But if she does, you're luckier than you deserve, for riding up on us like this! We've heard all about you, Buddy--though you were wise to send this lassie to gild your faults and make a hero of you!" Now, you want to know how Marian managed to live through that.

I will say that she discovered how tenaciously a young man's arms may cling when he thinks he is embracing merely his mother; but she freed herself and ran to Eddie, fairly pulled him off his horse, and talked very fast and incoherently to him and Jerry, asking question after question without waiting for a reply to any of them.

All this, I suppose, in the hope that they would not hear, or, hearing, would not understand what that terrible, wonderful little woman was saying so innocently.
But you cannot faze youth.

Eddie had important news for Sis, and he felt that now was the time to tell it before Marian blushed any redder, so he pulled her face up to his, put his lips so close to her ear that his breath tickled, and whispered--without any preface whatever that she could marry Bud any time now, because she was a widow.
"Here! Somebody--Bud--quick! Sis has fainted! Doggone it, I only told her Lew's dead and she can marry you--shucks! I thought she'd be glad!" Down on the Staked Plains, on an evening much like the evening when Bud came home with his "stake" and his hopes and two black sheep who were becoming white as most of us, a camp-fire began to crackle and wave smoke ribbons this way and that before it burned steadily under the supper pots of a certain hungry, happy group which you know.
"It's somewhere about here that I got lost from camp when I was a kid," Bud observed, tilting back his hat and lifting a knee to snap a dry stick over it.

"Mother'd know, I bet.