"An' the--gal-hero."
Joan shook her head decidedly.
"There's no heroine to this story," she said. "You need courage to be a heroine, and I--I have none. Do you know, Buck," she went on seriously, "when I look back on all that's gone I realize how much my own silly weakness has caused the trouble. If I had only had the courage to laugh at my aunt's prophecies, my aunt's distorted pronouncements, all this trouble would have been saved. I should never have come to the farm. My aunt would never have found the Padre. Those men would never have fired those woods when they burnt my farm, and--and the gentle-hearted Padre would never have lost his life."
It was Buck's turn to shake his head.
"Wrong, wrong, little gal," he said with a warmth of decision. "When you came to us--to me, an' we saw your trouble, we jest set to work to clear a heap o' cobwebs from your mind. That was up to us, because you were sure sufferin', and you needed help. But all we said, all we told you not to believe, those things were sure marked out, an' you, an' all of us had to go thro' with 'em. We can't talk away the plans o' Providence. You jest had to come to that farm. You jest had to do all the things you did. Maybe your auntie, in that queer way of hers, told you the truth, maybe she saw things us others didn't jest see. Who can tell?"
Joan's eyes lit with a startled look as she listened to the man's words. They made her wonder at the change in him. Had that terrible cataclysm impressed him with a new view of the life by which he was surrounded? It might be. Then, suddenly, a fresh thought occurred to her. A memory rose up and confronted her, and a sudden joyous anxiety thrilled her.
"Do you really think that, Buck?" she cried eagerly. "Do you? Do you?"
"Things seem changed, little gal," he said, half ruefully. "Seems to me the past week's been years an' years long." He laughed. "Maybe I got older. Maybe I think those things now, same as most folks think 'em--when they get older."
But Joan was full of her own thought, and she went on eagerly, passing his reasons by.
"Listen, Buck, when Aunt Mercy told me all my troubles, she told me something else. But it seemed so small by the side of those other things, that I--that I almost forgot it. What was it? Her words? Yes, yes, I asked her, was there no hope for me? No means by which I could be saved from my fate? And she said that my only hope lay in finding a love that was stronger than death. These were her words---"'I loved your father with a passion nothing, no disaster could destroy. Go you, child, and find you such a love. Go you and find a love so strong that no disaster can kill it. And maybe life may still have some compensations for you, maybe it will lift the curse from your suffering shoulders. It--it is the only thing in the world that is stronger than disaster. It is the only thing in the world that is stronger than--death.'"