Neighbor went home thinking.
They buried Delaroo. But even then they were not through with him. Delaroo had insurance in every order in the Bend, which meant almost every one on earth. There was no end to his benefit certificates, and no known beneficiaries. But when they overhauled his trunk they found every last certificate filed away up to the last paid assessment and the last quarter's dues. Then came a shock. People found out there was a beneficiary. While the fraters were busy making their passes Delaroo had quietly been directing the right honorable recording secretaries to make the benefits run to Neighbor, and so every dollar of his insurance ran. Nobody was more thunderstruck at the discovery than the master mechanic himself.
Yet Delaroo meant something by it. After Neighbor had studied over it nights the best of a month; after Maje Sampson had tried to take the color test and failed, as he persistently said he would; after he had gone to tinkering in the roundhouse, and from tinkering respectably, and by degrees down the hill to wiping at a dollar and forty cents a day with time and a half for overtime—Neighbor bethought himself all of a sudden one day of a paper Delaroo had once given him and asked him to keep.
He had put it away in the storekeeper's safe with his own papers and the drawings of his extension front end patent—and safely forgotten all about it. It was the day they had to go into the county court about the will that was not, when he recollected Delaroo's paper and pulled it out of its envelope. There was only a half sheet of paper, inside, with this writing from Delaroo to Neighbor:
R. B. A.—What is coming to me on ensurance give to Marty Sampson, wife of Maje. Give my trunk to P. McGraw.
Rispk.,
P. De la roux.
When the master mechanic read that before the probate judge, Maje Sampson took a-trembling: Martie hid her face in her shawl, crying again. Maybe a glimmer of what it meant came for the first time in her life over her. Maybe she remembered Delaroo as he used to sit with them under the kerosene lamp while Maje untiringly pounded the money question into him—smoking as he listened, and Martie mended on never-ending trousers. Looking from Maje Sampson, heated with monologue, to his wife, patiently stitching. No comments; just looking as Pierre Delaroux could look.
Strange, Neighbor thought it, and yet, maybe, not so strange. It was all there in the paper—the torn, worn little book of Delaroo's life. She was the only woman on earth that had ever done him a kindness.
Nobody at Medicine Bend quite understood it; but nobody at Medicine Bend quite suspected that under all the barrenness up at Maje Sampson's an ambition could have survived; yet one had. Martie had an ambition. Way down under her faded eyes and her faded dress there was an ambition, and that for the least promising subjects in the Rocky Mountains—the brickbats. Under the unending mending and the poverty and the toil, Martie, who never put her nose out of doors, who never attended a church social, never ventured even to a free public school show—had an ambition for the boys. She wanted the two biggest to go to the State University; wanted them to go and get an education. And they went; and Maje Sampson says them boys, ary one, has forgotten more about the money question than he ever knew. It looks as if after all the brickbats might come out; a bit of money in Martie's hands goes so far.
There are a few soldiers buried at the Bend. Decoration Day there is an attempt at a turn-out; a little speeching and a little marching. A thin, straggle column of the same warped, bent old fellows in the same faded old blue. Up the hill they go and around to the cemetery to decorate.
When they turn at Maje Sampson's place—there's a gate there now—Martie and more or less of the boys, and Maje, kind of join in along and go over with them carrying a basket or so of flowers and a bucket of water.