The next evening at sunset Charles stood beside the Butterworth gate,
about to enter, when Daniel came out. The boy had finished his early
supper, and was going to the village on an errand. His face was grave
and thoughtful, as always since the teacher’s departure.
Charles watched him coming down to the gate, and liked his broad
shoulders, and the blue eyes under his curly yellow lashes as he looked
up.
"Are you Daniel Butterworth?" asked Charles.
"I am," said Dan, eying him keenly.
"Are you the one"—Charles was going to say "boy," but that did not seem
to apply exactly to this grave young fellow—"are you the one who carried
the teacher’s baggage to the stage-coach when she went away so
suddenly?"
Charles had studied the question carefully. He did not know by what
name Dawn had gone, whether she had used his or kept her own maiden
name, or had assumed still another. He would not cast a shadow of
reflection upon her, or risk his chance of finding her by using the
wrong name, therefore he called her "the teacher." On inquiring about
her at the inn where the stage-coach stopped, he had been referred at
once to Peggy Gillette, who immediately guided him to the point in the
road where he could see the Butterworth house.
Daniel started, and looked the stranger over suspiciously. There was a
something about this clean-faced, long, strong fellow that reminded him
a little, just a very little, of the scoundrel who had frightened the
teacher away; yet he instinctively liked this man, and felt that he was
to be trusted. Rags, too, generally suspicious of strangers, had been
smelling and snuffing about this man, and now stood wagging his tail
with a smile on his homely, shaggy face. Rags’s judgment was generally
to be trusted.
"I might be," responded Daniel slowly, "and then again I mightn’t. Who
are you?"
Charles understood that the boy was testing him, and he liked him the
better for it. His heart warmed toward the one who had protected Dawn.
"That’s all right," responded Charles heartily. "I’m ready to identify
myself. I’m one who loves her better than my life, and I’ve done
nothing for a year but search for her."
He let Daniel see the depth of his meaning in his eyes, as the boy
looked keenly, wistfully, into his face. Daniel was satisfied, and with
a great sigh of renunciation, he said:
"I knew it, I told her so. I knew you would be half crazy, hunting her.
You’re the one she said she belonged to, aren’t you?"
A great light broke over Charles’s face, bringing out all the beauty of
his soul, all the lines of character that suffering had set upon his
youth, and that love had wrought into his fibre.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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