Then Polly, who had so courageously braced herself for the contest, experienced an overwhelming revulsion of feeling, and a great wave of gratitude and compunction 148 swept over her. To Uncle Seth’s speechless astonishment she flung her arms around his big neck, and, with some thing very like a sob, she cried:
“Oh, Uncle Seth, I never loved you half enough!”
Uncle Seth bore it very well, all things considered. He got pretty red in the face, but happily a full grizzly beard kept the secret of his blushes.
“Why, Polly!” he said, pounding away on her shoulder in an attempt to be consolatory; “you’ve always ben a good girl; not a mite of trouble, not a mite!”
They walked up to the house, Polly holding the rough, hairy hand as tightly as if it had been a solid chunk of gold. Before the short walk to the kitchen door was finished they had become sworn conspirators, and Uncle Seth was so entirely in the spirit of the piece that he held Polly back a minute to say, in a sepulchral whisper,
“Just you leave your Aunt Lucia to me. I’ll fix her.”
Polly never knew all the pains Uncle 149 Seth was at to “fix” Aunt Lucia, but by hook or crook the “fixing” was accomplished, and Aunt Lucia had given a mournful consent.
“I shouldn’t feel it right,” she declared, “to let you suppose I thought there was any hope of its curing Dan. That boy’s doomed, if ever a boy was, and I don’t know how you’ll ever manage with the funeral and all, way out there in Colorado, far from kith and kin. But your Uncle Seth says you’d better try it, and I ain’t one to oppose just for the sake of opposin’. I’ve been through too much for that. Only I warn you; mind, you don’t forget I warned you.”
Polly listened to Aunt Lucia’s lugubrious views with scarcely a twinge of alarm, and in five minutes she had plunged into preparations for the journey.
As for Dan, the mere thought of Colorado seemed to revive him. “Larks” of any description had always been very much to his taste, but the unending “lark” of an escape into the big world with Polly filled him with a fairly riotous joy. 150