heart away from YOU!

"Or from Bill.

"The first time I met Mr. Gledware, he acted in a curious way. Of
course I was introduced as 'Miss Willock' and he started at the name,
and at sight of me--two separate little movements just as plain as
anything. Then he said he had heard the name 'Willock' in unusual
surroundings, and that my face reminded him of somebody who was dead.
That was all there was to it, then. But afterward he heard Annabel
call me 'Lahoma,' and his face turned perfectly white.

"The first chance he had, after that, he sat down to talk to me in a
corner where we wouldn't be overhead, and he asked me questions. So, of
course, I told about father and mother taking me across the prairie to
the Oklahoma country, and how mother died and father was killed, and I
was with the Indians a while and then was taken to live with my cousin,
Brick. He listened with his head down, never meeting my eye, and when
I had finished all he said was, 'Did you ever bear my name before?'

"And I said I never had. Then he asked if I thought I had ever seen
him, for he thought he could remember having seem ME somewhere. And I
said I wasn't sure, I had met so many people, and there was something
familiar about him. Then he said he guessed we hadn't ever met unless
accidentally on the trail somewhere, as he had once been down in
Texas,--and that was all.

"I don't like Mr. Gledware's eye because it always looks away from you.
He would be considered a handsome man by anybody not particular about
eyes. Afterward, I heard about his trip to Texas. Annabel and her
mother were talking about Mr. Gledware's past. It seems that once Mr.
Gledware and his first wife (I say his FIRST because I look upon
Annabel as certain to be the second) joined the Oklahoma boomers and
they were attacked by Indians, just as MY father and mother were, and
they had with them his wife's little girl, for he had married a widow,
just as MY father had (my stepfather) and there was a terrible battle.
And Mr. Gledware, oh, he was SO brave! He killed ten Indians after the
rest of his party, including his wife and daughter, had been slain, and
he broke through the attacking party and escaped on a horse--the only
one that got away.

"He doesn't look THAT brave. Later, I asked him if it could be
possible that he was with the wagon-train we were in, but he said there
wasn't any Mr. or Mrs. Willock in his party, and no little girl named
Lahoma Willock. B