When with a last desperate spurt I ran into the clearing, I saw the Professor sitting in the cabin door, smoking his pipe and basking in the sunshine as though life held no trouble for him. I believed that I was in time to warn him of the threatening danger, that I had outsped the warrant, that I had outrun the redoubtable Lukens, and in the luxury of that thought my overtaxed strength ebbed away and I sank down on a stump, hot and panting. I had run a hard race for so small a boy. At times it seemed as though the mountains drew back from me, that every one of the five miles had stretched to ten, but I kept bravely on, going at top speed over the level places, dragging wearily up the steep hills, cutting through fields and woods where I could save distance, following every brief rest with a spasmodic burst of energy, and now I had come to the last stretch, the ragged patch of weeds, exhausted. I tried to call my friend, but my throat was parched and I could not raise my voice above a whisper, and as my head barely lifted over the wild growth of his farm, he smoked on, unconscious of my presence. Something in a distant tree-top engaged his attention, something vastly interesting, it seemed to me, for he never turned my way to see my waving hand. So I struggled to my feet and staggered on. At last he heard me, sprang up, and came striding over the clearing. Then my tired legs crumpled up; I sat down suddenly and, supported by my sprawling hands, waited for him.
"Davy—Davy Malcolm," he cried, "who has been chasing you now?"
"A warrant!" I gasped. "Mr. Lukens, he is coming with a warrant to arrest you!"
The tall form bent over me and I was raised to my feet. Supporting me in his strong grasp, he held me off from him, and for a moment regarded me with grave eyes.
"And you've come to warn me, eh, Davy?" he said.
"Yes, sir," I answered. "Mr. Pound he thinks you are a dangerous man.Mr. Pound he wants to get you out of the valley. Mr. Pound he——"
The Professor seemed to have little fear of Mr. Pound and as little interest in him. "Never mind the learned Doctor Pound," he exclaimed, and his mouth twitched in a smile inspired by the mere thought of the minister. "The point is, Davy, that you left home before daylight to tell me, and you must have run nearly all the way—eh, boy?"
"I had to," I panted. "You see, Mr. Lukens he was to come here early for you, and I thought if I was in time you might run away."
To run away seemed to me the only thing for the Professor to do, and I expected that at the mere mention of the terrible Lukens he would scurry to the mountain-top as fast as his legs would carry him. Yet he held the constable in as little terror as he did Mr. Pound, for instead of fleeing he drew me to him, and held me in an embrace so tight as to make me struggle for breath and freedom.
"Davy, Davy!" he cried; "you understand me, boy. You are a friend, a real friend—my only friend."
Again and again he said it—that I was his only friend—and not until I cried out that I had had no breakfast and would he please not squeeze me so tight did he release me, and then it was to keep fast hold on my arm and lead me to the house. Penelope had heard us and met us half-way, running, halting suddenly before us, and staring wide-eyed at the bedraggled boy who lurched along at her father's side.
"Davy," she cried, "have you come fishin' again?"
My answer was to hold out my hand to her, and together we three went into the house. There, with my breath regained, and my parched throat relieved, and my tired legs dangling from the most luxurious of rocking-chairs, my spirits rose with my returning strength. It nettled me to see the Professor giving so little heed to my warning. I had performed what was for me a herculean task, and yet the precious moments which I had fought so hard to gain for him were being frittered away in preparations for a breakfast for me. He was evidently grateful for what I had done, but he was getting no good from it. Had I run all those miles to tell him that the bogie man was coming he could not have moved about his cooking with less concern. For a time I watched him with growing indignation, yet I hesitated to mention the purpose of my errand before Penelope, who had fixed herself before my chair and, with her hands clasped behind her back and her head lifted high, was gazing at me in admiring silence. My uneasiness increased as the minutes flew by, and when the first sharp demands of appetite had been satisfied I looked at the Professor, now seated at the other side of the table, and nodded my head toward his daughter, and winked with a sageness beyond my years.
"Mr. Blight, hadn't you otter be going?" I asked.
The Professor, in answer, laughed outright. He clasped his hands to his sides and rocked on two legs of his chair in exuberance. "Davy—Davy, you'll be the death of me yet!"
To me this seemed a very hard thing to say, as I had no wish to be the death of the Professor; but, quite to the contrary, had made a great effort and had risked much trouble at home in my desire to help him. Now I was beginning to think that I had done as well to drop a post-card in the mail to warn him of his danger. The disappointment brought tears to my eyes. He saw them. His face turned very gentle and he leaned across the table toward me.
"Davy, I can't thank you enough for what you have done. But don't worry about me—I'm not afraid of Byron Lukens."
At the name of the constable Penelope broke into laughter, and placed a hand on my arm to draw my eyes to her. "Mr. Lukens was here this morning, Davy, just before you came. And, oh, you should have seen father knock him down!"
My fork and knife clattered to the plate as I turned to the girl, and she saw doubt and wonder in my eyes.
"He did!" she cried. "And oh, Davy, you'd have died laughing if you had seen Mr. Lukens tumble over the wood-pile and hit his head against the rain-barrel."
I stared at the Professor. I had liked him for his kindness to me and had pitied him for his misfortune. Now I was filled with admiration for the physical prowess of this man who could whip the intrepid constable, for in Malcolmville there was no one whom I held in so much awe as Byron Lukens. He was mighty in bulk; his voice was proportioned to his size; his words fitted his voice. Often I had sat on the store-porch and listened to his stories of his feats, and I believed that to cross him in any way must be the height of daring. The tale of the men whom he had whipped in the past and promised to whip in the future if they raised a finger against him would almost have made a census of the valley. That this frail man should have resisted him, that those thin hands should have been raised against him, that the intellectual Professor should have knocked down the Hercules of our village, was beyond my comprehension. So my friend across the table saw amazement welling up from my open mouth and eyes.
