jump.

Dr. Harpe could not see Mrs. Abe Tutts walking gingerly across lots
carrying a pot of baked beans and brown bread in her two hands, nor Mrs.
Alva Jackson panting up another street with a Lady Baltimore cake in the
hope of reaching the hotel before her dearest friend and enemy Mrs.
Tutts, but Dr. Harpe knew from what she already had seen and from the
curious glances cast at the windows of the Terriberry House, that the
town was agog with Essie Tisdale's romantic story and her newly
established relationship to the important looking stranger. Mrs.
Terriberry could be trusted to attend to that and in her capable hands
it was certain to lose nothing in the telling.

The story was simple enough in itself and had its counterpart in many
towns throughout the West. Young Dick Kincaid had run away from his home
on the bank of the Mississippi River to make his fortune in the mining
camps of the far West. He did not write, because the fortune was always
just a little farther on. The months slipped into years, and when he
returned with the "stake" which was to be his peace offering, the name
of Kincaid was but a memory in the community, and the restless
Mississippi with its ever-changing channel flowed over the valuable
tract of black-walnut timber which had constituted the financial
resources of the Kincaids. The little sister had married a westerner as
poor as he was picturesque, and against her parents' wishes. They had
gone, never to be heard from again, disappeared mysteriously and
completely, and Samuel Kincaid had died, he and his wife, as much of
loneliness and longing as of age.

The triumphant return of his boyish dreams was, instead, an acute and
haunting remorse. The success that had been his, the success that was to
be his in the near-by city, never erased the bitter disappointment of
that home-coming. He had searched in vain for some trace of the little
sister whom he had loved. He had never given up hoping and that hope had
had its weight in influencing him to make the tedious trip to Crowheart.

And then, as though the Fates had punished him enough for his filial
neglect, his sister's eyes had looked out at him from the flower-like
face at the funeral of old Edouard Dubois. He had followed up his
impulse, and the rest is quickly told, for all Crowheart knew the story
of Essie Tisdale's miraculous rescue and of the picture primer which had
furnished the single clue to her identity.

With the news of Essie