s thought,
like a baked apple. It had still a rosy bloom, but the puckers
overspread it, precisely like an apple's after fervent heat. They shook
hands, Jerry having extracted a gnarled member from his mitten.

"You take a look an' see 'f your trunk's come," he recommended,
restoring his hand to its beautifully knit sheath. "You're better
acquainted with the looks on't than I be. There 'tis now. Anyways it's
the only one there."

It was Raven's own, and he and Jerry lifted it into the back of the
pung, and were presently jogging temperately homeward. Jerry never had
horses with any go in them. In the old days, when Raven used to come to
the farm with his mother, he would write Jerry to see that he had a
horse.

"Get me a horse," he would write, "a horse, a horse, with four feet and
a mane and tail. Not a wooden freak out of Noah's ark, whittled out with
a jack-knife, such as I had last year. Get me a horse."

And he would arrive to find some aged specimen, raw-boned and
indifferent, waiting for him in the stable. And Jerry would slap the
creature's haunches with a fictitious jollity and prophesy, the while he
kept an anxious eye on Raven, "I guess he'll suit ye all right."

He never did suit. He had to be swapped off or, as it happened once or
twice, given away, and yet Raven was obtuse to the real reason until
Charlotte enlightened him. She took him aside, one day in the autumn,
when he and his mother were going back to town.

"I guess if you want any horses next spring," she said, with one eye on
the door where Jerry might appear, "you better fetch 'em along with
you."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "of course I can. Only I had an idea Jerry liked
to do the buying for the place."

"Not horses," said Charlotte firmly. "Jerry's a peculiar sort of man.
They know it an' they kinder take advantage of him. I dunno why."

Then Raven realized that Charlotte herself was responsible for his faith
in Jerry's bargaining prowess. She had hypnotized him into considering
Jerry a great fellow at a trade as at everything else manly and
invincible. She was watching him now with a doubtful and anxious eye.

"No," she repeated, "I dunno why."

"No," said Raven, "I don't know why either. But I'll look out for it."
At that instant he understood her way with Jerry and loved her for it.
She was tall and heavy-browed and dark, with warm, brown tints of eyes
and skin, and seven times the man Jerry was, but it was her passionate
intent