“Eh, child, better than you know! Better than I knew myself, perhaps.” “Better than--your children?” whispered Polly. * * * * * Granny’s head drooped. “I’m afraid so. Women can’t help their feelings, even when they do their duty--or what seems to them such. Once, he was gone so long that folks said he wa’n’t coming back. A hunter told me he was dead, that he’d seen Dan’l’s curly red scalp drying at the door of an Indian tepee. And so he had! Only some folks are tough enough to outlive even a scalping. They pestered me to be marrying again; they would not let me be. A woman has no chance to mourn her dead in peace in this country--we’re too skeerce. So I promised at last to marry the man that wanted me worst. But on the day set for the wedding, what should I hear but a musket shot, in the woods beyond my clearing--a musket whose voice I knew well! It was my Dan’l’s Betsey-gun.” “Ah-h!” Polly took the corner of her apron, and wiped the old woman’s eyes. “Eh, was I crying? I didn’t know. Well, the time come when Dan’l really was gone, for good and all. I couldn’t believe it at first, though since he’d lost his scalp he was always off hunting for it, had got sort of queer-like. Two, three years I waited, the men pestering me nigh out of my wits, for I was a comely wench then, and a good cook, too. And at last I married the poor soul I’d had to disappoint before. After his death--he died in his bed, for a wonder--I took me another, and come on over the mountains with him; hunting for Dan’l, I do believe, though I wouldn’t have told it to myself. And when the Indians got that one, I wedded my fourth--all good men and true, they were, who gave me their love, and my children, and something to do for, you know. But still”--the old voice sank to a whisper--“many’s the night I lay awake beside the man I was married to at the time, with his baby asleep in the crook of my arm, listening, listening for the sound of Dan’l’s Betsey-gun--” “And if you had heard it?” demanded the girl, with strange eagerness. “Ah!” The old woman made a wide gesture of surrender. “If I had heard it, I should have risen up out of that bed, mother to many that I was--ay, and grandmother, too--and I should have gone to him, gone to the love of my youth, my Dan’l. For I knew by then that he was my man--he and no other. A woman belongs to the one mate only, no matter how many take her after----”