"Lord, yes! Those,"—waving his hand toward the books, and she walked across to inspect them, Bayard moving beside her. "He left 'em for me. He keeps sendin' me more every fall. I ... I learnt all I know out of them, an' from what he told me. It ain't much—what I know. But I got it all myself; that makes it seem more."
Ann's throat tightened at that, but she only leaned lower over the shelves. Dickens was there, and Thackeray; one or two of Scott and a broken set of Dumas. History and travel predominated, with a volume of Kipling verse and a book on mythology discovered in a cursory inspection.
"I think a lot of my books. I like 'em all.... I liked that story 'bout Oliver Twist th' best of 'em," he said, pointing to the Dickens. "Poor kid! An' old Bill Sykes! Lord, he was a hellion—a bad one, ma'am,"—correcting himself hastily. "An' Miss Sharpe this man Thackeray wrote about in his book! I'd like to know a woman like her; she sure was a slick one, wasn't she? She'd done well in th' cow business."
"Do you like these?" she asked, indicating the Scott.
"Well, sometimes," he said. "I like th' history in 'em, but, unless I got a lot of time, like winter, I don't read 'em much. I like 'Ivanhoe' pretty well any time, but in most of 'em Walt sure rounded up a lot of words!"
She smiled at that.
"This is th' best of 'em all, though," he said, drawing out Carlyle's French Revolution. "It took me all one winter to get on to th' hang of that book, but I stayed by her an' ... well, I'd rather read it now than anythin'. Funny that a man writin' so long ago could say so many things that keep right on makin' good.
"I'd like to know him," he said a moment later. "I could think up a lot of questions to ask a man like that."
He stood running over the worn, soiled pages of his "French Revolution" lost in thought and Ann, stooping before the shelves, turned her face to watch him covertly. This was the explanation of the Bruce Bayard she knew and loved; she now understood. This was why he had drawn her to him so easily. He was rough of manner, of speech, but behind it all was thought, intelligence; not that alone, but the intelligence of an intrinsically fine mind. For an unschooled man to accomplish what he had accomplished was beyond her experience.
"I liked them," he said, touching some volumes of Owen Wister. "Lord, he sure knows cowboys an' such. He wrote a story about 'n hombre called Jones, Specimen Jones, that makes me sore from laughin' every time I read it. It's about Arizona an' naturally hits me.