folks that put me in will have to come and take me out."
This was not bravado, exactly; it was not conscience entirely. It was the faint resurgence of an old hope. Henry still dreamed of being vindicated. He doted on it. Honor seemed all that was left. Some docks and mills burning up were nothing to this young man—at least nothing so much. A far greater conflagration had been going on in his own heart all day and thus far into the night and there was something there that refused to incinerate. Vindication, not liberty, was what he craved.
"No?" Adam John had grunted, nonplused, but submissive, as always, to Harrington's slightest whim, "No?"—as if he could not understand, and yet was reconciled.
"I don't blame you though for lighting out, Adam John!" Henry assured him. "You keep under cover now till I can go to the bat for you. You got a rotten deal when I promised you a square one. This whole thing's going to untangle, and untangle darn quick. I can see that much in the light of that burning mill over there."
Adam John grunted.
"Where's Lahleet?" Henry whispered.
"Mebbe so she go Salisheuttes—fishing up coast." Adam John speculated. "Salisheuttes own everything—own all dis now; own every darn t'ing."
"The Salisheuttes!" ejaculated Henry, visioning a few tepees and lodges of smelly fish Indians. "There's a turnover for your life. It seems as if God was giving these people the laugh!"
But Adam John did not linger to philosophize.
