Chapter XXVI. How Happiness Returned to the Lazy A

When Lite rapped with his knuckles on the door of the room where she was waiting, Jean stood with her hands pressed tightly over her face, every muscle rigid with the restraint she was putting upon herself. For Lite this three-day interval had been too full of going here and there, attending to the manifold details of untangling the various threads of their broken life-pattern, for him to feel the suspense which Jean had suffered. She had not done much. She had waited. And now, with Lite and her dad standing outside the door, she almost dreaded the meeting. But she took a deep breath and walked to the door and opened it.

"Hello, dad," she cried with a nervous gaiety. "Give your dear daughter a kiss!" She had not meant to say that at all.

Tall and gaunt and gray and old; lines etched deep ground his bitter mouth; pale with the tragic prison pallor; looking out at the world with the somber eyes of one who has suffered most cruelly,--Aleck Douglas put out his thin, shaking arms and held her close. He did not say anything at all; and the kiss she asked for he laid softly upon her hair.

Lite stood in the doorway and looked at the two of them for a moment. "I'm going down to see about-- things. I'll be back in a little while. And, Jean, will you be ready?"

Jean looked up at him understandingly, and with a certain shyness in her eyes. "If it's all right with dad," she told him, "I'll be ready."

"Lite's a man!" Aleck stated unsmilingly, with a trace of that apathy which had hurt Jean so in the warden's office. "I'm glad you'll have him to take care of you, Jean."

So Lite closed the door softly and went away and left those two alone.

In a very few words I can tell you the rest. There were a few things to adjust, and a few arrangements to make. The greatest adjustment, perhaps, was when Jean begged off from that contract with the Great Western Company. Dewitt did not want to let her go, but he had read a marked article in a Montana paper that Lite mailed to him in advance of their return, and he realized that some things are greater even than the needs of a motion-picture company. He was very nice, therefore, to Jean. He told her by all means to consider herself free to give her time wholly to her father --and her husband. He also congratulated Lite in terms that made Jean blush and beat a hurried retreat from his office, and that made Lite grin all the way to the hotel. So the public lost Jean of the Lazy A almost as soon as it had learned to welcome her.

Then there was Pard, that had to leave the little buckskin and take that nerve-racking trip back to the Lazy A. Lite attended to that with perfect calm and a good deal of inner elation. So that detail was soon adjusted.

At the Lazy A there was a great deal to do before the traces of its tragedy were wiped out. We'll have to leave them