They noticed me staring at them, and, remembering my manners, I looked away. This intelligence I wrote to Apache Kid (to be called for at Santa Fe), as he had desired. But I never heard any word in reply. The letter, however, was not returned, so I presume he received it.
I do not know whether the fact that I am bound by a promise causes me, in contradictory-wise, to desire all the more to speak to these three of Apache Kid,—how alien his name sounds here in Edinburgh of all places!—but I do know that I long to speak to them. In Apache Kid's younger sister, especially in her winsome face, there is something I cannot describe that moves my heart. Once I saw her with her sister eating strawberries on one of the roof-cafés in Princes Street, whither I had gone with my mother. My mother noticed the drifting of my eyes and looked at the girl and looked back at me and smiled, and shook her head on me, and said:
"She is a sweet girl, but do not stare; you have lost your manners in America!"
She did not understand, and I could not explain. But her words, spoken jestingly, took me back to that conversation with Apache Kid on the stagecoach, after we had left the Half-Way-to-Kettle House, when he delivered his opinion on the transition period in the West; and I wondered if he had yet looked up Carlyle's remark about the manners of the backwoods.
My little fortune had to be explained in some way, but you may be sure I told nothing of the terrors of the journey that we undertook in the gathering of it. The common fallacy that fortunes are to be picked up in America, by any youth who cares to go a-plucking there, helped me greatly with most folk, and I never was required to tell the bloody story of the Lost Cabin Mine.
But now that they who might have wept for my share in that business have gone beyond all weeping and grieving I can publish the tale with no misgivings; for the only fear that haunts me, as I go my ways through the world, is lest I give pain to any of these quiet, cloistered hearts, who, in their blissful and desirable ignorance, live apart in peace, not knowing how barbaric, how sad, how full of unrest, and how blood-bespattered the world still is.
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOST CABIN MINE ***