the boy, and the man came into town galloping.

No need to fire the little pistol by her window, as he had once thought to do! She was outside before he could leap to the ground. And as he held her, she could only laugh, and cry, and say “Forgive me! Oh, why have you been so long?” She took him back to the room where his picture was, and made him sit, and sat herself close. “What is it?” she asked him. For through the love she read something else in his serious face. So then he told her how nothing was wrong; and as she listened to all that he had to tell, she, too, grew serious, and held very close to him. “Dear, dear neighbor!” she said.

As they sat so, happy with deepening happiness, but not gay yet, young Billy burst open the door. “There!” he cried. “I knowed Lin knowed you were a girl!”

Thus did Billy also have his wish. For had he not told Jessamine that he liked her, and urged her to come and live with him and Lin? That cabin on Box Elder became a home in truth, with a woman inside taking the only care of Mr. McLean that he had known since his childhood: though singularly enough he has an impression that it is he who takes care of Jessamine!