Leon paused long enough to thank the kind-hearted wagon master for the assistance he had rendered him, and then, taking his stand behind the desk, set manfully to work to earn the money that was to pay his way back to the States. That was all he had in his mind now. His ambition to become a hunter was dead and buried out of sight.
All the rest of the day, and until twelve o'clock that night, the trader and his new clerk stood at the desk trying to straighten out the accounts, which Leon found to be in the greatest confusion.
And we may add that his mind was in great confusion, too. The sudden blighting of his long-cherished hopes seemed to have stunned him, and that strange malady, homesickness, from which Frank had suffered actually ever since leaving Albany, assailed him with the greatest fury.
Frank had not given way to it, for he had been buoyed up by the thought that, if he could only secure his cousin's money, he could at once turn his face toward Boston; but Leon had absolutely nothing to encourage him.
While they were at work, the trader casually remarked that he had paid his former clerk twenty dollars a month and board, and when Leon thought of the long months he must spend in that dreary place before he could save enough to take him back to Eaton, he felt like crying out in despair.
"I can't stand it! I can't stand it!" sobbed the repentant runaway, as he tossed about on his hard bed in the little room off the store that had been occupied by his predecessor. "I shall die—I know I shall. Oh, mother! if I could only see you just one minute!"
Leon's grief was so intense that he seemed to be on the point of suffocating. He threw open the door of the room and walked the floor until he was almost exhausted; but when he went to bed again he did not sleep, and neither did he get up to open the store at six o'clock, as his employer had told him to do. He was too ill to hold up his head.
The trader opened the store himself, and, after holding a few minutes' conversation with his clerk, walked across the parade-ground and entered the doctor's office.
Returning to his store, he found there a party of teamsters who were waiting for him.