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Updated: June 18, 2025
"At the pos'-office one say to me, 'Here is lettaire for you! I take the lettaire and read.... Now, I ask you, Mistaire Steering, to take it and read." Bernique drew forth a letter from his pocket and thrust it into Steering's hand with a finely dramatic gesture. He had the appreciation of his race for climax.
"'Do these things for me, friend Placide, and believe that even in the grave, I remain, "'Very gratefully yours, The letter fell from Steering's hand and fluttered to the ground, while he sat with his hands hanging limply from his knees for a moment. "Grierson is dead! Grierson is dead!" he repeated. The funereal words rang through his ears like a grand Praise-God.
In the north and east the clouds had gathered with a mighty up-piling, from which the eye sank back affrighted, it towered so near heaven. The trees along the river, the shaking, shimmering river itself, were all shot with light. It was a grand scene, but removed, turbulent, unreal. Steering's strength failed him again, and he fell back over the saddle and hung on.
Upon the hypothesis that Steering would "come around" everything smoothed out. Resting securely upon that hypothesis, Madeira even formulated the words with which he would take Steering's surrender: "God love us, that's all right! You just trust to me from now on. From now on I'll look out for you, my boy." He could hear himself saying that.
"At least," cried old Bernique at last, "at least the Teegmores are yours! At last! At last!" At last! At last! Steering's eyes were travelling the long tumbling Tigmore line. "If they are," he said in that musing way he had developed within the last quarter of an hour, "if I take the Tigmores now, Uncle Bernique, I'll pull Madeira's house about him.
The Frenchman's convulsive anger received a sudden check by the sound of Steering's voice. He clung more tightly to Steering's arms as he looked into Steering's face, then shrank back helplessly. "My God!" said the old man, "I forgot!" "Yes," answered Steering, no hesitation in his voice. "Yes, you forgot her. We must not do that, you know."
"Well, d'you think," went on Piney, jerking his spear of grass viciously, "d'you think that a man cand fall in love with a lady rat off, just knowin' her a few weeks?" This was one of Piney's ways of manifesting the jealousy that disquieted him, slurring covertly, and with his lips flickering peculiarly, at Steering's brief acquaintance with Miss Madeira.
The girl, turning back to smile at Madeira, was the cause of Steering's turning back, too, and he was surprised to see a patriarchal, benign expression on Madeira's face, as though a reflection of the girl's illusions about his character lay warm upon him.
Uncle Bernique was off on the hills, too, almost all the time; at the moment of this present crisis Bernique had been away for days. It was the merciless loneliness of the effort there at Redbud that had been most effective in dulling Steering's endurance. If he had been less lonely he might have devised ways of standing Missouri yet longer.
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