“Yes,” she said. “That’s my name. Molly Marton. You see,” she added, “father’s dead. He’s been dead two years now. I run the farm with Lightning. He’s my hired man. At least, he calls himself that way. But he’s more than that. He’s a queer old tough. He’s been a cattleman all his life. He’s getting very old, but—he’s good to me. An’—an’ I guess I couldn’t run the farm right without him.”
But Jim was paying no heed to Molly’s eulogy of Lightning. In a moment his mind had leapt back to a time in his life when the name of Marton had meant complete salvation to him.
“I hadn’t a notion,” he muttered. Then, as they galloped silently down an incline towards a wide break in the forest that lay ahead, he bestirred himself under the girl’s scrutiny and laughed. “And you are Molly Marton?” he said. “And your father was George Marton a—a French-Canadian?”
“Then you do know us?” Molly swung her mare wide to avoid a fallen tree-trunk. But Beelzebub took it in his stride, and the girl noted the ease of the man’s seat in the saddle. As they came together again she went on. “Yes. He was my father,” she said, and waited.
Jim shook his head, and the silver whiteness of his bushy hair fascinated the girl.
“It beats everything,” he said. “I’d forgotten George Marton had a daughter. And yet I shouldn’t have,” he added, with an enigmatic smile. “But I only saw your father once. I hadn’t a ghost of an idea his farm was hereabouts.”
“Where did you know him?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking myself—months. It was somewhere around this hill country. But the particular locality?” He laughed and shrugged. “You can search me.”
Molly accepted his reply with all the trust of her unsuspicious nature. She nodded.
“That’s the way of things,” she said. “We meet folks, and pass right on. Don’t we? Then, when they happen into our lives again, we—we—just sit an’ wonder, an’ guess we must be dreaming. Maybe even you didn’t meet him in these hills at all. Maybe it was Hartspool, or—or—Calford. He used to go there.”