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“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.”