“This winter,” he said quietly, “you will be with me.”
There was something in the brief sentence that made her heart turn over; it was the authority, the conviction; it was all that the small group of words meant, all that it stood for. This winter she would be with him. East or west, going to symphonies and settlements and seeing new plays, or riding the range and bringing in the cattle; it didn’t in the least matter where they would be or what they would be doing: this winter—and all the winters in the world and all the summers—she would be with him.
So they came at length to the doctor’s camp, riding in single file, the Ranger, and the girl, and the Scout, “tied on his faithful horse,” and the shabby, tired, little dog trotting behind, and the gay, kindly people came out to meet them with sober faces and with tears.... “Betcher all the squaws cried like anything”—he had said, dramatizing the last hour of his life, and it was indeed “much more exciting than just hearses and hacks.”
At last he was filling the stage, Elmer Bunty, of whom the Scout Master had said that a really determined daddy longlegs could put him to flight—Elmer Bunty, the ’Fraid-Cat; Elmer Bunty, who had fought the good fight; the good scout. All the prosperous, poised people stood about him sorry and grave, to do him homage.
Ginger forgot her grief and her gladness for an instant when she saw her Aunt Fan coming toward her. She was limping painfully still and her short chugging steps were unsteady, and there was no sea-shell tint on her round face, and her eyes were red with weeping. “Oh, Aunt Fan,” she said remorsefully, “I’m sorry you worried so! I thought you’d know I was going to find Dean, and that you wouldn’t——”
“I haven’t been crying about you,” said Mrs. Featherstone, with asperity. “I worried, of course, but I knew you could take care of yourself, and I had other things to think about. It’s—” she gulped back a sob—“it’s Jim!”
“Aunt Fan—I’m sorry! What is it? What has happened?”
“It hasn’t happened yet; it’s going to happen, just as soon as I get there.” She pulled out one of her flippant, little sport handkerchiefs of pink linen embroidered in blue and dabbed at her eyes. “I had a telegram, a night letter, telephoned down to Pfeiffer’s. He’s sick—terribly sick, and the doctor wants to operate, and there’s a chance—a big chance—that he won’t—come through.” Her chin quivered uncontrollably. “His heart—his heart—” She had to stop.
They stood looking at her and listening to her in deep-eyed sympathy, the Ranger and the girl. Ginger took one of her hands and kept patting it softly.