Pam was not present. She went across to the Gittins’s place and stayed with Reggie, who was too much of an invalid as yet to stand the shaking and bumping of the wagon on the rough trail. Galena insisted that she was going, and she left the house tricked out in the smartest clothes she possessed. She clambered up into the wagon to sit by the side of her brother, and looked as hard and defiant as you please. Just as the wagon started, Pam, yielding to an impulse, ran out, and, holding up her hand to Nathan to wait a moment, clambered up on the high step. Then, flinging her arms round Galena, she gave her a bear-like hug and a warm kiss.
“What is that for?” demanded Miss Gittins in a caustic tone, and she tossed her head, making the roses on her much-beflowered hat nod vigorously.
“Because I love you,” said Pam, looking into the hard face with the quiet daring of a real affection. She added, with a trifle of hesitation: “I shall be thinking of you every minute of the time you are at meeting.”
“Which means you think I ought not to go. But I should like to know why?” Again Galena tossed her head, and the roses nodded in reply.
“It is splendid and brave of you to be able to bear it, but I am afraid you will find it very hard; that is why I came.” Pam reached up and dropped another kiss on the cheek of Galena, then slid down from the wagon with a nod to Nathan in token that he could go on. Her eyes filled with tears as she watched the two elderly-young people bumping placidly across the rough pasture in the little wagon. She wondered if she could ever go to meeting to hear a confession of Don’s read to clear the name of someone of a wrongfully imputed crime. Of course she and Don were not betrothed. Pam had not really owned to herself in plain speech that she loved him. But standing there that morning, watching the backs of Galena and Nathan, she told herself that she could not have borne it. Then she went back to the house to talk as cheerfully as possible to Reggie, and to make the leaden-footed hours pass for him as pleasantly as might be.
Reggie was very white-faced this morning. He was grieving over his brother’s death in a fashion that seemed strange when one remembered the callous neglect of Mose.
“You see, I had him to look after. Ma left him to me, and I can’t help feeling that I have left something out that I ought to have done.” The boy’s tone was so wistful as he spoke that Pam found her heart aching for him so badly as to make her forget how sorry she had just been for Galena. Really, when one comes to think of it, there are so many people to be sorry for that one’s own private and particular pain has mostly to be thrust into the background.
“I think you did everything a boy could do, but it is hard to influence a man, you know.” Pam spoke soothingly, thinking that if Mose could ignore the affection of his small step-brother, and leave the child as he had done, there could not have been much good stuff in him.
Reggie spoke as if he had read her thoughts.
“Mose would have been different if he had seen anything ahead of him that he could reach. Things were terribly against him. When Galena threw him over because he was lazy, she ought to have said that if he’d work hard and show willing she’d hitch up with him again, but what she did say was that she hadn’t no use for lazy people, and that was all. Then there was that bit of creek frontage. If only Sam Buckle would have put a price on that, then Mose would have stirred round and found the money, and he would have been so busy getting what he wanted that he wouldn’t have had time to be lazy. His trouble was that he could not have what he wanted, and so he lost heart.”