“How are you and the shingle-nail?” I asked.
“The nail an' I have gone out of partnership,” he answered. “I don't worry any more about that nail. I used to lie awake nights thinking of it. By-and-by I forgot it, and was all right. I drawed the nail out o' my mind, as ye might say, and have had no more trouble.”
Swipes had gone into deeper water than he knew. From that moment I began to draw the shingle-nails out of my own mind; the opposition of Boggs and Crocket was, after all, a little matter. What kind of man was I in fact?—there was the important thing, not what they thought of me. Death and his angels were ever striving to pull one down. I would not let them halt or baffle me for a moment. I had my belt on the great engine of life, as Pearl had told me, and I knew it would whirl me on.
So from that day I permitted little things to worry me no longer, but gave my strength wholly to greater issues. I forgot the shingle-nails.
The boys had heard of my adventure on the high rope, and now regarded me with a kind of awe, and put many queries. I answered them with a sense of sadness and humility that there was nothing else in my career which they thought it worth while to ask about.
On the whole, I was not sorry to leave the village of Heartsdale. It was greatly changed. The burned area was pretty well covered with new buildings. One man had left a black, dirty, charred ruin flush with the sidewalk in the very centre of the main street, and refused either to remove it or permit it to be removed. He blamed the firemen and the pump and everybody in the village for the loss of his store, and there stood the ruin for a punishment—a black memorial of his blacker scorn.
New faces were on every side. A steam-mill had come, and morning, noon, and night one could hear the peal of its whistle. The first waves of power had reached the little town. Instead of being content with its small farmer-traffic, the town itself had become a producer, and was shipping doors and blinds and sashes, and boats and canoes, and rough and dressed lumber to distant places. A new act was beginning in the great drama of the republic.
When we started for Rushwater there were at least a score of the friends and schoolmates of my sister who went to the station for a last word with us. There was not a prettier miss in the north country than that very sister of mine—save Jo, the incomparable Jo!
The hand-made gentleman met us at the depot in Rushwater, and drove us to our new home with a fine coach and pair.
“What a change!” said my sister, when he had left us for the night. “He has grown positively handsome and is a real gentleman.”