"Don't! You must show me where he hides to-morrow," she said, in her old
laughing way. "And now, Leon, I must go back to the house."
"May I write to him--to Jim Belcher, Mrs. Burroughs?" said the boy
timidly.
"Certainly. And come to me to-morrow with your letter--I will have mine
ready. Good-by." She stopped and glanced at the trail. "And you say that
if that man had kept on, the snake would have bitten him?"
"Sure pop!--if he'd trod on him--as he was sure to. The snake wouldn't
have known he didn't mean it. It's only natural," continued Leonidas,
with glowing partisanship for the gentle and absent William Henry. "YOU
wouldn't like to be trodden upon, Mrs. Burroughs!"
"No! I'd strike out!" she said quickly. She made a rapid motion forward
with her low forehead and level head, leaving it rigid the next moment,
so that it reminded him of the snake, and he laughed. At which she
laughed too, and tripped away.
Leonidas went back and caught his trout. But even this triumph did not
remove a vague sense of disappointment which had come over him. He had
often pictured to himself a Heaven-sent meeting with her in the woods,
a walk with her, alone, where he could pick her the rarest flowers and
herbs and show her his woodland friends; and it had only ended in this,
and an exhibition of William Henry! He ought to have saved HER from
something, and not her husband. Yet he had no ill-feeling for Burroughs,
only a desire to circumvent him, on behalf of the unprotected, as he
would have baffled a hawk or a wildcat. He went home in dismal spirits,
but later that evening constructed a boyish letter of thanks to the
apocryphal Belcher and told him all about--the trout!
He brought her his letter the next day, and received hers to inclose.
She was pleasant, her own charming self again, but she seemed more
interested in other things than himself, as, for instance, the docile
William Henry, whose hiding-place he showed, and whose few tricks she
made him exhibit to her, and which the gratified Leonidas accepted as a
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