“Umph, I don’t know, but I guess if we do peg out, it’ll be some considerable time before they can read the store account over us. Have you got any paper about you?”
“Not a scrap. We can leave a message on the salt though.”
“It’ll be blown away before to-morrow. Who do you want to write to? Your mother? That girl?”
Helm turned his face away. The man had no right to pry into his private concerns.
“Write to your mother, lad, write to your mother by all means. Mothers are made of different clay to other women; but don’t you bother about the other. Women are all alike, take my word for it. It’s out of sight out of mind with all of them. But write to your mother.”
“Some one may pass this way,” pondered the younger man, hardly heeding his words. “It’s just worth trying,” and he lay silent while Anderson talked on or rather thought aloud.
“It’s of the boy I’m thinking,” he said. “The poor helpless little one. He never throve since his mother died. She didn’t go much on me, but the boy was everything to her though he was a cripple. Well—well—if I were only certain he was dead now it wouldn’t be half so hard. He’d be better dead, I know, but I couldn’t think it before; he was all I had, and the last time I saw him he put up his little hand—such a mite of a hand—and clutched his daddy’s beard. He was all I had, how could I wish him dead? But now—now—my God!—if I were certain he was dead and it hadn’t hurt much.”
Helm sprang to his feet, and swore an oath.
“We’re not going to die,” he cried, “not as easily as all that. Come on, we have wasted enough precious time.
“Not till it’s a little cooler. It’s no good, I tell you, wearing ourselves out in the heat.”