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He was seeing that beauty and that personality in the social life of official Washington; seeing the triumph that would have been hers and wondering what it would have meant to her in the balance of contentment or unhappiness. Of course had Aaron McGivins begun his political career young enough, every trace of mountain illiteracy would long ago have been shed away by the growing girl.
Aaron McGivins had not progressed to this modestly enviable estate without the driving of shrewd bargains and the taking of bold chances. It followed that men called him hard, though few men called him other than just. To his door came disputants who preferred his arbitration on tangled issues to the dubious chances of litigation, for he was also accounted wise.
Out of pale eyes he studied the man before him until the newcomer from "down-below" felt that, in the attitude, lay almost the force of rebuke. It was as though he stood self-convicted of having visited Naples without seeing Vesuvius. "But I haven't been haggling with Mr. McGivins," he hastened to remonstrate. "On the contrary we have done business most amicably."
The taut nerves had loosened to that unspeakable relief but for the moment it was collapse. Brent had left the mountains a week after Alexander's safe return, but within two months he had occasion to return and he rode over to the mouth of Shoulder-blade. He had been told that Aaron McGivins, though he had made a swift and complete recovery from his wound, had after all only been reprieved.
"Whoever shot him, Joe," she replied, maintaining the complimentary fiction that she must temporize with his just wrath, "Paw he's done exacted a pledge thet neither of us won't seek ter avenge ther deed. Hit's a pledge thet binds us both." Even while his temples were still hot with his first wave of passionate indignation, Joe McGivins felt that a bitter cup had passed from him.
The city man acquiescently nodded his head but he was thinking chiefly of the calm patience and the tireless strenuousity with which McGivins, himself, was battling against calamity. "They are friends of yours," he answered. "They realize that your loss will be heavy if " He broke off there and the other went on. "Hit'll mighty nigh cripple me ef we don't save 'em.
"Alexander McGivins," began the spokesman afresh, "we charges ye with these weighty matters; thet ye glories in callin' yoreself a he-woman refusin' ter accept God's mandate an' castin' mortification on yore own sex by holdin' on ter shameless notions. We charges ye with settin' ther example of unwomanly behavior before ther eyes of young gals, an' we aims ter make a sample of ye.
"Long enough ter leave him lay an' ferget about him, I reckon," drily observed the parson. "Anyhow atter a spell Old Man McGivins had another bornin' at his dwellin-house an' thet time hit proved out to be a boy. His woman sought ter rechristen ther gal Lizzie or Lake Erie or somethin' else befittin petticoats.
We all went partners ter raise ther money fer rearin' hit," said Warwick McGivins, as he dismounted from his old pacing mare and pointed to a huge wooden building that stood at the edge of a bluff, from which one could drop a rock down a sheer hundred and fifty feet.
He had found old man McGivins toiling without sleep or rest; racing against the gathering cohorts of a Nature turned vandal, and into the fight and stress he had thrown himself and all his energies. That there was even the slimmest of chances to save the poplar, was a fact due to a peculiar conformation of the levels there, and to exceptional circumstances.
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