“I—dunno,” she slowly answered. “It’s the onliest home I ever knowed, but—but it ain’t the same now. No! I—I couldn’t live here! Now that I know who my real daddy was, and—and I’ve got a chance to draw real pictures and—and be somebody ’sides ‘Nigger Nat’s girl’ and ‘that red-headed catamount’ and all——”
She paused, her eyes shining as the misty portal of Dreams swung back and gave her a vision of what lay beyond. The three men nodded; Douglas understandingly, Uncle Eb decisively, Steve sombrely.
“That’s right,” Douglas agreed. “You’ve been underground long enough, and now you must blossom out into the sun. It’s your daddy’s blood that has driven you to draw and dream, and he’d tell you now to go out and develop your talent. That’s his heritage to you—that urge to draw—and you owe it to him to make something of it. It means work, but it’s worth while.”
“Oh, I can work—won’t I work, though! And—and some day I’m comin’ back up here and draw that hole in the crick that’s bothered me so long—and paint it, too—and make it right!”
Her slender fingers closed and her cheeks flushed in joyous enthusiasm. Steve eyed her soberly, then nodded again.
“Yas, tha’s right, I reckon,” he sighed. “It’s a-goin’ to be awful lonesome ’thout ye, Marry gal, but mebbe ye won’t forgit us. I—I——” He stopped abruptly and gulped.
“Why—why, Stevie!” She sprang up and stroked his hair. “I won’t never forgit you, never! You’ve always been good to me—stood up for me like a real brother many’s the time—it ’most broke my heart when they sent you away. And when the noo-mony got you jest lately I——”
“Don’t say no more,” he broke in huskily. “Ye’ve stood up for me too, an’ ye pulled me through that noo-mony, an’ I couldn’t ask no more. But I got to tell ye, Marry—I ain’t ’shamed to say it right out front of everybody—I got thinkin’ mebbe sometime we might—might git married, all reg’lar, with a ring an’ everythin’, I hadn’t no right to, but I couldn’t help it. But then I see it warn’t no use. I done a lot o’ thinkin’, up thar into my hole into the ground, an’ I could see plain ye was ’way over my head.”
His teeth set, and the hard lines around his mouth deepened. But he drove himself on.
“An’ I see the kind of a feller ye’d oughter have was like Hamp, here. An’ that’s mostly why I resked it to put that note under yer door, Hamp, the night Nat come——”