The Wrong Woman

by Charles D. Stewart

"It tastes very good," said Janet.

It hardly did seem the right thing to set before such a guest. But Janet, as good as her word, steadily made way with the frijole beans and did full justice to the hot bread; and soon, inspirited by his powerful coffee, she continued the story of how she was frightened by the steer and baffled by the brook, and how she was foolish enough to think she was going straight forward all the time.

He had a way, whenever she came to a pause, of enticing her to go on. Sometimes he primed the conversation by repeating the last thing she had said; again, an apt word or two summed up the whole spirit of the matter encouragingly; or there would be just a composed waiting for her to resume.

Not that he had any difficulty in finding something to say. He evidently liked to hear her talk, and so he rather deferred to her. Whether it was that she now had a feeling of this, or that there was something in the influence of his presence, his voice and manner, which removed all constraint, Janet had not the least difficulty in talking. She told him how the teacher at the school "boarded round," what an unnecessary number of classes Miss Porter had for so small a number of pupils,—although it was difficult to remedy the matter by "setting back" certain children, because their proud mothers would object to such a leveling,—and how the Blodgett children, four of them, all came to school on the back of one buckskin pony, the youngest having to hold on tight to keep from slipping off at the tail. "Buckskin,"; it seemed, had won quite a place in Janet's affections, although he was the worst behaved horse that came to school. He used to graze in the yard till school was out,—the other horses being staked out on the prairie,—and he had become so familiar that he would sometimes go so far as to put his head in at the window in hope of being fed. And Janet could not see, considering that Texas horses were used to being staked out, what reason there had been for building a fence around a school that stood out on open prairie, unless it was, perchance, that the Texans thought they ought to have a corral to herd the children in.

While she was thus going on, there came from the corral a bleat in the awe-inspiring tone of Fa, and this was followed by a succession of bleats which reminded her of nothing so much as a child getting its hands on the keyboard of an organ. Steve, as if suddenly admonished of something, rose to his feet, excused himself, and disappeared in the direction of the corral.

With the place before her temporarily vacant, and unable to see out of her circle of light except by looking upward, Janet instinctively lifted her eyes to the scene above. Thousands and thousands of stars made the night big and beautiful. They were so clear and so lively, as if they took joy in their shining. A mild southern breeze gave the night motion and perfume. Janet took a deep breath which was hardly a sigh; it was rather a big drink of air and the final suspiration of all her worries. As she took in more deeply the constellated heavens and the free fresh spirit of the roaming air, she began to feel that she would rather like to be a sheep-herder herself. From looking at so many, her mind turned back to her selected star, the "captain jewel" of them all, and her eye sought its whereabouts again. In others she could see tremulous tinges of red and blue; but this seemed to be the pure spirit of light. Unconsciously she had put her arm around the dog, as if to hold on to this earth, and Shep, whose affection had been steadily growing, nudged up closer and gave her a sense of warm companionship.

When Steve returned from his mysterious errand, he looked at her a moment and then fetched an armful of wood. The fire, to serve better the purposes of cooking, had been allowed to burn down to coals, and the smouldering embers now gave so little light that the face and figure of his guest were losing themselves in obscurity. As this state of affairs hardly suited him, he piled on the dry mesquite brush and fanned it with his hat into leaping flames. When Janet was lit up to his satisfaction, he put down the hat and resumed his earthen lounge.

As he stretched himself out before her, lithe-limbed and big-chested, the atmosphere of that firelit place seemed filled with a sense of safety. His deliberate manner of speech, quite different from the slowness of a drawl, was the natural voice of that big starry world so generous of time. Occasionally he made a remark which ought to have been flattery, but which, coming from him, was so quiet and true that one might float on it to topics of unknown depth. He was so evidently interested in everything she said, and his attention was so single-minded and sincere, that Janet was soon chatting again upon the subject of her recent circumnavigation of the prairie, which, as she now saw it in the light of the present, seemed more and more a sea of flowers—as the Past always does. Indeed, the whole recent course of her experience was such a novelty—the trip to Texas was her first real adventure in the world—that she saw things with the new vision of a traveler; and the present situation, turning out so happily, put the cap-sheaf on that dream which is truly Life. Janet, recently delivered from all danger, and yet sitting right in the middle of her adventures, had a double advantage; she was living in the present as well as the past, breathing the sweetness of the air, looking up at the big flock of stars and seeing in them all nothing less than the divine shepherding.

"But, of all the wonderful things I ever saw," she exclaimed. "Why, it was worth walking all day to see it."

"What was it?" he asked.