Several days passed during which Miss Grace and Steve had been constantly with the prisoner, then his injured back was sufficiently restored to permit of his being raised in bed to a sitting posture, and Miss Grace felt it was time she tried to win his consent to Steve’s remaining at school. With woman’s intuition she divined the best method of approach. Steve was not there and she told with simple pathos of the boy’s love for his mother. Jim Langly had loved his wife with all the mountain man’s lack of expression, but the natural portrayal of the boy’s affection did not displease him. The old self in fact seemed to pass out with that day of terrible fury and the softer spirit which had taken its place seemed to linger. She went on to tell how the boy’s mother had longed for him to have a chance to learn, and that only a few minutes before her death she had made him promise to go where he could learn.
“It was this,” she ended, “which made Steve leave home and not the man who sent the watch.”
Jim Langly lay silent a long while after hearing this, and then he said:
“I was agin that in her alive, I reckon I won’t be agin her dead.”
After a little he inquired with resentment in his 108 voice, “How come that man whut give him the watch ter be with him here?”
“The boy happened to find the man,” she said, “and the man was good to him when he needed a friend. But we will get Steve to tell us all about it,” she ended brightly, as Steve came just then to the door. And with a glad heart the boy told all his story from the day he left Hollow Hut till his father’s appearance a few days before.
The president of the school then visited Langly, told of the boy’s progress and begged earnestly that he be allowed to stay. Nothing was said as to how the boy’s expenses were to be met, and since Jim Langly knew as little as a child about the cost of such things, he asked no questions. When strong enough at last Langly walked out a free man, the president having withdrawn all charges against him, and after looking about the buildings with strange interest he started back to Hollow Hut, with no good-bye for his boy after the manner of the mountains, but with an understanding that when school closed Steve should return to his old home for the summer.
It was some two months later when Mr. Polk carried out this promise which had been made the father, by taking the boy back to the woods where they had first met. He expected to camp there 109 for a few days’ fishing, and to arrange for Steve’s safe return to the school in the fall, as happy plans of his own for the autumn would probably prevent his coming in person.
When Steve left Mr. Polk he swung off down the well-remembered mountainside with strange joy in his heart. He had felt a new kinship for his father growing upon him since he could remain at school in the freedom of parental consent, and shy thought had come of reading aloud sometimes in the old Hollow Hut cabin from the pile of books under his arms while his father smoked and listened, as he had in the beautiful days when Miss Grace had tended him.
But a few hours later he came slowly back up the same path with a stricken look on his face.