“Knowledge will save ’em from mistakes,” says Jake.
And then Miss Carey she speaks at last. “Thank you,” she says.
“Is this potlatch?” inquires Edmund, jokin’.
“Kultus potlatch!” says both of ’em together.
Would y’u think it?—after that day I never heard ’em scrappin’ together again. Maybe they did sometimes, but not in my hearin’. Their experience seemed to have changed ’em somehow. In the store I’d catch ’em lookin’ at each other. Their eyes was gentle. I think—yes, I think they knowed that it was coming, that good-by was on its way to them. The school-house was built in the spring; and after the school got into it, now and again Jake and Baldy would sneak up to the door, look in and take a back seat. And one of ’em would say he’d like to ask the kids a question: Where was Washington, D.C.? And when the answer came, Jake and Baldy they’d laugh like they’d split and sneak out again. One day in the store we heard the knockin’ sound of a boat bein’ rowed over the river, and Baldy came into the store alone. He walks to Edmund, but he looks down on the floor.
“Jake’s sick,” says he. “Jake’s sick.” Oh, he knowed what it meant.
There was no doctor in the valley, but what could a doctor do? In about three days we had Baldy sick, too. The tie between ’em was the tie of life, and Jake died of a Saturday and Baldy died Monday.
“They must be buried by the school-house,” says Miss Carey. And everybody went. And then up comes the question what to put on the headboard? It brought up something none of us had thought of.
“Why, we don’t even know their names!” says Miss Carey, very soft.
We didn’t know anything. They had come into the valley, they had made the valley laugh, they were gone. That was all. Not a fact or a birthplace or anythin’ to put over them that would tell who they had been. But Miss Carey wasn’t goin’ to let it be like that. She took it in charge and she got it right. She found a bit of poetry and she had the board painted, and it was this way: “Jake and Baldy. Our Friends. Their heart was free from malice, and all their anger was excess of love.”