Again his mind ran to Smith’s face as he had seen it 350 last. He put on his hat and started to take his long raincoat off the hook behind the rear door.
“Reckon I’d better take it. It looks like storming,” he muttered. “Hello! What the devil!”
For Rosie Gimpke, with blazing cheeks and hair dripping with perspiration, was hidden behind the coat.
“Oh, Mr. Champers, go queek and find Yon Yacob, but don’t go the creek roat. I coom slippin’ to tell you to go sure, and I hit when that strange man coom slippin’ in. I hear all you say, an’ I see him troo der crack here, an’ he stant out there a long time looking back in here. So I half to wait an’ you go nappin’ an’ I still wait. I wait to say, hurry, but don’t go oop nor down der creek trail. I do anything for Miss Shirley, an’ I like you for takin’ care off her goot name; goot names iss hardt to get back if dey gets avay. Hurry.”
“Heaven bless your good soul!” Champers said heartily. “But why not take the cool road? I’ve overslept and I’ve got to hurry and the storm’s hustling in.”
“Don’t, please don’t take it,” Rosie begged.
The next minute she was gone and as Champers closed and locked his doors he said to himself, “She does her work like a hero and never will have any credit for it, ’cause she’s not a pioneer nor a soldier. But she has saved more than one poor fellow snared into that joint I winked at for years.”
Then, obedient to her urging, he followed the longer, hotter road toward the Jacobs’ stock ranch bordering on Little Wolf Creek.
Meantime, John Jacobs inspected his property, forgetful of the intense heat and the coming storm, his mind full of 351 a strange foreboding. At the top of the hill above where the road wound down through deep shadows he sat a long while on his horse. “I wonder what makes me so lonely this evening,” he mused. “I’m not of a lonely nature, nor morose, thank the Lord! There’s no telling why we do or don’t want to do things. I wonder where Champers is. He ought to be coming up pretty soon. I wonder if I hadn’t had that dream two nights ago about that picture I saw in a book, when I was a little chap, if I’d had this fool’s cowardice about being out here alone today. And what was it that made me look over all those papers in my vault box last night? I have helped Careyville some, and the library I built will have a good endowment when I’m gone, and so will the children’s park, and the Temperance Societies. Maybe I’ve not lived in vain, if I have been an exacting Jew. I never asked for the blood in my pound of flesh, anyhow. I wonder where Champers can be.”
He listened intently and thought he heard someone coming around the bend down the darkening way.