had been watching and hoping for Piney for days,
and was on the alert. Every noise, however, resolved itself into the
noise of bird, squirrel, or sapling. There was never the voice nor the
footfall of the human. Once that very afternoon, he had been so sure
that he had heard Piney's pony up on the bluff that he had gone up there
searchingly, joyfully. But except for a little scatter, that he took to
be the lift of a covey of quail somewhere off in the Gulch bushes, not a
sound or sign came up to the bluff. Steering mourned for Piney. If the
tramp-boy had not gone away, things might have been more bearable. But
the lad's jealousy and his love for Steering were in battle royal now,
and Piney kept far from his hero, on the misty hills. Uncle Bernique was
off on the hills, too, almost all the time; at the moment of this
present crisis Bernique had been away for days. It was the merciless
loneliness of the effort there at Redbud that had been most effective in
dulling Steering's endurance. If he had been less lonely he might have
devised ways of standing Missouri yet longer. Up at Dade farm they kept
telling him, when he went up there for one of his visits to the little
girl with the cherries on her hat, that he had "malary." It did not seem
to him a very able diagnosis, but, as he had admitted to Miss Madeira,
something was the matter with him, and it had now become his notion that
the quicker he got out of Missouri the quicker he would be cured of the
something. He was all ready to commence his treatment; he had
corn-dodgers for supper that night, and for breakfast next morning, and
with the morning sun he meant to travel on. The only reason that he did
not start now, this minute, was because--well, she had come up the river
road about this hour once, and he was waiting. Circumstanced as he was
now, with the only three people whom he could count as friends in
Missouri almost always away from him, life had come to mean little but
this feverish, alert waiting. He went out and sat down by the shivering
Di for his very last wait for any of the three.

It was there that old Bernique came upon him. Steering was shivering a
little, too.

"Dieu! You have the malaria!" was the Frenchman's greeting.

"Go 'long, I have no such thing; I'm only as lonely as the devil."
Steering got up and shook hands with the old man with so much energy
that Bernique made a grimace of pain. "Come up here and talk," cried
Steering, his eagerness to h