"What's in that locket?"

She laughed as she caught it in her fingers.

"My luck!"

"I understand that. It brought me luck, too, but there's something else. Won't you tell me?"

She unclasped the trinket and held it in her hand, turning it over slowly. Then she sprung the catch and held it so he could see.

Behind the disc of mica lay a piece of oat straw.

"That is the last straw," she said simply.

He did not understand.

"The one you would not draw that day, which seems so long ago!"

His face brightened.

"You kept it?"

"I clung to it as though it were ... the last straw!

"Why, Tom, can't you see what it has meant? If you had drawn you would have been my foreman. You would have protected me, fought for me, taken care of me. I'd never have been forced to stand alone, never been forced to try to do something for myself, by myself. Your refusal put on me the responsibility of being a woman or a leech....

"I drew the last straw that day. I drew the responsibility of keeping the HC on its feet. I feel that I have helped to do that...."

"You have."

"Through sickness and through death, through dark days and storms. I have done something! I have walked alone, unaided....

"And I have made you love me, Tom.... _That_ is the biggest thing I have done. To be worthy of your love was my greatest undertaking. By being worthy, by winning you, I have justified my being here, my walking the earth, my breathing the air...."

"Sho!" he cried in embarra.s.sment, and took the locket and fingered it.

His hand dropped to the blanket and he stared upward as though a fresh idea had occurred to him.

"Say, I wonder if the Reverend was a regular preacher?" he asked.

"Why? He was a doer of good works. Why consider his actual standing?"

"Yeah. But I mean, could he marry folks, do you s'pose?"

He looked at her again and in his eyes was that amused twinkle, the laugh of a man a.s.sured, content, self sufficient ... and behind it was the tenderness that comes to a strong man's eyes only when he looks upon the woman who has given him love for love.

"If he could he'd be glad to," he said, "and I suspect that he'd throw a little variety into the ceremony ... something, likely, about your fightin' a good fight!"

THE END