as content to bide his time until the vacation
ended. He was passing through an ordeal and if he emerged alive he would
be a wiser and better man. He planned a life with Isabel that should be
spent wholly in the open. Cities should never know him again. Isabel
lived now so vividly in his mind that trifles he had not thought of in
their meetings became of tremendous importance; foolish things, lover's
fatuities. There was a certain grave deliberation of speech, more
deliberate when the sentence was to end in laughter; this he knew to be
adorable. There was the tiniest little scar, almost imperceptible, over
one of her temples; it was the right one, he remembered. An injury in
childhood, perhaps; he grieved over it as though he had seen the cruel
wound inflicted. And she had a way of laying her hand against her cheek
that touched him deeply as he thought of it. Her hands were the most
wonderful he had ever seen; useful, capable hands, slim and long.

When he thought of the castigation she had given him in those dark days
when they so miserably misunderstood each other, it helped to remember
her hands; they were hands that could be only the accompaniment of a
kind and generous heart. There was the troublesome cousin who loved her;
but he consoled himself with the reflection that she would not have
mentioned the man if she had really cared for him; and yet this might be
only a blind. He would have an eye to that cousin. The buried treasure
he hadn't taken very seriously. In spite of all the remarkable things
that had happened to him he still had moments of incredulity, and in the
midst of an Ohio wheatfield, with the click and clatter of the reapers
in his ears and the dry scent of the wheat in his nostrils, to dream of
buried gold was transcendent folly.

Gossip from the farmhouse reached him at the back door and he was alert
for any sign that Putney Congdon meditated leaving. Eliphalet had not
returned; he judged that Perky, probably inspired by the Governor, had
frightened the old man into taking a long journey. The woman who had
cared for Edith had left; he got that direct from Grubbs, who poured out
confidences freely as they smoked together after the twilight supper.

"Say, I guess I sized you up all wrong. You don't act like a bum at all;
I guess you and me might rent a farm round here somewhere and make some
money out of it next year. You're the first hobo I ever saw who could do
a day's work without cryin'."

Th