Old Jerry couldn’t quite fathom the whole meaning of those last words of hers. They surprised him so that all the things he had meant to tell her right then of Young Denny’s departure once more went totally out of mind. He wondered if it was the red-headlined account of his first battle that she had seen. No matter how doubtful it was he felt it was very, very possible, for at each day’s end he had been leaving Denny’s roll of papers there just as he had when the boy was at home.
But the rest of it he understood in spite of the wonder of it all. Whenever he remembered Young Denny asprawl upon the floor it seemed to him a thing too marvelous for belief, and yet, recalling the light that had glowed radiant in that girl’s eyes, he knew it was the only thing left to believe.
He talked it over with himself that night on the way home.
“She bought it so’s if he ever did want to come back, he’d feel as if he had come back home,” he 267 repeated her words, and he pondered long upon them. There was only one possible deduction.
“She thought he wouldn’t have nothing left to buy it back when he did come––that he’d be started on the road all the rest of ’em traveled and pretty well––shot––to––pieces! That’s what she thought,” he decided.
He shook his head over it.
“And she didn’t know,” he marveled. “She didn’t know how that old jug really got broke––because I ain’t told her yet! But she’s waitin’ for him just the same––just a-waitin’ for him, no matter how he comes. Figurin’ on takin’ care of him, too––that’s what she was doin’––her that ain’t no bigger’n his little finger!”
The storm had blown over long before his buggy went rattling down that long hill, and he sat with the reins dangling neglected between his knees and squinted up at the stars.
“I always did consider I’d been pretty lucky,” he confided after a time to the plump mare’s lazily flopping ears, “never gettin’ mixed up in any matrimonial tangle, so to speak. But now––now I ain’t quite so sure.” A lonesome note crept into the querulous voice. “Maybe I’d hev kept my eyes open a little mite wider’n I did if I’d ever a-dreamed anybody could care like that.... Don’t happen very often though, I reckon. Just about once in a lifetime, 268 maybe. Maybe, if he ain’t too blind to see it when it does come ... maybe once to every man!”