He heard the click of dishes which told that she was clearing the table, and he breathed freer.  He walked across the room, waited a space, and walked back again, and then went out with his heart in its proper position in his chest; Ford was unused to feeling his heart rise to his palate, and the sensation was more novel than agreeable.  When he went again down the path, there was a certain exhilaration in his step.  His thoughts arranged themselves in clear-cut sentences, as if he were speaking, instead of those vague, almost wordless impressions which fill the brain ordinarily.

“She’s keeping cases on that jug.  She must care, or she wouldn’t do that.  She’s worried a whole lot; I could see that, all along.  Down at the bunk-house she called me Ford twice—­and she said it meant a lot to her, whether I make good or not.  I wonder—­Lordy me!  A man could make good, all right, and do it easy, if she cared!  She doesn’t know what to think—­that jug staying right up to high-water mark, like that!” He laughed then, silently, and dwelt upon the picture she had made while she had stood there before the table.

“Lord! she’d want to kill me if she knew I hid in that closet, but I just had a hunch—­that is, if she cared anything about it.  I wonder if she did really say she wished I’d killed Dick?

“Anyway, I can fight it now, with her keeping cases on the quiet.  I know I can fight it.  Lordy me, I’ve got to fight it!  I’ve got to make good; that’s all there is about it.  Wonder what she’ll think when she sees that jug don’t go down any?  Wonder—­oh, hell!  She’d never care anything about me.  If she did—­” His thoughts went hazy with vague speculation, then clarified suddenly into one hard fact, like a rock thrusting up through the lazy sweep of a windless tide.  “If she did care, I couldn’t do anything.  I’m married!”

His step lost a little of its spring, then, and he went into the bunk-house with much the same expression on his face as when he had left it an hour or so before.

He did not see Dick that day.  The other boys watched him covertly, it seemed to him, and showed a disposition to talk among themselves.  Jim was whistling cheerfully in the kitchen.  He turned his head and laughed when Ford went in.

“I found a dead soldier behind the sack of spuds,” Jim announced, and produced an empty bottle, mate to the one Ford had thrown into the gully.  “And Dick didn’t seem to have any appetite at all, and Mose is still in Sleepytown.  I guess that’s all the news at this end of the line.  Er—­hope everything is all right at the house?”

“Far as I could see, it was,” Ford replied, with an inner sense of evasion.  “I guess we’ll just let her go as she looks, Jim.  Did you say anything to the boys?”

Jim reddened under his tan, but he laughed disarmingly.  “I cannot tell a lie,” he confessed honestly, “and it was too good to keep to myself.  I’m the most generous fellow you ever saw, when it comes to passing along a good story that won’t hurt anybody’s digestion.  You don’t care, do you?  The joke ain’t on you.”