“The Lord is good,” she replied. “Now, Captain, take me home, for I am afraid yet.”
As we left the wondering crowd behind, I heard one say to another:
“’Twas a mighty lift, and none like it was ever before seen in the Colony.”
Also I heard Cory remark, though not without respect:
“Our sturdy Captain, who lifts great rocks easily, can be held by light chains, it seems. Even a maid’s word.”
And I felt that he spoke the truth, for I knew that I loved Lucille, as I had never loved before.
CHAPTER VI.
LUCILLE.
I count it not strange, nor to my discredit, that I had, and so soon and easily perhaps, fallen prisoner to Lucille. It was small time I had ever had for love, because my past life had been spent in strife of one kind or another. I was at great pains, sometimes, to escape death, and my thoughts, in recent years, had been in the way of how to strike the hardest blow, and how to take the lightest.
So, it need not be wondered at that, when I had looked a few times into Lucille’s eyes, I did what any other soldier, or man, would have done. I came to love her. It had grown on me, like the buds on the trees, or the flowers on the vines. Yet I had spoken no words of love to her.
Our conversation, when we met, was on topics far removed from the feelings that swayed me. The weather, a reference to the affairs of the Colony, to the war soon to begin, of the Indians, of that day in the woods when I cast the knife, and of that well-nigh fatal heaving of the rock.