Jake kept his word, and his distance thereafter.  Indeed, it was after this first and last conversation with him that the influence of his powerful protection was so strong that all active criticisms of Johnny ceased, and only a respectful surveillance of his movements lingered in the settlement.  I do not know that this was altogether distasteful to the child; it would have been strange, indeed, if he had not felt at times exalted by this mysterious influence that he seemed to have acquired over his fellow creatures.  If he were merely hunting blackberries in the brush, he was always sure, sooner or later, to find a ready hand offered to help and accompany him; if he trapped a squirrel or tracked down a wild bees’ hoard, he generally found a smiling face watching him.  Prospectors sometimes stopped him with:  “Well, Johnny, as a chipper and far-minded boy, now whar would you advise us to dig?” I grieve to say that Johnny was not above giving his advice,—­and that it was invariably of not the smallest use to the recipient.

And so the days passed.  Mr. Medliker’s absence was protracted, and the hour of retribution and punishment still seemed far away.  The blackberries ripened and dried upon the hillside, and the squirrels had gathered their hoards; the bees no longer came and went through the thicket, but Johnny was still in daily mysterious possession of his grains of gold!  And then one day—­after the fate of all heroic humanity—­his secret was imperilled by the blandishments and machinations of the all-powerful sex.

Florry Fraser was a little playmate of Johnny’s.  Why, with his doubts of his elder sister’s intelligence and integrity, he should have selected a child two years younger, and of singular simplicity, was, like his other secret, his own.  What she saw in him to attract her was equally strange; possibly it may have been his brown-gooseberry eyes or his warts; but she was quite content to trot after him, like a young squaw, carrying his “bow-arrow,” or his “trap,” supremely satisfied to share his woodland knowledge or his scanter confidences.  For nobody who knew Johnny suspected that she was privy to his great secret.  Howbeit, wherever his ragged straw hat, thatched with his tawny hair, was detected in the brush, the little nankeen sunbonnet of Florry was sure to be discerned not far behind.  For two weeks they had not seen each other.  A fell disease, nurtured in ignorance, dirt, and carelessness, was striking right and left through the valleys of the foothills, and Florry, whose sister had just recovered from an attack, had been sequestered with her.  But one morning, as Johnny was bringing his wood from the stack behind the house, he saw, to his intense delight, a picket of the road fence slipped aside by a small red hand, and a moment after Florry squeezed herself through the narrow opening.  Her round cheeks were slightly flushed, and there was a scrap of red flannel around her plump throat that heightened the whiteness of her skin.