“With that she raised her hand an’ pinted th’oo the woods, over the flats to the solid wall o’ fire.
“Then I laughed. An’ I hed the right to laugh, fer ez I looked at them flames dartin’ among the trees it seemed like they was the best friends I ever had.
“‘It’s mean to cheat sech good fellers out o’ sech a nice clearin’,’ I sais to meself ez I run along the wood road puttin’ the torch to the dry leaves. ‘It’s mean, but I can’t spend the rest o’ me life settin’ on the pump-trough watchin’ the moon.’
“An’ cheat ’em I did. The leaves an’ the under-brush cot like powder, an’ the counter-fire went runnin’ over the flats towards the mo’ntain to tell the ole fire snakes that it wasn’t no uset to try to git to the clearin’ fer they was no path to it ’cept over ashes.
“We stood there in the wood-road watchin’ it—Pet on one side, then Major, then me. Fer a long time we sayd nawthin’, tell I couldn’t stand it no more.
“‘Pet,’ sais I, wery abrupt, ‘do you think now I’m so awful slow?’
“‘It ain’t them ez runs fastest allus goes the straightest an’ truest,’ she answers.
“It wasn’t wery much to say. Any girl might ’a’ done jest the same thing. But from the way she looked, I knowd I’d got my Missus.”