“Yes—fludge. And say, Mr. David—any time you’re passing, look in, won’t you? ’Cause there might be something there would spoil.”
CHAPTER XIX
BEREFT
I HAD not heard from Janet Jones again and I was beginning to think that I might never have another letter from her when a missive came.
Thank you for my cedar chest (she wrote). It reached me safely, but I have been ill in body and mind and unable to write sooner. Oh, the joy my bit of cedar wood is to me. When I look at it, I am transported at once to the heart of the clean woods. And I shut my eyes and vision the tree hosts in their tawny brown, like Khaki-clad soldiers marshalling at the trumpet call of the rushing September winds. What a sparkle and spirited flavor there is in the wine-like air. How the leaves swirl in the paths like gilded cups, and winnow through the air like painted galleons, and rustle and unroll beneath the tread, like cloth of gold. Oh, I love the summer. But the fall with its shining sumptuous days—its melancholy grandeur surpasses it. Only—the birds are gone—are they not? And the dear clever nests—“half-way houses on the road to Heaven”—sway tenantless. While the wood aisles seem hushed and solemn, I know, like vast cathedral spaces after the organ has ceased to reverberate.
I read this letter with delight, and I wrote and thanked Janet Jones as cordially as I knew how for the pleasure it had given me. I began to look forward to her next missive, and I was beginning to experience no small satisfaction from our peculiar, unconventional friendship, when a strange thing happened.
Joey and I were tearing out the straw from his mattress one day, intent on our usual fall house-cleaning, when my fingers closed over a bit of cardboard. I drew it forth, unrolled it, and smoothed it in my hand. It was the small square visiting card that had been attached to the parcel that Haidee had placed in my saddle-bag for Joey, on the day that now seemed so long ago, when I had gone to fell the trees at Hidden Lake and had ridden so ungallantly away.
Joey sprang at me and seized my wrist. “That’s mine! That’s mine!” he shouted. “Give it here, Mr. David—please.”
But I was staring at the writing on the back of the card. “For the boy who goes to Sunday school,” Haidee had written in strong, clear characters. Surely, the hand that had penned that line had more recently penned other lines to me and beneath them signed the name of Janet Jones.
I had a letter in my pocket, and later I compared the writing on the envelope with that on Joey’s card. And I smiled to myself; but wonderingly. Still a doubt assailed me. I grew wary. And fate favored me. When Wanza stopped her cart at the meadow bars en route to Roselake one day, to pick up Joey, I saddled Buttons and rode to the village in their wake. At the post-office I swung out of my saddle.
“Give me your letters, Wanza,” I suggested. “Don’t get down. I’ll post them.”