cited. He tried to explain to
me how the accident took place, but I couldn't make out hardly
what he did mean. It appears, though, that he was coming home
along the ravine--where it's always dark, no matter how bright the
moonlight--and he jabbed his hand, as he was walking fast, up against
a sharp jack oak stub--at least, he thought it must have been some
such thing--and he got an awful cut. You wouldn't believe, if you
didn't see it with your own eyes, that a stub of any kind could make
such a wound! There's a long, slanting cut clean through the palm of
his hand. I wanted him to let me look in it for splinters, but he's
real touchy about it; wouldn't even let me bathe it," she concluded
sadly.

Everybody liked Mrs. Horton, and a good many things that her husband
did would have been less easily condoned by their neighbors if she had
been as little of a favorite as he, and one of the things that people
liked best, while finding it most incomprehensible, was that she
believed in him and his good intentions most implicitly.

"I don't see how he could possibly have run against an oak stub in a
ravine," observed Jessie, musingly. "Oaks, and especially jack oaks,
grow only on the dry hillsides." Jessie is very observing when it
comes to a question of the flora of a country, and what she said was
true, as Mrs. Horton hastened to admit.

"I never thought of it before, but I believe that's so," she said. "It
might have been something else, but Jake himself said that there
wasn't any other kind of wood that he knew of, tough enough and hard
enough to make such a cut as that."

Having cared for the horses we three started for the house. "Did you
have a good bed at Mrs. Riley's?" Jessie now asked, bestowing direct
attention on me for the first time. We were just entering the house,
and before I could reply Jessie cried out in surprise at the
unfamiliar aspect of the bed-room, where the heavy quilt still
excluded the daylight from the window.

"Why, what is that for?" she asked, perceiving the cause of the
semi-darkness.

I had purposely refrained from telling my story until now. Now I told
it, to the consternation of my auditors. Jessie could scarcely credit
the evidence of her senses, and Mrs. Horton said feelingly:

"Thank God that you have a brave heart and good sense, Leslie! If you
hadn't thought of that clause in the homestead law in time, and had
gone away last night, I tell you this settlement would have been in