In the meantime it was difficult for Ambrose to attend properly to business, for never before had his partner left the store during working hours save for his meals and to attend the wedding of his sisters, two of whom had happily passed from his home to homes of their own. However, no words on the subject were exchanged when Miner curtly explained that Miss Dunham had too many bundles for a lady to carry.
It was after this extraordinary occurrence at their shop that Miner left Ambrose and Moses alone for three evenings in succession, the tall man sitting in his chair in the backyard under a ripening apple tree, with Moses at his side and his friend's empty chair near by. But although Ambrose drooped every now and then, he always smiled resolutely afterward. "It'll plumb be the salvation of Miner."
On the fourth night, however, Ambrose, having gone early to bed and fallen into a light sleep, was awakened by a knock at his kitchen door, and on coming downstairs again found his friend outside. "It ain't no hour to be in bed yet," Miner snapped. Knowing the little man had something unusual on his mind his friend led him to their accustomed refuge.
Ambrose and Miner were curiously incongruous figures that night in the garden, for the one man wore an oriental silk dressing-gown over a pair of hastily put on blue jean trousers; the gown, a scheme of deep rich colours and designs, having drifted into the shop one day by accident, had been seized upon by Ambrose to gratify a subconscious craving. It was tied about his waist with a red cord, and as he lolled back in his chair his eyes would travel from their study of his companion's face up toward the stars which he could see shining through the spaces between the leaves of his apple tree.
Miner kept his eyes always upon the ground; he had a chew of tobacco in his mouth, his lips worked spasmodically, but he did not speak, neither did be spit as a vent to his feelings, a tight, small man, buttoned up both inside and out! By and by, however, when nearly an hour had passed in silence, he rose to his feet.
"Reckon I'd better be goin', Ambrose; it's gettin' late. Good night."
But the tall man pushed him back again into his chair. "Lord, Miner, is it so hard for you to tell things, even to me?" he inquired. "Out with it!"
"Don't you go and be puttin' foolish ideas on to me if I tell you," Miner pleaded, "but it's just this: The women have made up their minds to put Miss Em'ly Dunham out of Pennyrile. Course we men tried and failed, so we give up, but when a woman starts out to do a thing, why she does it. Can't you think of no plan to make 'em stop, Ambrose, bein's as you've always had a kind of way with women?"
Ambrose shook his head, his homely face lined with sympathy. Poor Miner was unconscious of his own change of attitude toward the interloper, but surely he must not be turned back from the land of romance within whose gracious habitations Ambrose himself could never again hope to dwell.
"I don't see just what I kin do with the women," he was obliged to confess after a moment of hard thinking, "still ef we keep studyin' and studyin' no doubt we kin find a way."