rattled on like a kid about her old home and her school pranks and
the things she liked and the hateful ways of those Johnson girls just
across the street, 'way up in Indiana. Not a word was said about Ed
Collier or victuals or such solemn subjects. About noon Mame looks and
finds that the lunch she had put up in a basket had been left behind.
I could have managed quite a collation, but Mame didn't seem to be
grieving over nothing to eat, so I made no lamentations. It was a sore
subject with me, and I ruled provender in all its branches out of my
conversation.

"I am minded to touch light on explanations how I came to lose the
way. The road was dim and well grown with grass; and there was Mame by
my side confiscating my intellects and attention. The excuses are good
or they are not, as they may appear to you. But I lost it, and at dusk
that afternoon, when we should have been in Oklahoma City, we were
seesawing along the edge of nowhere in some undiscovered river bottom,
and the rain was falling in large, wet bunches. Down there in the
swamps we saw a little log house on a small knoll of high ground. The
bottom grass and the chaparral and the lonesome timber crowded all
around it. It seemed to be a melancholy little house, and you felt
sorry for it. 'Twas that house for the night, the way I reasoned it.
I explained to Mame, and she leaves it to me to decide. She doesn't
become galvanic and prosecuting, as most women would, but she says
it's all right; she knows I didn't mean to do it.

"We found the house was deserted. It had two empty rooms. There was a
little shed in the yard where beasts had once been kept. In a loft of
it was a lot of old hay. I put my horses in there and gave them some
of it, for which they looked at me sorrowful, expecting apologies.
The rest of the hay I carried into the house by armfuls, with a view