“Well, I suppose she’s got to learn soon or late whom to meet and whom to let alone here,” he said at last, in a troubled way, “and she might as well learn now as later. Yet I wish Max had not been in such a hurry. And he promised to take good care of her on the river, did he?” he added, after another pause. “Well, he’s a good fellow; but I reckon she can guide him in most things up here.”
“No, indeed,” answered Mrs. Huzzard, with promptness, “I heard her say myself that she had never been along this part of the Kootenai River before.”
“Maybe not,” he agreed. “I’m not speaking of this immediate locality. I mean that she has good general ideas about finding ways, and trails, and means. She’s got ideas of outdoor life that girls don’t often have, I 81 reckon. And if she can only look after herself as well in a camp as she can on a trail, I’ll be satisfied.”
Mrs. Huzzard looked at him as he stared moodily out of the window.
“I see how it is,” she said, nodding her head in a kindly way. “Since she’s here, you’re afraid some of the folks is most too rough to teach her much good. Well, well, don’t you worry. We’ll do the best we can, and that dead partner o’ yours—her father, you know—will know you do your best; and no man can do more. I had a notion about her associates when I let her go out on the river this morning. ‘Just go along,’ thought I, ‘if you get into the way of making company out of real gentlemen, you’ll not be so like to be satisfied with them as ain’t—”
“Good enough,” Dan assented, cheerily. “You have been doing a little thinking on your own account, Mrs. Huzzard? That’s all right, then. I’ll know that you are a conscientious care-taker, no matter how far out on a trail I am. There’s another thing I wanted to say; it’s this: Just you let her think that the help she gives you around the house more than pays for her keeping, will you?”
“Why, of course I will; and I’m willing enough to take her company in change for boarding, if that’s all. You know I didn’t want to take the money when you did pay it.”
“I know; that’s all right. I want you to have the money, only don’t let her know she is any bill of expense to me. Understand! You see, she said something about it yesterday—thought she was a trouble to me, or some such stuff. It seemed to bother her. When she gets older, we can talk to her square about such things. But 82 now, till she gets more used to the thought of being with us, we’ll have to do some pious cheating in the matter. I’ll take the responsibilities of the lies, if we have to tell any. It—it seems the only way out, you see.”
He spoke a little clumsily, as though uttering a speech prepared beforehand and by one not used to memorizing, and he did not look at Mrs. Huzzard as he talked to her.
But she looked at him and then let her hand fall kindly on his shoulder. She had not read romances for nothing. All at once she fancied she had found a romance in the life of Dan Overton.