She interrupted him gently. “It’s nearly supper-time, Andy, and my father will be along soon.” She looked straight in his face and smiled wistfully. “Andy, good-bye. You’re going on with the drive, and perhaps I won’t see you again till next spring.” And much to his astonishment she bent forward and kissed him. “Good-bye, Andy.”
Never a word said the young riverman as he turned and clattered down the trail, his calked boots rasping on the pebbles. He paused as he came opposite the wangan tents. He could hear some of the men laughing and talking about Joe Smeaton.
“Hell!” he muttered; “he wins—I lose. No accountin’ for a girl’s likes. But she kissed me and that’s mine to keep—and it’s all I get.”
He felt a half-guilty pleasure in the knowledge that she had kissed him, “without even askin’,” he added, as he thought of it. Unfortunately he missed the serene joy that might have assuaged his disappointment to some extent had he been capable of understanding the quality of the love that prompted Swickey’s action.
As it was, he swung blindly past a group of men who spoke to him, and entered the woods bordering the Tramworth road. “Huh!” exclaimed one of the men; “Andy’s gettin’ swelled up on his new job.”
“From where he’s headed for, I reckon he’s goin’ to Jules—fur some nerve.”
“Jules sellin’ booze ag’in?” asked the first speaker.
“Ag’in?” replied the other. “When did he quit? Huh, Pug, he’s allus got it—when you’re heeled.”
CHAPTER XXIV—RIVALS
About six o’clock in the evening of the next day, when the boys at “Fifteen-Two” were finding room for their legs under the long pine tables spread with an imposing array of cookies, doughnuts, hot biscuit, fried ham, potatoes, jam, and pies, Slocum, stumbling through the doorway, paused in the shadow cast by the lamps.