‘You have his license all ready?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Ed admitted. ‘I started to make it out, but Mamie said if I did he’d know we’d been talking about him, and that would bother him, so I waited till they came.’
Will protested: ‘Why didn’t you say so? I had the permit all made out, but I can see Mamie was right, at that.’
‘There weren’t time,’ Ed told him. ‘The train had whistled in by then.’ He added: ‘Struck me this morning that maybe I wasn’t supposed to sell a license to a man that’d been in jail, but I didn’t check up. I guess nobody’s going to bother him.’
‘He don’t look up this way at all,’ Jem pointed out. ‘Right now I wouldn’t wonder if he thinks the whole world’s down on him, holding their noses when they think of him. But she’ll straighten him out.’ He chuckled. ‘The way she’s made that place down there a regular park in the middle of the burnt land, it won’t be no trick at all for her to make things right for him.’
Ed said: ‘Damn it, I’m a mind to go slap him on the back, shake him by the hand.’
‘Give him time,’ Jem advised. ’You can’t tell how he’d take it. He’ll find out there’s mostly friendly people in the world, ’fore he’s through.’
The boat was loaded, the motor caught with a roar; and the three men watched in silence as it moved away. It went directly into the sun, so that it was presently a diminishing black dot silhouetted against a sea of radiant brightness. Ed said under his breath, with a lifted hand:
‘Good luck, Mister Man.’
‘He looks bad,’ Will reflected. ‘But the river and the woods’ll fix him up.’
Jem said in a sober content: ‘He’s hoed a long, hard row, but she’ll make it up to him.’ They rose to return to their own affairs; but their good will followed Harland long after the motorboat was lost to view.
THE END
Leave Her to Heaven Page 46