"Millie, hasn't Israel brought my horse yet?"
He came to where his mother sat, kissed her forehead, and passed; but her languorous eyes read, written all over him, the fact that she had drawn her cords one degree too tight, and that in the night something had snapped; she had a new force to deal with.
"John"—there was alarm in her voice—he had the door half open—"are you so cruel and foolish as to take last evening's words literally?"
"That's all gay, mother; 'tain't the parson I'm going after, it's the surveyor."
He shut the door on the last word and went away whistling. Not that he was merry; as his horse started he set his teeth, smote in the spurs, and cleared the paling fence at a bound.
The surveyors were Champion and Shotwell. John worked with them. To his own surprise he was the life of the party. Some nights they camped. They sang jolly songs together; but often Shotwell would say:
"O Champion, I'll hush if you will; we're scaring the wolves. Now, if you had such a voice as John's—Go on, March, sing 'Queen o' my Soul.'"
John would sing; Shotwell would lie back on the pine-needles with his eyes shut, and each time the singer reached the refrain, "Mary, Mary, queen of my soul," the impassioned listener would fetch a whoop and cry, "That's her!" although everybody had known that for years the only "her" who had queened it over Shotwell's soul was John's own Fannie Halliday.
"Now, March, sing, 'Thou wert the first, thou aht the layst,' an' th'ow yo' whole soul into it like you did last night!"
"John," said Champion once, after March had sung this lament, "You're a plumb fraud. If you wa'n't you couldn't sing that thing an' then turn round and sing, 'They laughed, ha-ha! and they quaffed, ha-ha!'"