“But we should have tried, and we should have been on the other side of the mountains,” said Sheba.
“So we should,” said Tom, reflectively. “And there’s a good deal in seeing the other side of the mountains when people are young.”
Sheba put her hand on his and looked at him with a glowing face.
“Uncle Tom,” she said, “oh, let us go!”
“Uncle Tom,” said Rupert, “I must go!”
The line showed itself between his black brows again, though it was not a frown. He put his hand in his pocket and held it out, open, with a solitary twenty-dollar bill lying in it.
“That’s all I’ve got,” he said, “and that’s borrowed. If the claim is worth nothing, I must earn enough to pay it back. All right. We’ll all three go,” said Tom.
The next day he began to develop the plans he had been allowing to form vaguely as a background to his thoughts. They were not easy to carry out in the existing condition of general poverty. But at Lucasville, some forty miles distant, he was able to raise a mortgage on his land.
“If the worst comes to the worst,” he said to Sheba, “after we have seen the other side of the mountains, do you think you could stand it to come back and live with me in the rooms behind the store?”
Sheba sat down upon his knee and put her arms round his neck, as she had done when she was ten years old.