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Updated: June 6, 2025
For Tom was his son, and he had not suspected filial treachery in the matter of the spectral blackberry bush. Rufe stared in his turn, not comprehending Byers's surprise. "TOM," he reiterated presently, with mocking explicitness. "Tom Byers I reckon ye knows him. That thar freckled-faced, snaggled- toothed, red-headed Tom Byers, ez lives at yer house. I reckon ye MUS' know him."
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.
Byers made no rejoinder, and the tanner, puffing his pipe, vaguely watched the wreaths of smoke rise above his head, and whisk buoyantly about in the air, and finally skurry off into invisibility. A gentle breeze was astir in the woods, and it set the leaves to whispering. The treetoads and the locusts were trolling a chorus. So loudly vibrant, it was! So clamorously gay!
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?"
He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but he acted automatically. He stood before her. "You're Emma Byers, ain't you?" She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely had the roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man. Then: "Why, Ben!" she said quietly. And there was pity in her voice, though she did not mean to have it there.
Perkins pressed forward with eager curiosity, never having seen this famous grant. The ground bark on the surface was pretty dry, the layer being ten or fifteen inches thick, and the tanning infusion had not yet risen through it. Byers stared with a frown at the tan, and lifted another board. Nothing appeared beneath it on the smooth surface of the bark.
The next day all three of us were quietly walking down the guard-line on the outside. At the creek, where all the camp came for water, we found Dorr and Byers and West, and calling to one of them in the presence of the guard, asked for blankets to bring in spruce boughs for beds. When the blankets came they contained certain haversacks, cups, and little indispensable articles for the road.
He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about to neighbor-hood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the thing had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld's. There was what the neighbors called an understanding, though perhaps he had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him.
After a few minutes' conference with Captain Ainsworth about the capacity of his boat, and the state of facts along the river, I instructed him to be ready to start back at 6 p.m., and ordered Captain Byers to get ready to carry dispatches to Washington.
But something in him was. Something that had resisted her all these years. Something that had made him master and superior in spite of everything. In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and was prosperous.
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