When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry Part 51

"Turney," she said, "there's one thing that I've got to say--and I guess it had better be now."

"If it's any fault you're finding with yourself--don't say it," he protested as his hands closed over her slender fingers. "There ain't anything that I need to have explained. I reckon I understand what happiness means and that's enough."

But Blossom shook her head.

"If I'd been straight loyal--like you've been, Turney, I reckon I couldn't ever have made any mistake. There wouldn't ever have been room for anybody but you." She paused and then went falteringly ahead. "From now on there won't ever be. You've known me always and yet even you can't realize how young and foolish and _plumb_ ignorant I was a year ago. If I'd been just a _little_ more experienced, it couldn't have happened. If things hadn't come with such a rush after they began, that I was just swept along like a log in a spring-tide--it couldn't have happened." It seemed difficult for her to force the words, but she obeyed the mandate of her conscience with the candor of the confessional. "I never had the chance to think--until I came over here and began looking back. A person like I was doesn't think very clear in the midst of cyclones and confusions, and I didn't see that the real bigness was in you--more than in--him. I didn't see it until later. I'd grown up with you, and I took you too much for granted, I reckon, and everything he said or did seemed like a sc.r.a.p out of a fairy story to my foolish mind."

There was one thing she did not tell him, even now; that she had learned at last through the lawyers what her husband's connection with the railroad plans had been. Back of all his fascination there had been a tarnished honesty, but that secret she still kept to herself.

But she lifted eyes to Turner that were wide open for his reading, and gravely she said: "I lost my way once--but I've found it again and if you can forget what a little fool I was at sixteen, you won't ever have need to doubt me any more."

"All thet's happened was worth goin' through--if it led to this," he declared in a husky whisper, and as she raised her lips to his her eyes were sparkling, and her words fell whimsically into dialect.

"Thet piece of bottom land down thar, Turney--I reckon we kin raise a dwellin'-house on hit now--a dwellin'-house an' a school-house, too."

THE END.