"No--that's so," responded Mr. Langworthy, nodding his head, as a.s.senting to an undeniable proposition, "and you--I suppose you're gettin' on too. I reckon you're--er--married--eh?"--with a slight suggestion of putting the question delicately.

The lady nodded, ignoring the hesitation. "Yes, let me see, it's just three years and three days. Constantine Byers--I don't reckon you know him--from Milwaukee. Timber merchant. Standin' timber's his specialty."

"And I reckon he's--satisfactory?"

"Yes! Mr. Byers is a good provider--and handy. And you? I should say you'd want a wife in this business?"

Mr. Langworthy's serious half-perfunctory manner here took on an appearance of interest. "Yes--I've bin thinkin' that way. Thar's a young woman helpin' in the kitchen ez might do, though I'm not certain, and I ain't lettin' on anything as yet. You might take a look at her, Rosalie,--I orter say Mrs. Byers ez is,--and kinder size her up, and gimme the result. It's still wantin' seven minutes o' schedule time afore the stage goes, and--if you ain't wantin' more food"--delicately, as became a landlord--"and ain't got anythin' else to do, it might pa.s.s the time."

Strange as it may seem, Mrs. Byers here displayed an equal animation in her fresh face as she rose promptly to her feet and began to rearrange her dust cloak around her buxom figure. "I don't mind, Abner," she said, "and I don't think that Mr. Byers would mind either;" then seeing Langworthy hesitating at the latter unexpected suggestion, she added confidently, "and I wouldn't mind even if he did, for I'm sure if I don't know the kind o' woman you'd be likely to need, I don't know who would. Only last week I was sayin' like that to Mr. Byers"--

"To Mr. Byers?" said Abner, with some surprise.

"Yes--to him. I said, 'We've been married three years, Constantine, and ef I don't know by this time what kind o' woman you need now--and might need in future--why, thar ain't much use in matrimony.'"

"You was always wise, Rosalie," said Abner, with reminiscent appreciation.

"I was always there, Abner," returned Mrs. Byers, with a complacent show of dimples, which she, however, chastened into that resignation which seemed characteristic of the pair. "Let's see your 'intended'--as might be."

Thus supported, Mr. Langworthy led Mrs. Byers into the hall through a crowd of loungers, into a smaller hall, and there opened the door of the kitchen. It was a large room, whose windows were half darkened by the encompa.s.sing pines which still pressed around the house on the scantily cleared site. A number of men and women, among them a Chinaman and a negro, were engaged in washing dishes and other culinary duties; and beside the window stood a young blonde girl, who was wiping a tin pan which she was also using to hide a burst of laughter evidently caused by the abrupt entrance of her employer. A quant.i.ty of fluffy hair and part of a white, bared arm were nevertheless visible outside the disk, and Mrs. Byers gathered from the direction of Mr. Langworthy's eyes, a.s.sisted by a slight nudge from his elbow, that this was the selected fair one. His feeble explanatory introduction, addressed to the occupants generally, "Just showing the house to Mrs.--er--Dusenberry,"

convinced her that the circ.u.mstances of his having been divorced he had not yet confided to the young woman. As he turned almost immediately away, Mrs. Byers in following him managed to get a better look at the girl, as she was exchanging some facetious remark to a neighbor. Mr.

Langworthy did not speak until they had reached the deserted dining-room again.

"Well?" he said briefly, glancing at the clock, "what did ye think o'

Mary Ellen?"

To any ordinary observer the girl in question would have seemed the least fitted in age, sobriety of deportment, and administrative capacity to fill the situation thus proposed for her, but Mrs. Byers was not an ordinary observer, and her auditor was not an ordinary listener.

"She's older than she gives herself out to be," said Mrs. Byers tentatively, "and them kitten ways don't amount to much."

Mr. Langworthy nodded. Had Mrs. Byers discovered a homicidal tendency in Mary Ellen he would have been equally unmoved.

"She don't handsome much," continued Mrs. Byers musingly, "but"--

"I never was keen on good looks in a woman, Rosalie. You know that!"

Mrs. Byers received the equivocal remark unemotionally, and returned to the subject.

"Well!" she said contemplatively, "I should think you could make her suit."

Mr. Langworthy nodded with resigned toleration of all that might have influenced her judgment and his own. "I was wantin' a fa'r-minded opinion, Rosalie, and you happened along jest in time. Kin I put up anythin' in the way of food for ye?" he added, as a stir outside and the words "All aboard!" proclaimed the departing of the stage-coach,--"an orange or a hunk o' gingerbread, freshly baked?"

"Thank ye kindly, Abner, but I sha'n't be usin' anythin' afore supper,"

responded Mrs. Byers, as they pa.s.sed out into the veranda beside the waiting coach.

Mr. Langworthy helped her to her seat. "Ef you're pa.s.sin' this way ag'in"--he hesitated delicately.

"I'll drop in, or I reckon Mr. Byers might, he havin' business along the road," returned Mrs. Byers with a cheerful nod, as the coach rolled away and the landlord of the Big Flume Hotel reentered his house.

