Their team was soon ready and after another long, pleasant drive Steve was watching the departing train from the little station platform. He felt keen regret as it bore his friends out of sight, but he turned to his team for the homeward drive with a strange exhilaration in his heart. He had hardly been able to wait for that communion with himself, 158 and when the opportunity came there was no uncertainty in its tenor.
“Of course I love Nancy Follet! I have loved her ever since I first set eyes upon her sweet little face,––and it has come before me always in any stress of mind or heart as though to tell me she was always to have part in my life. And yet I have been so dull I did not understand. She preëmpted my heart from the first and that is why I did not love beautiful Nita Trowbridge,––why I have never been able to look at any girl with a spark of interest since.” How he loved to linger over the revelation which had come to him! It was like having emerged from a desert into a land flowing with milk and honey. Little Nancy! She had been so gentle, so confiding, so eager to help him with things,––she would be his dear helper in the work of his life,––and the work would thereby be glorified beyond measure! Under the spell of his tender musing the forty miles again sped by unheeded and he was back once more at the schoolroom door.
It was well that his tasks for the year were well-nigh over, for he at once became consumed with the desire to see Nancy in the maturity of her girlhood. He promptly decided that he would go as soon as school closed and win her promise before he went on that prospecting tour. In the meantime his mind 159 continued to hover over the hours they had spent together as boy and girl. He went to mill once more walking beside a little fairy figure on old Dobbin’s back,––he caught the fragrance of shy flowers which nestled in cool woodland depths, and memory let softly down the bars into a holy of holies as the little girl said again in her sweet innocence, “Steve, let’s build us a house in this wood and live here always.” He mounted the rugged steeps of Greely’s Ridge, her strong protector, while she reached down once more a timid little hand to hold his tightly,––and suddenly he was startled with remembrance of the character of that ridge. It must have held minerals! Coal, yes, coal,––he was sure of it! There was the piece of land he had been wanting to find!
And so with buoyant, twofold hope he started as soon as school was out towards the Follet home, having deposited in the bank a sum which he felt would be sufficient to purchase the Greely Ridge, should he find it as valuable as he suspected and no one had preceded him in its discovery.
XIII
OLD TIES RENEWED
It was mid-afternoon of a late June day when Steve stopped at Mr. Follet’s store. He wondered if his old friend would be there. Yes, the door was open, and for a moment Steve stood on the platform in front, his tall figure erect, his head bared as he looked reverently towards the little home which had opened the world of books to him. Then Mr. Follet’s high voice rang out from the dark depths where dry-goods and groceries rioted in hopeless confusion as of old.
“Hello, stranger, what’s the time o’ day?”