And again Caleb spent a sleepless night, this time
alone before the fireplace, but the thoughts which kept him awake
failed to grow fantastic and romantically absurd with prolonged
contemplation, as they had the night before.
Never until that day had he considered his oft-repeated theory that
there was many a boy in those back-woods who, with a chance, might go
far, as anything but an idealistic truth, in the abstract. The
realization that a chance had come to test it, in the concrete, stunned
him at first.
Dispassionately he summed up all the boy's characteristics that night
and reviewed them, one by one: His poise and utter lack of
self-consciousness, his fearless directness and faith in himself, in
all that he said or did; and they came through the mental assay without
fault or flaw.
He had already decided that he must go up-river and explore the old tin
box which had been left there, locked in the "cubberd," but he was a
little proud to make his decision before he learned all that it might,
or might not, reveal; he was proud to believe that he knew a
thorough-bred, without a pedigree for confirmation. And when Sunday
morning dawned and the floodlike downpour had subsided to a gray and
steady rainfall, even Caleb, none too weatherwise, knew that it had
come to "stay fer a spell." He knew that the boy who had come marching
down the valley road, two days before, was going to stay, too, if it
lay within his power to persuade him.
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