Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl's
photograph pasted on the inside of the case. Corry Hutchinson
gazed at it with admiration welling up in his eyes.
"Mabel is her name," Pentfield went on. "And it's just as well you
should know how to find the house. Soon as you strike 'Frisco,
take a cab, and just say, 'Holmes's place, Myrdon Avenue'--I doubt
if the Myrdon Avenue is necessary. The cabby'll know where Judge
Holmes lives.
"And say," Pentfield continued, after a pause, "it won't be a bad
idea for you to get me a few little things which a--er--"
"A married man should have in his business," Hutchinson blurted out
with a grin.
Pentfield grinned back.
"Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such
things. And you might get a good set of china. You know it'll
come hard for her to settle down to this sort of thing. You can
freight them in by steamer around by Bering Sea. And, I say,
what's the matter with a piano?"
Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily. His reluctance had
vanished, and he was warming up to his mission.
"By Jove! Lawrence," he said at the conclusion of the council, as
they both rose to their feet, "I'll bring back that girl of yours
in style. I'll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all
that brother'll have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for
her whatever I've forgotten. And I'll forget damn little, I can
tell you."
The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last
time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the
frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world. Pentfield
went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary
than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter. There was
work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in
burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in
the work. Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a
new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine. It was a
grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms.
Each log was hand-hewed and squared--an expensive whim when the
axemen received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing
could be too costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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