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Updated: May 4, 2025
"Do you think, Miss MacDonald, she would feel like talking business for a few minutes?" "Oh, yes; if she's like me, she'll want to get the agony over with." Billy Louise turned with a twitch of the shoulders. She felt chilled, somehow. She had not quite expected that Seabeck would want to talk about his stolen stock at all.
That ended the Seabeck part of the whole sordid affair, except that he remained for another hour, doing chores and making everything snug for the night. Also he filled the kitchen woodbox as high as he could pile the sticks and brought water to last overnight since Charlie's plan to pipe water into the cabin had remained a beautiful plan and nothing more.
Billy Louise took her courage in both hands and went straight to the point. "Mr. Seabeck, I've always heard that you're an awfully square man," she said. "Daddy seemed to think that you could be depended on in any kind of a pinch. I hope it's true. I'm banking a lot on your squareness to-day."
Though he did not know it, trouble had caught Billy Louise in that same place, and had sent her forward with drooping shoulders and a mind so absorbed that she gave no attention to her horse; but that is merely a trifling coincidence. The thing he had to decide was far more complicated than Billy Louise's problem. Should he go straight to Seabeck and tell him what he had found out?
But with the evidence of those rebranded cattle, and the testimony of two men, together with the damning testimony of his past! Ward lifted his head and stared heavily at the pine slope before him. He could not go to Seabeck and tell him anything. In the black hour of that ride, he could not think of anything that he could do that would save him.
"And so Marthy just leaned more and more on him and let him take care of her and pet her; and she never once dreamed he was doing anything crooked. I thought she did, I know, Mr. Seabeck. I thought she was in it, too; but I see now that Marthy has been living the woman in her, these last two years; she'd never had a chance before.
Billy Louise thanked Seabeck, when he was ready to go. "I knew you were square, and you're really big-souled, too. I'll remember it always, Mr. Seabeck." "Will you?" Seabeck looked down at her, with his hand upon the latch. "Even if you are put in a position where you must pay that note you will still Hm-mm! I see.
"Would you be as ready to help somebody else? Somebody I thought a lot of?" Seabeck, evidently, saw light. He cleared his throat and spat gravely into a bush. "I see you don't trust me, after all," he said. "I do. I've got to; I mean, I'd have to whether I did or not. It's like this, Mr. Seabeck. It isn't the big D brand; of course you knew it couldn't be. But it isn't yours, either.
Therefore, Seabeck rode away and did not look into the snow-banked cabin, as another man might have done; and Ward missed his one chance of getting help from the outside. Of course, he was doing pretty well as it was; but he would have welcomed the chance to talk to someone. Taciturn as Ward was with men, he had enough of his own company for once.
I let him go ahead, an' I set in the house with a white apurn tied on me an' thought I was havin' an easy time. I set here and let him rob my neighbors that I ain't never harmed er cheated out of a cent, and soon's he thought he was found out, he left ole Marthy to look after herself. Never so much as fed the hogs or done the milkin' first! Looky here, Seabeck!
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