“You’ve been reading it,” he cried. “You had no right. You have been prying into my private affairs.”
“It may be I haven’t been brought up a gentleman like you,” he returned hotly. “But I wouldn’t be peering and prying into other people’s business for all that. Whatever mean secrets you have hid away in that book, they are there still, safe and sound. All I did was to write a page at the end. I was afraid that if you didn’t have an account of that bear business at once, you might forget just how it happened.”
Dabney snatched the book and nervously turned to the last page. Beatrice was so close that she could not help seeing that it was covered with Olaf’s square schoolboy writing. The last sentence caught her eye, giving a clue to the rest.
“Even though our hero took the precaution of getting behind the lady who was with him, he did not escape entirely unharmed.”
Dabney thrust the book into his pocket and shot Olaf a glance of wicked rage.
“I am very much obliged to you,” he said. “You shall hear of my gratitude later. I know more about you than you think, young man.”
He went out into the rain, slamming the door behind him.
It was still raining next morning, which was, as Aunt Anna said, “a merciful providence, considering how much mending there is to do, and how little we stay indoors to do it on a bright day.”
They sat around the fire talking and sewing busily, for it was true that much had been neglected in the enjoyment of other things. Beatrice, the least enthusiastic seamstress of the three, was the one whose wardrobe needed the most repair, since her scrambles over the mountains had wrought more ruin than she had realized. If Aunt Anna had not mended the rent in her riding skirt and Nancy had not sewed up the rip in her sheepskin coat, she would never have come to the end.
“I seem to have strewed the whole State of Montana over with buttons,” she declared with a sigh, “but, oh, how much I have seen while I have been doing it! If it is still raining to-morrow, I think Buck will kick out the side of his stall, he is so impatient to be off again, and so am I.”
There was a promise of clearing at sunset, for the clouds began to lift, and patches of blue sky showed to the westward, a hopeful sign for the morrow. The peak of Gray Cloud Mountain, visible from their doorstep, loomed through the mist that had shrouded it from view and before dark showed its towering outline, clear-cut against the clouds. And never, never, so Beatrice and Nancy thought, had they seen a more glorious day than the morrow turned out to be. With the whole world washed clean, with the dripping water dried up in an hour by the all-conquering sunshine, it seemed that nothing could be more perfect.