“It’s a fine thing for him,” commented Sergeant Schaefer. “He can relinquish as soon as he gets his papers for ten or twelve thousand dollars. I understand the railroad’s willing to pay that.”
“It’s nice and comfortable to have a millionaire in our midst,” said June. “Mother, you’d better set your cap for him.”
“June Reed!” rebuked her mother sharply above the laughter which the proposal provoked.
But under the hand of the night the widow blushed warmly, and with a little stirring of the treasured leaves of romance in her breast. She had thought of trying for the doctor, for she was only forty-seven, and hope lives in the female heart much longer than any such trifling term. 112
They sat and talked over the change this belated news would make in the doctor’s fortunes, and the men smoked their pipes, and the miller’s wife suggested tea. But nobody wanted to kindle a fire, so she shivered a little and went off to bed.
The night wore on, Comanche howling and fiddling as it never had howled and fiddled before. One by one the doctor’s friends tired of waiting for him and went to bed. Walker, William Bentley, and Agnes were the last of the guard; the hour was two o’clock in the morning.
“I believe you’d just as well go to bed, Miss Horton,” suggested Bentley, “and save the pleasure of congratulating him until tomorrow. I can’t understand why he doesn’t come back.”
“I didn’t know it was so late,” she excused, rising to act on his plainly sensible view of it.
“Walker and I will skirmish around and see if we can find him,” said Bentley. “It’s more than likely that he’s run across some old friend and is sitting talking somewhere. You’ve no notion how time slips by in such a meeting.”
“And perhaps he doesn’t know of his good fortune yet,” she suggested.