In spite of myself, it was Virginia Royall to whom my dreams turned all the time.  Whether in the keen cold of the still nights when the howl of the wolves came to me like the cries of torment, or in the howling tempests which roared across my puny hovel like trampling hosts of wild things, sifting the snow in at my window, powdering the floor, and making my cattle in their sheds as white as sheep, I went to sleep every night thinking of her, and thinking I should dream of her—­but never doing so; for I slept like the dead.  I held her in my arms again as I had done the night Ann Gowdy had died back there near Dubuque, all senseless in her faint; or as I had when I scared the wolves away from her back along the Old Ridge Road; or as when I had carried her across the creek back in our Grove of Destiny—­and she always, in my dreams, was willing, and conscious that I held her so tight because I loved her.

I saw her again as she played with her doll under the trees.  Again I rode by her side into Waterloo; and again she ran back to me to bid me her sweet good-by after I had given her up.  Often I did not give her up, but brought her to my new home, built my house with her to cheer me; and often I imagined that she was beside me, sheltered from the storm and happy while she could be by my side and in my arms.  Oh, I lived whole lives over and over again with Virginia that lonely winter.  She had been such a dear little creature.  I had been able to do so much for her in getting her away from what she thought a great danger.  She had done so much for me, too.  Had not she and I cried together over the memory of my mother?  Had she not been my intimate companion for weeks, cooked for me, planned for me, advised me, dreamed with me?  It was not nearly so lonely as you might think, in one sense of the word.

And now I had not seen her for such a long time that I wondered if she were not forgetting me.  No wonder that I was a little flighty, as I crowded myself into my poor best suit which I was so rapidly outgrowing, and walked into Monterey Centre in time to be Judge Horace Stone’s body-guard the night of the party—­I heard it called a reception—­at Governor DeWitt Clinton Wade’s new Gothic house, over in Benton Township that was to be.

I was proportionately miserable when I called at Elder Thorndyke’s, to find that Virginia was not ready to see me, and that Grandma Thorndyke seemed cool and somehow different toward me.  When she left me, I slipped out and went to Stone’s.

“Thought you wasn’t coming, Jake,” said he.  “Almost give you up.  Just time for you to get a bite to eat before we start.”

3

When we did start, his wife came out in a new black silk dress—­for the Stones were quality—­and was helped into the back seat, and the judge came out of the house carrying a satchel which when he handed it to me I found to be very heavy.  I should say, as I have often stated, that it weighed about fifty to sixty pounds, and when he shoved it back under the seat before sitting down, it gave as I seemed to remember afterward a sort of muffled jingle.