For the next three weeks, however, it did not appear that Mr. Langworthy was in any hurry to act upon the advice of his former wife. His relations to Mary Ellen Budd were characterized by his usual tolerance to his employees' failings,--which in Mary Ellen's case included many "breakages,"--but were not marked by the invasion of any warmer feeling, or a desire for confidences. The only perceptible divergence from his regular habits was a disposition to be on the veranda at the arrival of the stage-coach, and when his duties permitted this, a cautious survey of his female guests at the beginning of dinner. This probably led to his more or less ignoring any peculiarities in his masculine patrons or their claims to his personal attention. Particularly so, in the case of a red-bearded man, in a long linen duster, both heavily freighted with the red dust of the stage road, which seemed to have invaded his very eyes as he watched the landlord closely. Towards the close of the dinner, when Abner, accompanied by a negro waiter after his usual custom, pa.s.sed down each side of the long table, collecting payment for the meal, the stranger looked up. "You air the landlord of this hotel, I reckon?"

"I am," said Abner tolerantly.

"I'd like a word or two with ye."

But Abner had been obliged to have a formula for such occasions. "Ye'll pay for yer dinner first," he said submissively, but firmly, "and make yer remarks agin the food arter."

The stranger flushed quickly, and his eye took an additional shade of red, but meeting Abner's serious gray ones, he contented himself with ostentatiously taking out a handful of gold and silver and paying his bill. Abner pa.s.sed on, but after dinner was over he found the stranger in the hall.

"Ye pulled me up rather short in thar," said the man gloomily, "but it's just as well, as the talk I was wantin' with ye was kinder betwixt and between ourselves, and not hotel business. My name's Byers, and my wife let on she met ye down here."

For the first time it struck Abner as incongruous that another man should call Rosalie "his wife," although the fact of her remarriage had been made sufficiently plain to him. He accepted it as he would an earthquake, or any other dislocation, with his usual tolerant smile, and held out his hand.

Mr. Byers took it, seemingly mollified, and yet inwardly disturbed,--more even than was customary in Abner's guests after dinner.

"Have a drink with me," he suggested, although it had struck him that Mr. Byers had been drinking before dinner.

"I'm agreeable," responded Byers promptly; "but," with a glance at the crowded bar-room, "couldn't we go somewhere, jest you and me, and have a quiet confab?"

"I reckon. But ye must wait till we get her off."

Mr. Byers started slightly, but it appeared that the impedimental s.e.x in this case was the coach, which, after a slight feminine hesitation, was at last started. Whereupon Mr. Langworthy, followed by a negro with a tray bearing a decanter and gla.s.ses, grasped Mr. Byers's arm, and walked along a small side veranda the depth of the house, stepped off, and apparently plunged with his guest into the primeval wilderness.

It has already been indicated that the site of the Big Flume Hotel had been scantily cleared; but Mr. Byers, backwoodsman though he was, was quite unprepared for so abrupt a change. The hotel, with its noisy crowd and garish newness, although scarcely a dozen yards away, seemed lost completely to sight and sound. A slight fringe of old tin cans, broken china, shavings, and even of the long-dried chips of the felled trees, once crossed, the two men were alone! From the tray, deposited at the foot of an enormous pine, they took the decanter, filled their gla.s.ses, and then disposed of themselves comfortably against a spreading root.

The curling tail of a squirrel disappeared behind them; the far-off tap of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r accented the loneliness. And then, almost magically as it seemed, the thin veneering of civilization on the two men seemed to be cast off like the bark of the trees around them, and they lounged before each other in aboriginal freedom. Mr. Byers removed his restraining duster and undercoat. Mr. Langworthy resigned his dirty white jacket, his collar, and unloosed a suspender, with which he played.

"Would it be a fair question between two fa'r-minded men, ez hez lived alone," said Mr. Byers, with a gravity so supernatural that it could be referred only to liquor, "to ask ye in what sort o' way did Mrs. Byers show her temper?"

"Show her temper?" echoed Abner vacantly.

"Yes--in course, I mean when you and Mrs. Byers was--was--one? You know the di-vorce was for in-com-pat-ibility of temper."

"But she got the divorce from me, so I reckon I had the temper," said Langworthy, with great simplicity.

"Wha-at?" said Mr. Byers, putting down his gla.s.s and gazing with drunken gravity at the sad-eyed yet good-humoredly tolerant man before him.

"You?--you had the temper?"

"I reckon that's what the court allowed," said Abner simply.

Mr. Byers stared. Then after a moment's pause he nodded with a significant yet relieved face. "Yes, I see, in course. Times when you'd h'isted too much o' this corn juice," lifting up his gla.s.s, "inside ye--ye sorter bu'st out ravin'?"

But Abner shook his head. "I wuz a total abstainer in them days," he said quietly.

Mr. Byers got unsteadily on his legs and looked around him. "Wot might hev bin the general gait o' your temper, pardner?" he said in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

"Don't know. I reckon that's jest whar the incompatibility kem in."

"And when she hove plates at your head, wot did you do?"