Miss Mittie stopped her measuring, since he was satisfied to take the ribbon as it was, and put the slip into his hand with a smile that said, “Now I’ll be ready to go with you to our entertainment.”
They made up the amount with difficulty,—it took every cent Roddy had and most of the spare cash in the party,—and when he had given it to her, he leaned over the counter, almost to kissing distance, and said:
“Little girl, y’ can buy me fer a nickel.”
She drew a shabby purse and took out of it a shabby nickel.
“It’s all I have,” she told him, soberly, offering it.
All she had, and she was giving it to him in earnest! In one swift flash it came to him why she hadn’t seen through the mean joke they were playing on her: she had trusted him too much; or, as he more picturesquely put it, “She knowed I was too much of a gentleman to do a girl dirt.” Her lack of comprehension of the true inwardness of the whole affair was precisely her measure of the high estimate she placed on his chivalry; she saw him as his own deepest ideals painted him, and he knew she saw him thus; and in the shine of the heavenly revelation he saw her as lovely calm womanhood confiding in his nobility. Something broke loose in him; his better nature, his affection, his generosity, his instinct for fair play, rose to its occasion, and in one instant he ceased to be a lawless young rapscallion—his heart truly and in the scriptural sense turned from its wickedness and the error of its ways.
“Little girl, if I take this here nickel offen ye, it’s a bargain between us,” he told her, dizzily. “You an’ me’ll belong to each other fer keeps. I mean it, honest.”
She hesitated, blushing from throat to forehead under the gaping stare of the other young fellows; then she said bravely, “I mean it honest, too,” and laid the nickel in his hand.
I fear I’ve told this so jocosely I’ve belittled their miracle, which was very real. I met her on the street in Laramie last summer, five years after the episode, and speaking of her marriage she confided to me that she and Roddy had been “made for each other.”
