Openings in the Old Trail | Page 5

lingering in that stimulating atmosphere of sugar, cheese, and coffee. But to-day his stay was brief, so transitory that the postmaster himself inferred audibly that "old man Boone must have been tanning Lee with a hickory switch." But the simple reason was that Leonidas wished to go back to the stockade fence and the fair stranger, if haply she was still there. His heart sank as, breathless with unwonted haste, he reached the clearing and the empty buckeye shade. He walked slowly and with sad diffidence by the deserted stockade fence. But presently his quick eye discerned a glint of white among the laurels near the house. It was SHE, walking with apparent indifference away from him towards the corner of the clearing and the road. But this he knew would bring her to the end of the stockade fence, where he must pass--and it did. She turned to him with a bright smile of affected surprise. "Why, you're as swift-footed as Mercury!"
Leonidas understood her perfectly. Mercury was the other name for quicksilver--and that was lively, you bet! He had often spilt some on the floor to see it move. She must be awfully cute to have noticed it too--cuter than his sisters. He was quite breathless with pleasure.
"I put your letter in the box all right," he burst out at last.
"Without any one seeing it?" she asked.
"Sure pop! nary one! The postmaster stuck out his hand to grab it, but I just let on that I didn't see him, and shoved it in myself."
"You're as sharp as you're good," she said smilingly. "Now, there's just ONE thing more I want you to do. Forget all about this--won't you?"
Her voice was very caressing. Perhaps that was why he said boldly: "Yes, ma'am, all except YOU."
"Dear me, what a compliment! How old are you?"
"Goin' on fifteen," said Leonidas confidently.
"And going very fast," said the lady mischievously. "Well, then, you needn't forget ME. On the contrary," she added, after looking at him curiously, "I would rather you'd remember me. Good-by--or, rather, good-afternoon--if I'm to be remembered, Leon."
"Good-afternoon, ma'am."
She moved away, and presently disappeared among the laurels. But her last words were ringing in his ears. "Leon"--everybody else called him "Lee" for brevity; "Leon"--it was pretty as she said it.
He turned away. But it so chanced that their parting was not to pass unnoticed, for, looking up the hill, Leonidas perceived his elder sister and little brother coming down the road, and knew that they must have seen him from the hilltop. It was like their "snoopin'"!
They ran to him eagerly.
"You were talking to the stranger," said his sister breathlessly.
"She spoke to me first," said Leonidas, on the defensive.
"What did she say?"
"Wanted to know the eleckshun news," said Leonidas with cool mendacity, "and I told her."
This improbable fiction nevertheless satisfied them. "What was she like? Oh, do tell us, Lee!" continued his sister.
Nothing would have delighted him more than to expatiate upon her loveliness, the soft white beauty of her hands, the "cunning" little puckers around her lips, her bright tender eyes, the angelic texture of her robes, and the musical tinkle of her voice. But Leonidas had no confidant, and what healthy boy ever trusted his sister in such matter! "YOU saw what she was like," he said, with evasive bluntness.
"But, Lee"--
But Lee was adamant. "Go and ask her," he said.
"Like as not you were sassy to her, and she shut you up," said his sister artfully. But even this cruel suggestion, which he could have so easily flouted, did not draw him, and his ingenious relations flounced disgustedly away.
But Leonidas was not spared any further allusion to the fair stranger; for the fact of her having spoken to him was duly reported at home, and at dinner his reticence was again sorely attacked. "Just like her, in spite of all her airs and graces, to hang out along the fence like any ordinary hired girl, jabberin' with anybody that went along the road," said his mother incisively. He knew that she didn't like her new neighbors, so this did not surprise nor greatly pain him. Neither did the prosaic facts that were now first made plain to him. His divinity was a Mrs. Burroughs, whose husband was conducting a series of mining operations, and prospecting with a gang of men on the Casket Ridge. As his duty required his continual presence there, Mrs. Burroughs was forced to forego the civilized pleasures of San Francisco for a frontier life, for which she was ill fitted, and in which she had no interest. All this was a vague irrelevance to Leonidas, who knew her only as a goddess in white who had been familiar to him, and kind, and to whom he was tied by the delicious joy of having a secret in