Free Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories by Elisabeth Grace Foley

right, but didn’t think it was likely…”
    She said in a quick, uncertain voice, “I
didn’t know when I went down there what I was going to do. I just
wanted to find out…I almost said something, but I…couldn’t. I just
got the pattern from Jennie, and went home.”
    Jim twisted his head a little, squinting up
at her. She was facing away, so he could just see the outline of
her profile against the dimness flung by the tiny fire. It wasn’t
every girl who had an eye-catching profile, he thought; most girls
looked so ordinary from the side, all of them much like each other.
Maybe it was just that he’d been thinking Callie Lupin was a bit of
an extraordinary girl herself. But she had her weakness, like
anybody, and he thought he knew what it was.
    “Well, you’ve got yourself in quite a spot,
haven’t you,” he observed after a minute. “Now you’ve gone to all
the trouble of saving me, you can’t get rid of me. Unless you were
to just shoot me and put me out of my misery—say, you’ve got my
gun, too, haven’t you?—but no, I can’t see you doing that. But you
don’t want to let me loose. What d’you plan to do, starve me until
I promise not to tell a soul about the hole in the rocks?”
    Callie turned abruptly as if she had just
been reminded of something and went back to the fire, and removed
the stew from the flames. Jim watched her. “What did you figure on
doing with me when you helped me, out there?” he said.
    “I didn’t even know,” said Callie, turning
to look full at him for the first time. “I couldn’t leave you there
for—anyone to find you; I just needed time to think.”
    “Made up your mind yet?”
    “No.”
    “I suppose you realize you could always tell
Nolan that somebody’d found the hole,” remarked Jim to the roof of
the mine; “spike our guns if he didn’t use it again.”
    Callie shook her head. “I couldn’t do
that.”
    Jim shook his head too. “No, you couldn’t,”
he said. “It wouldn’t be in your book of what’s honest. You’ve got
some funny ideas about doing what’s right, you know that?”
    “I don’t even know ,” said Callie.
“Can’t you see that? I don’t know for sure about anything.”
    “Why don’t you ask him, then?”
    She flashed him a horrified look, as if that
was the most frightening idea she could conceive of. “No—I couldn’t —”
    Jim said, “Are you engaged to him?”
    “No,” said Callie. “I’m not even…I don’t
know if he even notices me. He comes around our place a lot, even
though Pa doesn’t really like him, but I don’t know if he—”
    “But you’ve been kind of hoping he will, one
of these days,” said Jim.
    Callie had been toying with the spoon she
had used to stir the stew, looking down at it as she turned it over
in her fingers. Now she picked up a tin plate, took the cover off
the pail again and began spooning stew into the plate.
    “Is that what you really want?”
    “What do you mean?” said Callie without
looking up.
    “Do you still like him as well as you did
before, knowing he might be mixed up in this?”
    “I don’t know that that’s any of your
business,” said Callie, speaking crisply for once.
    “Well, not to make a joke, but now that
you’ve dragged me into it I guess it’s become my business,” said
Jim with a return of the edge to his voice.
    Callie let the spoon drop on the tin plate
with a thin clatter. “Would you rather I’d left you lying out
there?”
    “Oh, quit it!” said Jim, making an impatient
gesture with his hand and rolling his head back restlessly on the
blankets. He lay there staring up into the darkness while Callie
put the plate down and clapped the lid back on the pail, her sharp
movements testifying to her mood.
    “Look here, Callie,” Jim began again, after
a few moments; more calmly, but with an earnestness in his voice
that had not been there before. “It’s because of what you did for
me that I think you’re a darned fine girl.