He knew, in fact, a great deal more about many things than he had known that night. And he was a vastly different man. He was still thin, but it was not the pale thinness of before. He was lean and brown, his frame was filling slowly but evenly, and his one care was the procuring of food. For he had the perpetual hunger of the gaunt young animal whose growing cells are ever demanding more and more building materials.
His step had none of the nervous hurry of those who tread city streets. In his rough tramping boots he swung down through brush and over rocks with a long, sure, loping stride which showed that he had forgotten that he had such things as nerves, and though he was physically tired his face shone with the zest of a boy in the game and of the hunter hurrying to his mate with the kill.
As he came down behind the long sugar house he heard Augusta singing. She sang a wonderfully sweet natural contralto, but Jimmie had learned that she hardly ever sang except when she felt lonely—and he knew that there must be times when she was indeed very lonesome, for this was a life which might well have tested the constant cheerfulness of a staid woman, while Augusta was indeed, in many things, only a highly sensitive and impressionable child. He started to hurry, thinking of the many long hours he left her alone in this lonesome place. But the song arrested him—he had not heard it before—and he loitered a little, not wishing to break in until he had heard it through.
She was singing:
"Gyp, Gyp, me little horse?"
"Gyp-Gyp, again sir."
"How many miles to Dublin?"
"Four score an' ten, sir."
"Gyp, Gyp, me little horse?"
"Gyp-Gyp, again sir."
"Can I get there by candle-light?"
"Troth an' back again, sir."
"Gallopy, gallopy, gallopy
"Trot!
"I sold my buttermilk every drop.
"Ev-er-y drop."
It was a happy lilting little song that trotted merrily up and down an easy range of sweet and saucy notes, and Jimmie could see "Me Little Horse" dancing blithely along in front of a cart and answering back his part of the dialogue. From the song he knew that Augusta was not singing this time because she was lonely. She was happy. And it followed, therefore, that she was busy at something that her heart was proud of. Jimmie wondered if she had, perhaps, found some new and wonderfully neater way of turning a patch on his clothes. This he had found was one of Augusta's most thrilling and soul satisfying achievements. But there was another sound that came hammering into the song as he came nearer. It was a jerky, clicking, amateurish sort of noise, but it was unmistakable. Jimmie's head went up and one ear turned up into the air, listening with unbelief. But there came the stroke of the little bell near the end of the line, and he plainly heard the sound of the carriage being shifted.
"By the Poker of Moses!" said Jimmie to himself. "She's found a typewriter growing under a toadstool somewhere, and she's at it. It won't surprise me if she's got a couple of books written by now. I knew she'd get loose sometime."
Sure enough, as he came softly around the corner of the camp house in which they were living, there sat Augusta in front of John McQuade's table, and, strangest of all, she was working on Jimmie's own old machine! The sight of that battered old machine brought Wardwell up stock still with a lump in his throat, for he went back on the instant to a black night, now long ago, when he had laid down such things as work and ambition and courage, and thought that he was done with them forever.