July in Kentucky brings a swift maturity. Already ears of corn were full ripe in their sheaths and the other grain bowed by its own abundance. Yet Ambrose took little of his accustomed interest in the landscape. Rapidly he walked in spite of the heat and as rapidly evolved and set aside his plans for aiding Miner and Miss Dunham. He knew his own people; the girl had been sent into Pennyroyal by the Freedmen's Bureau, a product of the Civil War hated by most Southerners; and while Pennyroyal might not mean to be cruel, her pride and clannishness had no parallel outside of early Scottish history. And, in spite of Kentucky's far-famed hospitality, truly there is no other place in the world where an outsider may be made to feel so outside.
Finally when he had come to the edge of the clearing and could see the log school-house ahead, Ambrose was weary, and so sat down on the stump of a tree. He should have preferred to go boldly to Miss Dunham's door and ask that she talk with him, but while his courage had carried him thus far, the recollection of his first visit to her halted him at this spot. Surely the girl would some time come to her door or else be taking a walk through the woods, for the papaw grove of small slender trees was thickly shaded, cool and still, many of the birds that earlier inhabited it having flown farther north, while for those which remained behind it was a season of home responsibilities.
How long Ambrose waited and watched he did not know, since time is of so little importance to a lonely man, and, moreover, he possessed a long and beautiful patience with men and things, even with that Providence whose ways are past finding out. Only once did anything happen to encourage him, and then some one did come out of the school-house door to look toward the setting sun, but she proved to be the coloured woman who was Miss Dunham's sole guardian and caretaker. Still Ambrose managed to keep cheerful, when unexpectedly and without warning a dreadful change came over him. His head sank upon his chest, his delicate nose quivered, and boyish tears sprang up in his eyes. And this change was brought about in the oddest fashion. Ambrose had been idly carving his own initials in the stump of the tree where he sat, when all of a sudden it was borne in upon him that this was the first time in his life that he had ever carved his own initials without some girl's to entwine with them. And this brought such a longing for Sarah that Ambrose straightway forgot both Miner and Miner's cause, remembering only his own loss and the single plate and cup and saucer that must be waiting for him on his supper table at home.
"Lord," Ambrose whispered, "I'm all in." Then leaping up from his seat he started running, running away from the thought of himself. He must have appeared rather like an animated scarecrow with his straw-coloured hair, his long arms flopping and his legs covering such stretches of ground that his coat-tails stood out straight behind, for in deference to a possible meeting with a young woman Ambrose was wearing the swallow tail and carrying the stove-pipe hat of his wedding journey.
He stopped, however, when the mouth of an old war pistol was suddenly placed in front of his left shoulder.
"Please don't move," its owner said tremulously.
"He stopped when the mouth of an old war pistol was suddenly placed in front of his shoulder"
And Ambrose's lips twitched as he answered politely, "I ain't a-goin' to," and then he kept absolutely still, noticing that the arm that held the pistol was trembling nervously and that the girl at the end of the arm wore a yellow sunbonnet and a primrose covered dress, and that the face within the sunbonnet was possibly a shade paler and more startled than his own.