Openings in the Old Trail | Page 6

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 common, and
having done her a special favor. Healthy youth clings to its own
impressions, let reason, experience, and even facts argue ever to the
contrary.
So he kept her secret and his intact, and was rewarded a few days
afterwards by a distant view of her walking in the garden, with a man

whom he recognized as her husband. It is needless to say that, without
any extraneous thought, the man suffered in Leonidas's estimation by
his propinquity to the goddess, and that he deemed him vastly inferior.
It was a still greater reward to his fidelity that she seized an opportunity
when her husband's head was turned to wave her hand to him. Leonidas
did not approach the fence, partly through shyness and partly through a
more subtle instinct that this man was not in the secret. He was right,
for only the next day, as he passed to the post-office, she called him to
the fence.
"Did you see me wave my hand to you yesterday?" she asked
pleasantly.
"Yes, ma'am; but"--he hesitated--"I didn't come up, for I didn't think
you wanted me when any one else was there."
She laughed merrily, and lifting his straw hat from his head, ran the
fingers of the other hand through his damp curls. "You're the brightest,
dearest boy I ever knew, Leon," she said, dropping her pretty face to
the level of his own, "and I ought to have remembered it. But I don't
mind telling you I was dreadfully frightened lest you might
misunderstand me and come and ask for another letter--before HIM."
As she emphasized the personal pronoun, her whole face seemed to
change: the light of her blue eyes became mere glittering points, her
nostrils grew white and contracted, and her pretty little mouth seemed
to narrow into a straight cruel line, like a cat's. "Not a word ever to
HIM, of all men! Do you hear?" she said almost brusquely. Then,
seeing the concern in the boy's face, she laughed, and added
explanatorily: "He's a bad, bad man, Leon, remember that."
The fact that she was speaking of her husband did not shock the boy's
moral sense in the least. The sacredness of those relations, and even of
blood kinship, is, I fear, not always so clear to the youthful mind as we
fondly imagine. That Mr. Burroughs was a bad man to have excited this
change in this lovely woman was Leonidas's only conclusion. He
remembered how his sister's soft, pretty little kitten, purring on her lap,
used to get its back up and spit at the postmaster's yellow hound.

"I never wished to come unless you called me first," he said frankly.
"What?" she said, in her half playful, half reproachful, but wholly
caressing way. "You mean to say you would never come to see me
unless I sent for you? Oh, Leon! and you'd abandon me in that way?"
But Leonidas was set in his own boyish superstition. "I'd just delight in
being sent for by you any time, Mrs. Burroughs, and you kin always
find me," he said shyly, but doggedly; "but"-- He stopped.
"What an opinionated young gentleman! Well, I see I must do all the
courting. So consider that I sent for you this morning. I've got another
letter for you to mail." She put her hand to her breast, and out of the
pretty frillings of her frock produced, as before, with the same faint
perfume of violets, a letter like the first. But it was unsealed. "Now,
listen, Leon; we are going to be great friends--you and I." Leonidas felt
his cheeks glowing. "You are going to do me another great favor, and
we are going to have a little fun and a great secret all by our own selves.
Now, first, have you any correspondent--you know--any one who
writes to you--any boy or girl--from San Francisco?"
Leonidas's cheeks grew redder--alas! from a less happy consciousness.
He never received any letters; nobody ever wrote to him. He was
obliged to make this shameful admission.
Mrs. Burroughs looked thoughtful. "But you have some