When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry

by Charles Neville Buck

As in those old days the hills seemed to rock about him and the arms that came forward and paused were unsteady.

"Ye means ... thet...."

"I means thet I loved ye first, Turney." The words came tremulously, almost whispered, and in them was something of self-accusation. "Maybe I ought to be ashamed—but somehow I can't. All of what happened seems to me like a dream that doesn't really belong in my life. It seems to me that I was dazzled and couldn't tell the true from the seeming.... It seems as I look back that a little piece of my life was torn loose from the rest—but that the real me has always been yours."

She laid her hands on his shoulders, and as he caught her in his arms, the light breath of the night breeze brought the fragrance of honeysuckle to them both. She rested for a moment in his embrace with the serene feeling that she was at home.

Between them fell a silence but in the bath of silvery light through the fragrant stillness of dove gray night-tones and cobalt shadows the girl's eyes were brightly eloquent. Yet after a moment a shade of troubling thought came into them and the lips moved into the tremulousness of a self-searching and somewhat self-accusing whisper.

"Turney," she said, "there's one thing that I've got to say—and I guess it had better be now."

"If it's any fault you're finding with yourself—don't say it," he protested as his hands closed over her slender fingers. "There ain't anything that I need to have explained. I reckon I understand what happiness means and that's enough."

But Blossom shook her head.

"If I'd been straight loyal—like you've been, Turney, I reckon I couldn't ever have made any mistake. There wouldn't ever have been room for anybody but you." She paused and then went falteringly ahead. "From now on there won't ever be. You've known me always and yet even you can't realize how young and foolish and plumb ignorant I was a year ago. If I'd been just a little more experienced, it couldn't have happened. If things hadn't come with such a rush after they began, that I was just swept along like a log in a spring-tide—it couldn't have happened." It seemed difficult for her to force the words, but she obeyed the mandate of her conscience with the candor of the confessional. "I never had the chance to think—until I came over here and began looking back. A person like I was doesn't think very clear in the midst of cyclones and confusions, and I didn't see that the real bigness was in you—more than in—him. I didn't see it until later. I'd grown up with you, and I took you too much for granted, I reckon, and everything he said or did seemed like a scrap out of a fairy story to my foolish mind."

There was one thing she did not tell him, even now; that she had learned at last through the lawyers what her husband's connection with the railroad plans had been. Back of all his fascination there had been a tarnished honesty, but that secret she still kept to herself.