“When will you give me a chance to return your basket?”
“Why, anytime; there's no hurry about the basket. Have you any regular times?”
He looked away, dissembling his joy in the question, and answered as if he were making an official report,—
“I leave camp at six, patrol the line to the ferry and back, lay off an hour, and down again at eleven. Back in camp at three, and two hours for dinner. On again at five, and back in camp at nine. I pass this bridge, for instance, at seven and nine of a morning, twelve and two afternoons, and six and eight in the evening.”
“Six and eight,” Nancy mused, with a slight increase of color. “Well, I can stop some evening after cow-time, I suppose; but it isn't any matter about the basket.”
Six evenings, going and coming, Travis delayed in passing the bridge, on the watch for Nancy; six times he filled the basket with such late field-flowers as he could find, and she never came. On the seventh evening his heart announced her, from as far off as his eyes beheld her. This time she was in white, without her hat, and she wore a blue ribbon in her gold-brown braids,—a blue ribbon in her braids, and a red, red rose in either cheek; and her colors, and the colors of the sky, floated like flowers on the placid water.
“Well, where is the basket, then?” she merrily demanded.
“I left it behind, for luck.”
“For luck? What sort of luck?”
“Six times I brought it, and you were never here; so to-night I just kicked it into the tent and came off without it. It seems to have been about the right thing to do.”