Everybody liked Mrs. Horton, and a good many things that her husband did would have been less easily condoned by their neighbors if she had been as little of a favorite as he, and one of the things that people liked best, while finding it most incomprehensible, was that she believed in him and his good intentions most implicitly.
“I don’t see how he could possibly have run against an oak stub in a ravine,” observed Jessie, musingly. “Oaks, and especially jack oaks, grow only on the dry hillsides.” Jessie is very observing when it comes to a question of the flora of a country, and what she said was true, as Mrs. Horton hastened to admit.
“I never thought of it before, but I believe that’s so,” she said. “It might have been something else, but Jake himself said that there wasn’t any other kind of wood that he knew of, tough enough and hard enough to make such a cut as that.”
Having cared for the horses we three started for the house. “Did you have a good bed at Mrs. Riley’s?” Jessie now asked, bestowing direct attention on me for the first time. We were just entering the house, and before I could reply Jessie cried out in surprise at the unfamiliar aspect of the bed-room, where the heavy quilt still excluded the daylight from the window.
“Why, what is that for?” she asked, perceiving the cause of the semi-darkness.
I had purposely refrained from telling my story until now. Now I told it, to the consternation of my auditors. Jessie could scarcely credit the evidence of her senses, and Mrs. Horton said feelingly:
“Thank God that you have a brave heart and good sense, Leslie! If you hadn’t thought of that clause in the homestead law in time, and had gone away last night, I tell you this settlement would have been in mourning this morning! Seems to me that I just couldn’t bear for you children to lose this place now—this place that your poor pa had set his heart on! And to think that such an accident should take place so near the time of your proving up makes it so much the worse, for, if the house had gone, I don’t believe you could have got your title. No, not if you had taken down a dozen witnesses to testify to the burning. The law is strict. I doubt if the agent would have the power to give you a deed unless there was a house standing on the land at the moment that the deed was issued, no matter if he wanted to ever so badly.”
She was full of sympathy and kindness, poor soul, and, listening to her exclamations and condolences, I was sorry for her. Jessie was right: there were no jack oaks in the ravine down which Mr. Horton must have passed on the way from the north pasture to his home.