"He's in Wisconsin somewhere; I don't know where." "Is he coming back?" "I don't know." She often spoke of Bert, and complained of his silence. Once she said: "I guess he's forgot us, pap." "I guess not. More likely he's thinkin' we've fergot him. He'll turn up some bright mornin' with a pocketful o' rocks. He ain't no spring chicken, Bert ain't." ("All the same, I wish't he'd write," Anson said to himself.) The sad death of Kendall came to them without much disturbing force. He had been out of their lives so long that when Anson came in with the paper and letter telling of the accident, and with his instinctive delicacy left her alone to read the news, Flaxen was awed and saddened, but had little sense of personal pain and loss. "Young Kendall," the newspaper went on under its scare-heads, "was on a visit to La Crosse, and while skating with a party on the bayou, where the La Crosse River empties into the Father of Waters, skated into an air-hole. The two young ladies with him were rescued, but the fated man was swept under the ice. He was the son," etc. When Anson came back Flaxen sat with the letter in her hand and the paper on her lap. She was meditating deeply, but what was in her mind Anson never knew. She had grown more and more reticent of late. She sighed, rose, and resumed her evening tasks. CHAPTER XV. BERT COMES BACK. One raw March evening, when the wind was roaring among the gray branches of the maples like a lion in wrath, some one knocked on the door. "Come in!" shouted Anson, who was giving baby her regular ride on his boots. "Come in!" added Flaxen. Gearheart walked in slowly, closed the door behind his back, and stood devouring the cheerful scene. He was poorly dressed and wore a wide, limp hat; they did not know him till he bared his head. "Bert!" yelled Anson, tossing the baby to his shoulder and leaping toward his chum, tramping and shaking and clapping like a madman, scaring the child. "My gosh-all-hemlock! I'm glad to see ye! Gimme that paw again. Come to the fire. This is Flaxie" (as though he had not had his eyes on her face all the time). "Be'n sick?" Bert's hollow cough prompted this question. "Yes. Had some kind of a fever down in Arizony. Oh, I'm all right now," he added in reply to an anxious look from Flaxen. "An' this is--" "Baby--Elsie," she replied, putting a finishing touch to the little one's dress, mother-like. "Where's he?" he asked a little later. Anson replied with a little gesture, which silenced Bert at the same time that it explained. And when Flaxen was busy a few moments later, Anson said: "Gone up the spout." At the table they grew quite gay, talking over old times, and Bert's pale face grew rosier, catching a reflection of the happy faces opposite. "Say, Bert, do you remember the time you threw that pan o' biscuits I made out into the grass an' killed every dog in the township?" Then they roared.