He took the two little boys, Steve and Champ, with their dog, every day up to the old haunt by Tige’s rock, where he camped every night. He had brought picture books with him, illustrated alphabets and one-syllable stories with the thought of possible need for them. And the brown eyes of the two little fellows, so like his own in the old days, as he well knew, in their blankness and wonder, gave eager response to new things. He called the spot “our school,” and the two little pupils soon learned their letters, while in a month’s time little Steve was reading simple stories telling that “The dog is on the mat,” and “The cat is on the rug” with great exhilaration, and spelling out laboriously more complex things.
But Champ Brady was restless under the visit. He told Mirandy frequently that he had no use for a fellow who hadn’t enough stuff in him to drink good liquor when it was put before him; and Steve, knowing well his state of mind without hearing any expression of it, went sadly away from the cabin at Hollow Hut for the third time.
After a last earnest talk with Mirandy, he took the little boys to the old spot where they had kept school and he had camped for the month and put into the hands of Steve the second a German silver watch which he had also brought with the thought of a boy in the old home again as a possibility.
“This little shining ticker will tell you each day that you are going to make big, strong men who know things one of these days. You will listen to it always, will you not?” he said, and each in turn, as he was held up in the tender arms, promised earnestly with queer aching in their little throats. Then Steve set them down and rode away, looking back again and again with a waving hand at the two sober little figures as long as they were in sight.
“Oh, God of the wilderness,” he cried, when at last he saw them no more, “Thou didst come and comfort me when I wandered here alone; oh, now give me assurance that Thou wilt watch over these two of my own blood and bring them into the light.”
The prayer went up in despair akin to that of his boyhood’s desolation and again, after a time, a sense of comfort and peace flooded his soul, while, in its full tide, a fresh resolve was fixed upon him:
“I will give my life to the work. Not money alone, please God, if I should make it, but my daily breath and life and vigour shall go for the uplift of my people of the mountains!”
And he smiled to think that literature should ever have appealed to him, for a sense of linking himself to the Almighty God to whom he had prayed had come to him in the holy stillness of the wilderness, making anything else seem trivial beyond compare.