Your loving
Gladys.
P. S. Medmangi writes that she has passed her exams and entered the Medical School. Sahwah is going to Business College and having the time of her life with shorthand. P.P.S. Hinpoha is dying of curiosity to hear more about the sick man. Please answer by return mail.
KATHERINE TO THE WINNEBAGOS
Nov. 1, 19—.
Dearest Winnies:
Well, Justice Sherman may be a sheep herder and a son of the pasture, but I hae me doots. I know a hawk from a handsaw if I was born and bred in the backwoods. I know it isn’t polite to doubt people’s word, and he seemed to be telling an absolutely straight story when he told how he beat his way across from Texas, but for all that there’s some mystery about him. His manners betrayed him the first time he ever sat down to the table with us. Even though he limped badly and was still awfully wobbly, he stood behind my mother’s chair and shoved it in for her and then hobbled over and did the same for me.
You can see it, can’t you? The table set in the kitchen—for our humble cot does not boast of a dining room—father and Jim Wiggin collarless and in their shirtsleeves, and the stranded sheep herder waiting upon mother and me as if we were queens. For no reason at all I suddenly became abashed. I felt my face flaming to the roots of my hair, and absentmindedly began to eat my soup with a fork, whereat Jim Wiggin set up a great thundering haw! haw! Jim had been a sheep herder before he came to take care of father’s horses, and it struck me forcibly just then that there was a wide difference between him and the stranger within our gates.
I said something to father about it that night when we were out in the stable together giving Sandhelo his nightly dole. Father rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, a sign that a thing is of no concern to him.
“Don’t you get to worryin’ about the stranger’s affairs,” he advised mildly. “If he’s got something he doesn’t want to tell, you ain’t got no business tryin’ to find it out. Tend to your own affairs, I say, and leave others’ alone. There ain’t nobody goin’ to be pestered with embarrassing questions while they’re under my roof.”
So I promised not to ask any questions. Just about the time the stranger’s foot was well enough to walk on, Jim Wiggin stepped on a rusty nail and laid himself up. Justice Sherman was a godsend just then because men were so hard to get, and father hired him to help with the horses until Jim was about again. Father begged me again at this time not to ask him anything about his past.
“Just as soon as he thinks we’re gettin’ curious he’ll up and leave,” he said, “and that would put us in a bad way. Help is so scarce now I don’t know where I would get an extra man. Seems almost as though the hand of Providence had sent him to us.”