The Quickening. Lynde Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ the bait knife home when hostilities actual should begin.

      "Oh, please! Don't you hurt my dog!" said a rather weak little voice out of the rearward void.

      But, gray eyes human, holding brown canine in an unwinking gaze: "You come round here and call him off o' me."

      "He is not wishing to hurt you, or anybody," said the voice. "Down, Hector!"

      The Great Dane passed from suspicious rigidity and threatening lip twitchings to mighty and frivolous gambolings, and Thomas Jefferson got up to give him room. A girl—the girl, as some inner sense instantly assured him—was trying to make the dog behave. So he had a chance to look her over before the battle for sovereignty should begin.

      There was a little shock of disdainful surprise to go with the first glance. Somehow he had been expecting something very different; something on the order of the Queen of Sheba—done small, of course—as that personage was pictured in the family Bible; a girl, proud and scornful, and possibly wearing a silk dress and satin shoes.

      Instead, she was only a pale, tired baby in a brier-torn frock; a girl whose bones showed brazenly at every angle, and whose only claim to a second glance lay in her thick mop of reddish-brown hair and in a pair of great, slate-blue eyes two sizes too large for the thin face. A double conclusion came and sat in Thomas Jefferson's mind: she was rather to be contemptuously pitied than feared; and as for looks—well, she was not to be thought of in the same day with black-eyed Nan Bryerson.

      When the dog was reduced to quietude, the small one repaid Thomas Jefferson's stare with a level gaze out of the over-sized eyes.

      "Was it that you were afraid of Hector?" she asked.

      "Huh!" said Thomas Jefferson, and the scorn was partly for her queer way of speaking and partly for the foolishness of the question. "Huh! I reckon you don't know who I am. I'd have killed your dog if he'd jumped on me, maybe."

      "Me? I do know who you are. You are Thomas Gordon. Your mother took care of me and prayed for me when I was sick. Hector is a—an extremely good dog. He would not jump at you."

      "It's mighty lucky for him he didn't," bragged Thomas Jefferson, with a very creditable imitation of his father's grim frown. Then he sat down on the bank of the stream and busied himself with his fishing-tackle as if he considered the incident closed.

      "What is it that you are trying to do?" asked Ardea, when the silence had extended to the third worm impaled on the hook and promptly abstracted therefrom by a wily sucker lying at the bottom of the pool.

      "I was fishin' some before you and your dog came along and scared all the perch away," he said sourly. Then, turning suddenly on her: "Why don't you go ahead and say it? Is it 'cause you're afeard to?"

      "I don't know what you mean."

      "I know what you're going to say; you are going to tell me this is your grandfather's land and run me off. But I ain't aimin' to go till I'm good and ready."

      She looked down on him without malice.

      "You are such a funny boy," she remarked, and there was something in her way of saying it that made Thomas Jefferson feel little and infantile and inferior, though he was sure there must be an immense age difference in his favor.

      "Why?" he demanded.

      "Oh, I don't know; just because you are. If you knew French I could explain it better that way."

      "I don't know anybody by that name, and I don't care," said Thomas Jefferson doggedly; and went back to his fishing.

      Followed another interval of silence, in which two more worms were fed to the insatiable sucker at the bottom of the pool. Then came the volcanic outburst.

      "I think you are mean, mean!" she sobbed, with an angry stamp of her foot. "I—I want to go ho-ome!"

      "Well, I reckon there ain't anybody holdin' you," said Thomas Jefferson brutally. He was intent on fixing the sixth worm on the hook in such fashion as permanently to discourage the bait thief, and was coming to his own in the matter of self-possession with grateful facility. It was going to be notably easy to bully her—another point of difference between her and Nan Bryerson.

      "I know there isn't anybody holding me, but—but I can't find the way."

      That any one could be lost within an easy mile of the manor-house was ridiculously incredible to Thomas Jefferson. Yet there was no telling, in the case of a girl.

      "You want me to show you the way?" he asked, putting all the ungraciousness he could muster into the query.

      "You might tell me, I should think! I've walked and walked!"

      "I reckon I'd better take you; you might get lost again," he said, with gloomy sarcasm. Then he consumed all the time he could for the methodical disposal of his fishing-tackle. It would be good for her to learn that she must wait on his motions.

      She waited patiently, sitting on the ground with one arm around the neck of the Great Dane; and when Thomas Jefferson stole a glance at her to see how she was taking it, she looked so tired and thin and woebegone that he almost let the better part of him get the upper hand. That made him surlier than ever when he finally recovered his string of fish from the stream and said: "Well, come on, if you're comin'."

      He told himself, hypocritically, that it was only to show her what hardships she would have to face if she should try to tag him, that he dragged her such a weary round over the hills and through the worst brier patches and across and across the creek, doubling and circling until the easy mile was spun out into three uncommonly difficult ones. But at bottom the motive was purely wicked. In all the range of sentient creatures there is none so innately and barbarously cruel as the human boy-child; and this was the first time Thomas Jefferson had ever had a helplessly pliable subject.

      The better she kept up, the more determined he became to break her down; but at the very last, when she stumbled and fell in an old leaf bed and cried for sheer weariness, he relented enough to say: "I reckon you'll know better than to go projectin' round in the woods the next time. Come on—we're 'most there, now."

      But Ardea's troubles were not yet at an end. She stopped crying and got up to follow him blindly over more hills and through other brier tangles; and when they finally emerged in the cleared lands, they were still on the wrong side of the creek.

      "It's only about up to your chin; reckon you can wade it?" asked Thomas Jefferson, in a sudden access of heart-hardening. But it softened him a little to see her gather her torn frock and stumble down to the water's edge without a word, and he added: "Hold on; maybe we can find a log, somewhere."

      There was a foot log just around the next bend above, as he very well knew, and thither he led the way. The dog made the crossing first, and stood wagging his tail encouragingly on the bank of safety. Then Thomas Jefferson passed his trembling victim out on the log.

      "You go first," he directed; "so 't I can catch you if you slip."

      For the first time she humbled herself to beg a boon.

      "Oh, you please go first, so I won't have to look down at the water!"

      "No; I'm coming behind—then I can catch you if you get dizzy and go to fall," he said stubbornly.

      "Will СКАЧАТЬ