"Then I spent some sleepless nights, Frank, old boy. I was glad you had come, and even in my gladness for that sometimes I wished you—We humans are such queer mixtures; beyond analysis. But the more I admitted these things to myself the more I had also to admit that something might be said for Alice. Alice had once been to me all that it now seemed that Jean might be. I wondered if, by some miracle, that might not come again. Wasn't the obstacle, all the obstacle, the only obstacle, right in my own mind? What if I should root it out? What if I should say, 'I'm too big a man to submit to this; I refuse to be tyrannized by a little jealous demon in one corner of my mind?' . . .
"I began to think that perhaps after all Alice's purpose in following me here was quite different from what I had suspected. Women are strange creatures. They keep you guessing, as you say in this country."
"Better that than boredom," I heard my own voice saying.
"Shake!" said Spoof, springing suddenly to his feet and seizing me by the hand. "Shake! By Jove, I didn't know it was in you. If I were a moralist, setting light houses on the reefs about the sea of matrimony, I would set the biggest, blazingest light on Boredom. But nobody set a light on it for me . . .
"Besides, I wanted tremendously to see the boy.
"So yesterday I hitched the oxen and broke trail over to 'Widow Alton's.' My afflictions had brought me to a sufficiently humble frame of mind to let Alice say her say. For awhile she couldn't say anything; just wept, you know, and cried my name over and over, and sometimes Gerald's. Mighty uncomfortable for a man standing around and feeling that in some way he's to blame for it all.
"Well, when we got down to facts she had come in the hope of raising money by means of homesteading so that she could educate the boy. Fancy that, and me associating her with blackmail! But when she found, through old Jake, that I had located here, she wasn't above following. And yet she was afraid of me; afraid she'd meet me somewhere; afraid I'd come over to her homestead; and all the time hoping I would! Women are strange creatures.
"Well, we talked it all over, and"—and for the first time in his narrative Spoof's face lighted with a gentle smile—"I didn't go back to Two last night at all. We're planning a sort of quinquennial honeymoon progress about the district, and, properly enough, our first call is at Fourteen. And now that that's off my chest, behold a man happy once more. I am amazed at the folly that denied me all these years—— Men, too, are strange creatures.
"There's just one thing—a very insignificant thing compared with Alice's happiness, and mine, and Gerald's, but it's this: In taking up her homestead she had to declare herself a widow. She did it for the boy's sake, and she knows she will have to give up the claim, but will she get into further trouble? Will they let it go at that?"
That was a poser, and I turned it over in my mind for some minutes. "Better see Jake about that," I suggested. "He'll find a way."