glad I thought of it! It will be so
nice for you to do something to help out right here at home. And," she
went on, her kind eyes shining, "maybe you can learn to be a
dressmaker--"

"No, no!" interposed Jessie, who had her future comfortably mapped out
in her mind. "I mean to be a teacher."

"Do you? That's a good, respectable trade, too, and a teacher you
shall be if I can do anything to help you get a school."

Jessie smiled up at her gratefully. Mrs. Horton might not, perhaps,
have great influence in educational circles, but the highest authority
among them could not have had a kinder heart. But something that Mrs.
Horton had said set me thinking of quite another matter.

"If you were here so long ago," I observed, suspending my task of
shelling peas, and looking earnestly at our visitor, "why didn't Mr.
Horton take up some land? He could have taken anything, almost then,
and I--we--I have sometimes thought that he kind of wanted this
place," I concluded, weakly.

Mrs. Horton's gentle face flushed; she was really fond of her husband,
who, to be sure, was very careful not to let any knowledge of his
underhanded doings come to her ears.

"To tell the truth, Leslie," she said, "I've thought now and again
myself that Jake was looking after this place. It's a beautiful place;
there isn't another as pretty in the valley, but when we first came
here folks were not thinking of taking up land--no, indeed. Cattle
ranges were what they were after, and they couldn't abide the settler
that put up fences. No; Jake let his chance of taking the place slip,
and your father took it up; and that was right; he wasn't a cattleman,
and he needed the land to work. Don't you fret about Jake's wanting
it. He don't need it, for one thing, for we're real well to do, if I
do say it, and it would be a pretty unneighborly thing for him to
grudge the place to you now. You see, Jake's ways are different. He
makes folks think, often, I make no doubt, that he's set on getting
things when he isn't, really. I expect he'd feel quite hurt if you
were to lose this place."

"Unless he got it himself," was my silent amendment.

"We could buy the ranch where we are," Mrs. Horton went on, "and I
wish Jake was willing to do it; I'm like your father was; I want a
home of my own, but Jake says he doesn't like that place as well as he
does another that he has in mind."

"What place is that?" asked Jessie.

"I don't know, really, Jake's no hand to ta