“Hettie Fergusson was here just now,” she said.

“This early!” exclaimed Harriet, incredulously.  “Why, mother, where did she spend the night?”

“At home; that’s the curious part about it; she has walked all that three miles since daylight, if she didn’t get up before and start through the dark.  I never could understand that girl.  All the time she was working here she puzzled me.  She was so absent-minded, and would jump and scream almost when the door would open.  I am glad we didn’t need her help any longer.  Sometimes I wish she had never come to the hotel.”

Harriet stared wonderingly at her mother; then she said: 

“Did she want to help us again?”

Mrs. Floyd laughed significantly.

“That’s what she pretended she wanted, but she didn’t have no more idea of working here than I have of flying through the air at this minute.  Harriet, she is dead crazy in love with Toot Wambush.  That is the truth about it.”

“Why, mother, I can’t believe it!” cried Harriet, her brow wrinkling in perplexity.  “He hardly ever went with her or talked to her.”

“He took her out home with him in a buggy six or seven times to my knowledge,” declared Mrs. Floyd, “and there’s no telling how often he saw her at home.  He is awfully thick with her father.  I never was fooled in a woman; she is in love with him, and right now she is worried to death about him.  She couldn’t hide her anxiety, and asked a good many round-about questions about where he was gone to, and if we knew whether the sheriff was hunting for him now, and if we thought Mr. Westerfelt would prosecute him.”

Harriet laughed.  “Well, I never dreamt there was a thing between those two.  When he asked her to go with him in his buggy out home, I thought it was because she lived on the road to his father’s, and that he just did it to accommodate her, and—­”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt that is what he did it for, darling, but she was falling in love with him all the time, and now that he is in trouble, she can’t hide it.  Do you know her conduct this morning has set me to thinking?  The night you and I spent over at Joe Long’s I heard Wambush came very near being arrested with a barrel of whiskey he was taking to town, and that he managed to throw the officers off his track while he was talking to Hettie in our back yard.  Do you know it ain’t a bit unlikely that she helped him play that trick somehow?  They say he was laughing down at the store after that about how he gave them the slip.  I’ll bet she helped him.”

“If she is in love with him she did, I reckon,” returned Harriet, wisely.  “I wish he was in love with her.  He is getting entirely too troublesome.”