He bent down and picked a thread carefully from his frayed trousers. Raising his head, he stared again at the picture. “I wrote it at last,” he went on in his heavy way, “an’ I sent it to her. I was down an’ out. I—kinder lost me self-respeck, boss, havin’ to write that way to Maggie when she could ’a’ done so much better. . . Yes sir. An’ then her answer came. She wasn’t a very good writer. She just said I wasn’t to worry; she guessed she could get along without me till the spring—always one for a joke, was Maggie!—but I was to think of her on Christmas.”
The shabby man’s voice trailed off into silence. After a moment he said, thoughtfully: “Queer how they—the good ones—can break a feller all up an’ put him on his feet at the same time, aint it, boss?”
“I—don’t know,” said Forrester, softly. “Go on please.”
“She said I was to think of her on Christmas. Somethin’ you said awhile back put me in mind of how I felt then. Think of her! Why, I—I felt as though I could chop the mountains down same as if they was trees to get her! I felt there was nothin’—just nothin’—I couldn’t do, or bear, or get, so as Maggie didn’t quit me. I felt I’d get her them great shiny stars fer buttons to her Sunday dress if she was wantin’ them. Made me feel twelve foot high and drunk, she did, just with three lines o’ bad spellin’ and a joke! I’d five dollars in me pocket, an’ I went an’ looked up a Siwash, one o’ them mountain Injuns that looks like a Chinaman and moves up or down like a goat; I’d done him a kindness a little while back, an’ he was grateful, which is more’n white fellers always is. I said, would he take a letter to my _klootch_ in Cascapedia, for five dollars, she to get it on Christmas? Yes, he said, he would. I gave him the letter an’ the bill, an’ off he went—not that she was rightly my _klootch_ then, o’ course, an’ she’d ’a’ been terrible vexed if she’d known I called her so; but it was near enough fer _him_.
“We wasn’t so far apart, as I says—not so many miles on the level, only not a yard of it _was_ level; the hills was like a wall between us; but there was one thing we could both see, one thing that was in sight from Cascapedia an’ from the Oucouagan on the other side. An’ that was that mountain there.”