“I don’t worry about this end,” he said, at parting, “and you needn’t worry about mine. Don’t be afraid of going hungry. There’s nothin’ like full stomachs to make axes and saws run well. It will have to be hand-to-mouth till snow flies, then I’ll slip you in stores enough to fill that wangan to the roof. Good heart, my boy! We’re goin’ to make some money.”
Wade followed him to the edge of the clearing with his first sense of loneliness tugging within him.
“Safe home to you, Mr. Ide,” he said, “and my respectful regards to Miss Nina, if you will take them. I suppose—she will—probably—the girl she took away—” he stammered.
“By thunder mighty!” cried the Castonia magnate, whirling on him, “I’d forgotten all about that Skeet girl, or Arden girl, or whatever they call her.”
He eyed the young man with a dawning of his old curiosity, but Wade met his gaze frankly.
“The affair of the girl is not mine at all,” he said. “Simply because she seemed superior to the tribe she was with, I hoped Mr. Barrett would do as he partly promised—use a few dollars of his money to help her from the muck. Such cases appeal to me, because I’m not accustomed to seeing them, perhaps.”
“If my girl is interested in that poor little wildcat, you needn’t think twice about her bein’ taken good care of,” cried the admiring father.
And gazing into the wholesome eyes and candid face of the little man, Wade reflected that perhaps Fate had handled a problem better for John Barrett’s abandoned daughter than he himself, in his resentful zeal, had planned.
He shook Ide’s hand hard, and, with the picture of John Barrett’s other daughter in his dimming eyes and the love of John Barrett’s other daughter burning in his lonely heart, he turned back towards the woods, whose fronded arms, tossing in the October wind, beckoned him to his duty.