“I ride like a sailor,” he admitted as he climbed into the saddle, “and—I didn’t tell you—I am going to sea again next week. My mother doesn’t like my going but I can’t stop ashore more than this long. Now that all this trouble is cleared up, I will go down to stay with her until I leave. And you will go to see her sometimes, won’t you, after I am gone?”
“Yes,” promised Beatrice, “but we are going ourselves before very long. I can’t believe the summer has really passed. Hester is coming with us to go to the school where Nancy and I go, and John Herrick—can I ever call him anything else, I wonder—is coming too. But in a year we will all be back again.”
He rode away, leaving her sitting on the steps, still wide awake and reluctant to go in. The cabin was very still, since evidently no one had awakened to miss her in the hours that she had been gone. She sat very quietly, watching the sky grow red between the black columns of the pine-trees, listening to the soft thunder of the waterfall and the growing chorus of the birds as they awoke with the awakening dawn.
An approaching footstep surprised her. Some one had come very softly up the needle-strewn pathway while she sat there dreaming. It was a figure that she did not recognize at once—a person with outlandish clothes, and a yellow face, and with two bundles done up in blue cotton handkerchiefs hung on the pole upon his shoulder. After a moment of inspection she exclaimed:
“Joe Ling!”
The Chinaman nodded.
“I leave your house because trouble was coming,” he explained. “Trouble over now,” he waved his hand toward the village; “I come back again.”
By some secret sense through which Chinamen seem to know everything, he had got news of the outbreak in the town almost before it had occurred and had departed; but now, divining just as quickly that the difficulty was over, he had returned. There could be no more convincing proof that peace and quiet were really restored in Ely.
Beatrice thought for a moment, inclined at first to send him away. She was beginning to be more used to the strange ways of Chinamen, however. “And besides,” she reflected, “it will not do Nancy and me any harm to have a vacation from our work for these last days that we are here.”
She nodded to Joe Ling and he made his way around the corner of the house, to be heard presently in the kitchen making preparations for breakfast as easily as though he had been in residence a twelvemonth.