The Man Thou Gavest. Harriet T. Comstock

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СКАЧАТЬ out there’s goin’ t’ be a right smart lot of trouble brewing!”

      This was said with such comical seriousness that Truedale laughed again, but sobered instantly when he recalled the incident of the white bantam which Jim had so vividly portrayed.

      “But you see,” he replied, “I don’t want to let you go after this first party, and never see you again!”

      The girl shrugged her shoulders and apparently dismissed the matter. She sat down and, with charming abandon, began to eat. Presently Truedale, amused and interested, spoke again:

      “It would be very unkind of you not to let me see you.”

      “I’m—thinking!” Nella-Rose drew her brows together and nibbled a bit of corn bread meditatively. Then—quite suddenly:

      “I’m coming here!”

      “You—you mean that?” Truedale flushed.

      “Yes. And the big woods—you walk in them?”

      “I certainly do.”

      “Sometimes—I am in the big woods.”

      “Where—specially?” Truedale was playing this new game with the foolish skill of the novice.

      “There’s a Hollow—where—” (Nella-Rose paused) “where the laurel tangle is like a jungle—”

      Truedale broke in: “I know it! There’s a little stream running through it, and—trails.”

      “Yes!” Nella-Rose leaned back and showed her white teeth alluringly.

      “I—I should not—permit this!” For a moment Truedale broke through the thin ice of delight that was luring him to unknown danger and fell upon the solid rock of conservatism.

      “Why?” The eyes, so tenderly innocent, confronted him appealingly. “There are nuts there and—and other things! You are just teasing; you’ll let me—show you the way about?”

      The girl was all child now and made Truedale ashamed to hold her to any absurd course that his standards acknowledged but that hers had never conceived.

      “Of course. I’ll be glad to have you for a guide. Jim White has no ideas about nuts and things—he goes to the woods to kill something; he’s there now. I dare say mere are other things in the mountains besides—prey?”

      Nella-Rose nodded.

      “Let’s sit by the fire!” she suddenly said. “I—I want to tell you—something, and then I must go.”

      The lack of shyness and reserve might so easily have become boldness—but they did not! The girl was like a creature of the wilds which, knowing no reason for fear, was revelling in heretofore unsuspected enjoyment. Truedale pulled the couch to the hearth for Nella-Rose, piled the pillows on one end and then seated himself on the stump of a tree which served as a settee.

      “Now, then!” he said, keeping his eyes on his breezy little guest. “What have you got to tell me—before you go?”

      “It’s something that happened—long ago. You will not laugh if I tell you? You laugh right much.”

      “I? You think I laugh a good deal? Good Lord! Some folk think I don’t laugh enough.” He had his friends back home in mind, and somehow the memory steadied him for an instant.

      “P’r’aps they-all don’t know you as well as I do.” This with amusing conviction.

      “Perhaps they don’t.” Truedale was deadly solemn. “But go on, Nella-Rose. I promise not to laugh now.”

      “It was the beginning of—you!” The girl turned her eyes to the fire—she was quaintly demure. “At first when I saw you looking in that window, yonder, I was right scared.”

      Jim White’s statement that Nella-Rose wasn’t more than half real seemed, in the light of present happenings, little less than bald fact.

      “It was the way you looked—way back there when I was ten years old. I had run away—”

      “Are you always running away?” asked Truedale from the hollow depths of unreality.

      “I run away a smart lot. You have to if you want to—see things and be different.”

      “And you—you want to be different, Nella-Rose?”

      “I—why, can’t you see?—I am different.”

      “Of course. I only meant—do you like to be different.”

      “I have to like it. I was born with a cawl.”

      “In heaven’s name, what’s that?”

      “Something over your eyes, and when they take it off you see more, and farther, than any one else. You’re part ha’nt.”

      Truedale wiped his forehead—the room was getting hot, but the heat alone was not responsible for his emotions; he was being carried beyond his depth—beyond himself—by the wild fascination of the little creature before him. He would hardly have been surprised had a draught of air wafted her out of the window like a bit of mountain mist.

      “But you mustn’t interrupt so much!” She turned a stern face upon him. “I ran away that time to see a—railroad train! One of the niggers told me about it—he said it was the Bogy Man. I wanted to know, so I went to the station. It’s a right smart way down and I had to sleep one night under the trees. Don’t the stars look starry sometimes?”

      The interruption made Truedale jump.

      “They certainly do,” he said, looking at the soft, dark eyes with their long lashes.

      “I wasn’t afraid—and I didn’t hurry. It was evening, and the sun just a-going down, when I got to the station. There wasn’t any one about so I—I ran down the big road the train comes on—to meet it. And then” (here Nella-Rose clasped her hands excitedly and her breath came short), “and then I saw it a-coming and a-coming. The big fire-eye a-glaring and the mighty noise a-snorting and I reckoned it was old Master Satan and I just—couldn’t move!”

      “Go on! go on!” Truedale bent close to her—she had caught him in the mesh of her dramatic charm.

      “I saw it a-coming, and set on—on devouring o’ me, and still I couldn’t stir. Everything was growing black and black except a big square with that monster eye a-glaring into the soul o’ me!”

      The girl’s face was set—her eyes vacant and wild; suddenly they softened, and her little white teeth showed through the childish, parted lips.

      “Then the eye went away, there was a blackness in the square place, and then a face came—a kind face it was—all a-laughing and it—it kept going farther and farther off to one side and I kept a-following and a-following and then—the big noise went rushing by me, and there I was right safe and plump up against a tree!”

      “Good СКАЧАТЬ