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Page 73
While Charlotte was absent, making ready her plates, her visitors waited
in the little living-room and looked about it. Its walls were now
possessed of many interesting photographs of people in the village,
among them several of Burns himself, at which he gazed with a quizzical
expression.
"She certainly succeeds in making a hero of me, doesn't she?" he
observed. "Red hair turns dusky before the camera, luckily for me. I look
as if there wasn't much of anything I couldn't do, including playing
leading man in a melodrama--eh?"
"She has caught the personality, cleverly enough," Leaver commented,
looking over Burns's shoulder.
"I rather think, though," mused Burns, "that I don't look so much as if
there wasn't anything I couldn't do as that I thought there wasn't.
There's a difference, Jack,--eh? Do I really seem as ready to bounce out
of my chair and tackle somebody as that picture makes me look? If I do I
need to have a tourniquet applied somewhere about my neck to stop the
flow of blood to my bumptious head."
Smiling, Leaver studied the photograph in question. "It's the best I ever
saw of you. It's precisely that air of being all there and ready for
action which is your most endearing characteristic. It is the quality
which made me willing to put myself in your hands last April."
"Much obliged. But you didn't put yourself in my hands. I laid hands
on you and tied you down. I couldn't do it now, though," and Burns
turned to survey his friend with satisfaction. "You are in elegant trim,
if I do say it who shouldn't, and that's why I want a picture of my
handiwork--and Nature's. It's just possible that Nature deserves some
credit, not to mention Amy Mathewson. By the way, she's another who must
have this portrait of you, my boy."
"She certainly shall, if she cares for it," admitted Leaver, gravely.
"I'm very willing to remind her how much I owe her, in that and better
ways."
Charlotte appeared. As she set about her work Bob came racing over the
lawn and in at the open door.
"Uncle Red, somebody wants you right away quick!" he announced.
"Just my luck! I wanted to help pose the picture," grumbled Burns, but
went off, the boy on his shoulder shouting with delight.
The photographer, in the plain dress of dull blue, which, artist-wise,
she had chosen as her professional garb, and in which she herself made a
picture to be observed with enjoyment, moved deftly about the room
arranging her lights and shadows. This done, she turned to her sitter.
When she came in he had been standing before a set of prints upon the
wall, studying them critically, but from the moment of her entrance he
had been watching her, though he held a photograph in his hand with which
he might have seemed to be engaged.
"Ready?" she asked, smiling. "Or, rather, as ready as you ever will be?"
"Does my reluctance show as plainly as that? But I am quite ready now to
do your bidding."
"Sit down in that chair, please. But first--I really can't wait longer to
ask you--how is Jamie Ferguson?"
"Doing finely." His face lighted with pleasure at the thought.
"Will he have the full use of his poor little legs?"
"It is too soon to say positively. We hope quite confidently for that
result. He shows better powers of recuperation than we dared expect."
"Yesterday," said Charlotte, her hand on a certain bulb out of sight,
"Miss Mathewson told me something Jamie had said. It was the most
extraordinary thing--"
She related the incident, in which the lad had shyly praised both
Leaver and Burns as seeming to him like big brothers. She told it with
animation, her watchful eyes on her sitter's face. At a certain point,
just before the climax of the story, she gave the bulb a long, slow
pressure; then, ending, she remarked:
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