"How glad I am that you didn't have to go clear over to Antonito," I said. "You wouldn't have been home for hours yet, and Mrs. Horton wouldn't have been making us a visit." "And Mrs. Horton would a good deal rather be making you a visit than driving these horses to Antonito, I can tell you!" said that lady. "They're quiet as lambs until it comes to cars and engines, and the sight of them scares them both nigh to death, and the railway track runs along right beside the highway for a mile before you get into Antonito. I'd have been obliged to drive Jessie over, for the hired man is gone, and Mr. Horton met with an accident to one of his hands last night, and couldn't have driven." "An accident! How did it happen?" I inquired, with feigned carelessness. "Why, I declare, I can hardly make out how it did happen!" exclaimed Mr. Horton's wife, with a troubled look. "There, Jessie, that's hay enough to last them a week, and I don't expect to stay that long. You see," she went on, slipping the harness deftly off the nigh horse, and tossing it down on the pile of hay, "nothing would do Jake last night but he must go up to the north pasture to salt the cattle. I told him there was no need--they were salted only last Sunday--but go he would, and go he did. It got to be so late before he came back that I got real uneasy about him. It's a good bit to the north pasture, but I knew it ought not to keep him out so very late. Why, it was after twelve o'clock when he came in at last, with his clothes torn, and his hand done up in his handkerchief and just dripping with blood! Jessie and Ralph had gone to bed, hours before, and I was thankful that she wasn't up to see it, for it fairly scared me, and I'm not a mite nervous, generally. I expect I was the more scared because of Jake's way of taking it. He's as steady as iron, most times, but last night he was all kind of trembly and excited. He tried to explain to me how the accident took place, but I couldn't make out hardly what he did mean. It appears, though, that he was coming home along the ravine--where it's always dark, no matter how bright the moonlight--and he jabbed his hand, as he was walking fast, up against a sharp jack oak stub--at least, he thought it must have been some such thing--and he got an awful cut. You wouldn't believe, if you didn't see it with your own eyes, that a stub of any kind could make such a wound! There's a long, slanting cut clean through the palm of his hand. I wanted him to let me look in it for splinters, but he's real touchy about it; wouldn't even let me bathe it," she concluded sadly. Everybody liked Mrs. Horton, and a good many things that her husband did would have been less easily condoned by their neighbors if she had been as little of a favorite as he, and one of the things that people liked best, while finding it most incomprehensible, was that she believed in him and his good intentions most implicitly.