red Humphrey had remembered what Jack had shouted at the boys when
they fired. "--And mother, that was the luckiest call-down I ever
handed the bunch. It proved, don't you see, that the hold-up was just
a josh that turned out wrong. And it proved the boys weren't planning
to shoot--oh, it just showed the whole thing up in a different light,
you know, so a blind man had to see it. So they let me go--"

"If you could have seen him, you wouldn't have wondered, Mrs. Corey!"
Marion had been dumb for an hour, but she could not resist painting
Jack into the scene with the warm hues of romance. "He went there when
he ought to have gone to the hospital. Why, he had the highest
fever!--and he was so thin and hollow-eyed he just looked simply
pathetic! Why, they wouldn't have been human if they had sent him to
jail! And he told the whole thing, and how it just started in fooling;
and why, it was the grandest, noblest thing a boy could do, when the
others had been mean enough to lay all the blame on Jack. And he had
his shoulder all bandaged and his arm in a sling, and he looked so--so
brave, Mrs. Corey, that--"

Mrs. Singleton Corey reached out and patted Marion on the hand, and
smiled strangely. "Yes, my dear--I understand. But I think you might
call me mother."

If it cost her something to say that, she was amply repaid. Marion
gave her one grateful look and fled, fearing that tears would be
misunderstood. And Jack made no move to follow her, but stayed and
gathered his mother again into a one-armed imitation of a real
bear-hug. I think Jack wiped the last jealous thought out of Mrs.
Singleton Corey's mind when he did that. So they clung to each other
like lovers, and Jack patted her white cloud of hair that he had never
made bold to touch since he was a baby.

"My own boy--that I lost from the cradle, and did not know--" She
reached up and drew her fingers caressingly down his weathered cheek,
that was losing some of its hardness in the softer air of the South.
"Jack, your poor old mother has been cheating herself all these years.
Cheating you too, dear--"

"Not much! Your cub of a son has been cheating himself and you. But
you watch him make it up. And--mother, don't you think maybe all this
trouble has been kind of a good thing after all? I mean--if it's
brought the real stuff out to the surface of me, you know--"'

"I know. The gold in us all is too often hidden away under so much
worthless--"

"Why, forev--" In the