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Updated: August 13, 2024
Red Pete's body had been delivered to his widow. Perhaps it would only be neighborly for Salomy Jane to ride over to the funeral. But Salomy Jane did not take to the suggestion kindly, nor yet did she explain to her father that, as the other man was still living, she did not care to undergo a second disciplining at the widow's hands.
Such were the ethics of this strange locality that neither the man who made the offer nor the girl to whom it was made was struck by anything that seemed illogical or indelicate, or at all inconsistent with justice or the horse-thief's real conversion. Salomy Jane nevertheless dissented, from another and weaker reason.
He must have been able to regain it, and escaped, after the shots had been fired. She drew a long breath of relief, but it was caught up in an apprehension of alarm. Her father, awakened from his sleep by the shots, was hurriedly approaching her. "What's up now, Salomy Jane?" he demanded excitedly. "Nothin'," said the girl with an effort. "Nothin', at least, that I can find."
I remembered well might I, for they were in my own too the honest tears in the eyes of Uncle Coffin and Aunt Salomy as we parted; of being tucked in again under the Star, with new accessions to our store, of dried smelts and summer savory, and three newly born kittens in a bag, which I was instructed to hold so as to give them air without allowing them to escape.
So ef you've writ to Salomy Jane, come." Madison Clay no longer hesitated. Salomy Jane might return at any moment, it would be part of her "fool womanishness," and he was in no mood to see her before a third party.
Nevertheless, she contrasted her situation with that of the widow with a new and singular satisfaction. It might have been Red Pete who had escaped. But he had not the grit of the nameless one. She had already settled his heroic quality. "Ye ain't harkenin' to me, Salomy." Salomy Jane started. "Here I'm askin' ye if ye've see that hound Phil Larrabee sneaking by yer today?" Salomy Jane had not.
"You just lie low, dad, for a day or two more, and let me do a little prowlin'," said the girl, with sympathetic indignation in her dark eyes. "Ef it's that skunk, I'll spot him soon enough and let you know whar he's hiding." "You'll just stay where ye are, Salomy," said her father decisively. "This ain't no woman's work though I ain't sayin' you haven't got more head for it than some men I know."
A grotesque idea struck him. "Salomy Jane, ye might do worse than come yere and say 'good-by' to a dying man, and him a stranger," he said. There seemed to be a subtle stroke of poetry and irony in this that equally struck the apathetic crowd. It was well known that Salomy Jane Clay thought no small potatoes of herself, and always held off the local swain with a lazy nymph-like scorn.
But though the sting of her father's reproach was spared her, Salomy Jane had no need of the letter to know what had happened. For as she entered the woods in the dim light of that morning she saw the figure of Dart gliding from the shadow of a pine towards her. The unaffected cry of joy that rose from her lips died there as she caught sight of his face in the open light.
Then they stood embraced as they had embraced two days before, but no longer the same. For the cool, lazy Salomy Jane had been transformed into another woman a passionate, clinging savage. Perhaps something of her father's blood had surged within her at that supreme moment. The man stood erect and determined. "Wot's your name?" she whispered quickly.
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