“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.