“You’ve so many things to tell me,” said Claire, with a curiosity she could not quite repress.
“Yes,” answered Marion, blushing.
It was nearly midnight when they sat down to supper, but none of them cared for time. Marion was not sleepy. She and Haig and Pete had slept well in a deserted cabin the last night of their journey, before a huge fire, in circumstances positively pleasant in comparison with what they had passed through. But she was hungry. As she never expected to be really and truly clean again, she doubted that she should ever get enough to eat. Claire did the best she could on that score, and that was something. There was chicken with cream gravy; and potatoes, baked in their skins, and seasoned with butter and salt and paprika; and three kinds of jelly to be spread on buttered toast; and angel cake. In the midst of the feast there were steps on the veranda, and a knock on the door; and Curly appeared, bearing two bottles of champagne.
“Mr. Haig says you’re all to drink Pete’s health, an’ he ought to live to be a hundred,” said Curly, grinning, 335 and gazing in wonderment at Marion, whose exploit had caused her to assume somewhat the nature of a goddess in his simple mind.
When the door had closed on Curly, Huntington stood for a moment awkwardly holding the bottles, an expression almost of consternation on his face. He had once made some remarks about Haig’s champagne. But he had the sense not to act the part of a skeleton at the feast. Pete’s health was drunk by all; and might he live to be a hundred!
In another hour Marion was in bed, in a real bed, in her own pink room, between sweet, clean sheets, and warm again at last, but shivering in sheer excess of comfort, and crying a little perhaps from overwhelming joy. For she knew in her heart––something she could not yet tell even Claire.
Bill Craven was mending a bridle by the light of a smoky lantern in the stable, when he saw a ghost. It just opened the door, and walked in, and said, “How are you, Bill?” Craven fell backward off his stool, then leaped to his feet with a yell that caused a commotion among the barn swallows under the eaves, and brought Farrish and Curly tumbling down the ladder from the loft. Thereupon discipline, for which Haig had always been rather a stickler, suffered a bad half hour. They had given him up for lost; and had found on comparing experiences that each of them had many reasons for counting that loss his own. In the days following the attempts to rescue Miss Gaylord, these three had gone about the Park with chips on their shoulders, inviting any outspoken citizen to say to them anything that was 336 not strictly proper and complimentary about Haig. So now, though the words were few after the first noisy demonstration, they were the kind of words that are worth hearing, from man to man.
Haig and Bill Craven presently compared notes in the matter of “busted” legs. Bill’s had mended much sooner than Haig’s, which was quite easily understood, considering the great difference in their circumstances. Curly had “nigh killed” the sorrels, getting the doctor for Craven, but they were all right now. “Fat and sassy,” Curly added.
“I’ll take some of that out of them, to-morrow,” said Haig. “I’ll want the sleigh, Farrish. Please look after it in the morning.”