And "to-morrow" kept coming up the hill and out of the darkness till the nervous man was half way to the Howling Wilderness.
The Judge was there, a cooler man now, even though it was midsummer. His shirt was open till his black hairy breast showed through as if it had been a naked bear-skin.
The Forks came in force to its second wedding, but the Forks, too, was cooler, and had put aside to some extent its faith and its folly. And yet it liked Bunker Hill ever so much. Bunker Hill, said the Forks, had not been the best of women in days gone by, but Bunker Hill had never deceived.
She stood alone there that day, the day of all days to any woman in the world, and the boys did not like it at all.
Why had she not asked the Widow to be by her side? Surely she had stood by the Widow in the day of trouble; why was not the Widow there? And then they thought about it a little while, and saw how impossible it was for poor deformed little Bunker Hill to dare to ask the Widow to come and stand with her at her wedding.
The woman who stood there, about to be made the head of the second family in the Forks, had nursed the Widow back to life and health, had seen all the time the line that lay between them, and had not taken a single step to cross it. When her task was finished she had gone back to her home. She carried with her the memory and the recollection of a duty well performed, and felt that it was enough. She had not seen the Widow any more.
The Judge stood there with the Declaration of Independence, the Statutes of California, and the marriage ceremony, all under his arm, and ready to do his office. The sun was pouring down in the open streets. Little Bunker Hill felt hardly, somehow, that she had a right to be married out in the open day, in the fresh, sweet air, and under the trees; and Limber Tim preferred to be married where his partner had been married, and so it was that they had met in the Howling Wilderness as before. All was silence now, all were waiting for the Judge to begin. Up in the loft the mice nibbled away at their endless rations of old boots, and a big red-headed woodpecker pounded away on the wall back by the chimney without.
There was a commotion at the door. Then there was a murmur of admiration and applause.