Peanut turned his face to the wall.
VI
THE letter which the postmaster handed to the Rose of Texas seemed heavier than usual. The Rose hugged it all the way up the mountain. Then out on the doorstep, where he had said good-by, she opened and read it. The first sentence made her heart leap:
Dear Rose,—I am coming back. I will start before morning. If I go west and keep on every day, some day I will get there. Miss Schofield told me once that it was fifteen hundred miles, so if I can walk fifteen miles a day it will take me a hundred days to get to the cabin and Sam’s grave. The money you gave me is not enough to come on the cars. I will spend it for things to eat. At ten cents a day it will last till I get home. Perhaps some days I won’t need to spend so much. I will wear the clothes you made me and my own hat and shoes. I have them all on now, and the lether sack with Sam’s ambertipe and the whissel, and the money. I would like to take the picture of the grave, but I shall leave it on the wall.
I wrote you how Miss Schofield showed the picture of the grave and told about Sam’s good heart. When I am not there she tells how he had a cruel heart and was only good to me. And it is not true, and when she told how she met me at Sam’s grave she told other things that were not true, and that did not happen at all. She laughs at Sam and the grave and at you and me. And she makes other people laugh. That is all she cares for. I thaut she was like Sam, but she is not and I could not be good here either, where there are so many bad people and nothing is clean. The snow is so dirty here they take it right away and you can never hear the wind and rain. They have trees in the park and animals and birds in cages, but they make me cry because they are so homesick, like me. I want to come back to the hills where there is just you and the bears and Sam’s grave. If I start to-night and it takes a hundred days it will be more than a year since I went away. I will never leave you any more. I am obliged to Miss Schofield for sending me to school, but I cannot stay here now. I was yours before I was hers, and I will be yours again. Perhaps I can get some books and study lessons there with you and learn to be a naturallist, when I grow up, which means to live in the woods and know about the birds and animals, and I will dig gold out of the mines for us and I will put a white stone at Sam’s grave so we can see it from every-where.
Now I am going to start. I am going to slip down-stairs and I will be out in the country before morning. Sam taut me how to hide, and how to keep in one direction. Perhaps I will write to you on the way, but I must not buy many stamps or paper. Anyway I will be coming all the time, and some day I will be there the same as ever.
Yours,
Peanut.
The Rose of Texas was a bundle of conflicting emotions by the time she reached the end of this letter. But out of it all came one dominant joy. Peanut was coming back to her—he was already on the way. Whatever resentment she may have felt toward Miss Schofield was swallowed up in this great fact.