“Brown! Pearl Brown!” Trigger Smith exclaimed in a voice of amazement.
“Wrong, Smith. You’re wrong,” she said, catching his hand and looking up at him with a warmth that never before had he seen in her eyes, a warmth that told that she was still young, still had recesses in her heart that were unhardened, was still a woman well worth while.
He couldn’t get it all. Surely she was Brown—Pearl Brown who owned the Alamo up there in Murdock and yet—Pearl Brown hadn’t ever looked like this. His gaze swept over her head to that young fellow with the red head, that fellow Ring, and that fellow had a grin as wide as all outdoors and was trying to make signs with bandaged arms and, putting his feet on the floor in the first efforts to rise, come forward and greet him. Her voice came as a positive interruption.
“I am Mrs. Ring—Mrs. Horace Ring, now,” she said. “We were married four days ago. And the name Brown was all right, too, because that fellow I married after my uncle, Father Wyatt, who you knew, died, was named Brown. I’ve sold the Alamo. I’m through with it and everything like it. I’ve reformed. You see, I had to. It couldn’t be helped. I had to take care of Ring. He needed somebody to put some sense in his head. It couldn’t be pounded there. You know that, because you’re really his friend.
“I had to take on the job and—we’re happy. Very happy. He’ll tell you so now, Trigger Smith, and if it rests with me, he’ll still tell you so when you are dying. I don’t know what you’ll think about it. But I care. So does he—Ring. The trouble with a lot of us in this world is that we don’t understand what makes others do certain things, the necessities that have driven, that have made us do this or that, that have kept us from doing perhaps better. But I think there’s three of us who understand one another now—my husband, you, and I. Can we hope for that?”
“I lose a hundred because I bet old John Fosdike that you were a Cathcart,” said Smith, “and I can’t see why I never thought about Father Wyatt having a niece; but—as for a few understanding—yes—they can. We do.”
And he had to disengage himself to take hold of Ring, The Reformer, who had succeeded in struggling from his chair and was coming toward them totteringly, with hands that, though bandaged from battling were still clean and unafraid.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the October 20, 1926 issue of The Popular Magazine.