Page:The Story of Opal.djvu/10

vi "Yes, in lots of lumber-camps."

"How many?"

"Nineteen. At least, we moved nineteen times."

It was hard not to be interested now. One close question followed another regarding the surroundings of her girlhood. The answers were so detailed, so sharply remembered, that the next question was natural.

"If you remember like that, you must have kept a diary."

Her eyes opened wide. "Yes, always. I do still."

"Then it is not the book I want, but the diary."

She caught her breath. "It's destroyed. It's all torn up." Tears were in her eyes.

"You loved it?"

"Yes; I told it everything."

"Then you kept the pieces."

The guess was easy (what child whose doll is rent asunder throws away the sawdust?), but she looked amazed.

"Yes, I have kept everything. The pieces are all stored in Los Angeles."

We telegraphed for them, and they came, hundreds, thousands, one might almost say millions of them. Some few were large as a half-sheet of notepaper; more, scarce big enough to hold a letter of the alphabet. The paper was of all shades, sorts, and sizes: butchers' bags pressed and sliced in two, wrapping-paper, the backs of envelopes—anything and everything that could hold writing. The early years of the diary are printed in letters so close that, when the sheets are fitted, not another letter can be squeezed in. In later passages the characters are written with childish clumsiness, and later still one sees the gradually forming adult hand.

The labor of piecing the diary together may fairly be described as enormous. For nine months almost continuously the diarist has labored, piecing it together sheet by sheet, each page a kind of picture-puzzle, lettered, for frugality (the store was precious), on both sides of the paper.