He shrugged his shoulders. "There was nothing else to do, Davy. He beat you here after all. Probably you missed him in your short cuts over the fields. Why, it was hardly light when I heard him pounding at the door. He said he had come to arrest me." Rising and drawing himself to his full height, the Professor began to tell me of the early morning conflict, forgetting, in his indignation, how small were his two auditors, and throwing out his voice as though to reach a multitude. "He had come to arrest me—me; said that I was a vagrant; spoke to me as you wouldn't speak to a dog, and told me to come along—to come along with him, a hulking, boastful brute. Why, it was all I could do to keep my temper, Davy. I answered him as politely as I could, said that I had done no wrong, and certainly would not allow myself to be arrested. And then——"
"Then father knocked him down," cried Penelope, clapping her hands."Oh, Davy, you'd otter seen it."
"Should have, Penelope, should have seen," said the Professor reprovingly, and having done his duty as a father and a man of education he drove his fist into the air to show with what quickness and force he could use it. "Yes, that's the way I did it, David. He applied an oath to me and laid a hand on my shoulder. What else could I do? I appeal to you—what else could I do but knock him down?"
"And didn't he whip you for it, sir?" I cried, still doubting that the giant could have fallen beneath such a blow.
"Whip me?" The Professor laughed. "Do you think that great bully could whip me? Why, David, you quite hurt my feelings. By the time he had gone over the wood-pile into the rain-barrel there wasn't any fight left in him. He didn't even speak till he was safe across the clearing. Then you should have seen him. He has gone down to the village to get help; he is going to teach me what it means to assault an officer of the law; he is going to send me to jail for life." The Professor glared out of the open doorway as fiercely as though the constable were standing there and he defying him. Then suddenly he leaned over the table to me, and fixing his eyes on mine asked in a hoarse voice: "David, did you ever hear of such injustice?"
"No, sir," I answered. "But Mr. Pound said——"
At the mention of Mr. Pound the Professor sat down and the table reeled under his fist. "Pound—he is at the bottom of it all. He has said that I am a good-for-nothing loafer and the county should be rid of me. Maybe he is right. But he won't have his way. I have done nothing and I will not go—do you hear that, Davy, I will not go. Now tell me what Mr. Pound said."
In a faltering voice I began my story with that fateful home ride with James. As I went on I lost my diffidence in my interest in the tale, and spoke rapidly till the need of breath slowed me down. There were retrogressions to speak of things which I had forgotten, and many corrections where I had slightly misquoted Miss Spinner, Mr. Smiley, or some other equally unimportant person. I told the story as a small boy recites to his elders the details of some book which he has read; so the Professor had to check me frequently with admonitions not to mind what Mrs. Crumple said about my mother's ice-cream and such matters, but to tell him exactly what my father said of him. Still I persisted in my own way, bound that whatever I did should be done thoroughly, even though he might hold in contempt my effort to be of service to him. When at last there was not a word left untold, he leaned back in his chair and gazed at me with a look of utter helplessness.
"Well, what am I to do now?" he cried. His head shot toward me and his hands were held out in appeal. "Davy, can't you suggest something?"
In my pride at being asked for advice by one so old, I sat up very straight as I had seen my father do and allowed a proper interval of silence before I spoke.
"Yes," I replied slowly. "If you were me I'd run away before Mr.Lukens got back."
This excellent suggestion was met by a frown so fierce that I pushed back from the table in alarm.
"Run away?" he exclaimed. "Why, that's just what they want me to do. What have I done that I should run away? And if I did, what would become of Penelope?"
He drew his little daughter close to his side, while he looked out of the door into the patch of blue sky, seeking there some inspiration. His lips moved, and I knew that he was asking again and again of that little patch of sky what he should do. Then suddenly he rose, as though the answer had been given, for he clapped on his hat, stood erect with shoulders squared and hands clasped behind him, facing the open door with the demeanor of a man whose mind was made up, who was ready to meet the world and defy it. This, to me, was the hero who had knocked down the constable, and I imagined him confronting a dozen like Byron Lukens and piling them one on top of the other, for surely things had come to pass that the man would have to hold the clearing against an army. But as suddenly the shoulders drooped, the back bowed, the head sank, and he turned to me.
"Davy, Davy, what shall I do?" he asked in a hoarse whisper.
As I was silent, he addressed the same appeal to Penelope, and she, in answer, ran to the door and pointed across the clearing.
"Look, father," she shouted; "he has come back."
Byron Lukens had indeed returned and with a heavy reinforcement. Five men climbed out of the wagon which had appeared from the road, and now they began a careful reconnoissance of the house. As they stood on the edge of the woods looking toward us I marked each one of them, and the problem uppermost in my mind concerned what I should do myself, for I was fairly cornered. I could not run away, for they were watching every exit from the cabin, and there was not one of them who would not recognize me did I flee over the open. The presence of James alone meant my undoing, and there he was, standing by the constable, eying the place with a lowering glare which threatened a storm, for here he had fallen and here he would redeem himself by some act of exceptional daring. Caught in this net, I hid behind the door-post and peered around it through a protecting shield made by the Professor's coat-tails. In the silence I could hear my heart beat.
There was one thing for the Professor to do now, and he did that well. He gathered his scattered senses and stood quietly in the doorway, smoking, leaving to the invaders the burden of action. Their indecision gave him strength.
"The idea of my giving in to a crew like that," he said to me in a steady voice. "It's a pity Mr. Pound didn't come, and your father too, David, that they might see how little I cared for their warrants." Then, to show how undisturbed he was by their presence, he called to them pleasantly: "Good morning, gentlemen."
This mild greeting gave courage to our foes and Stacy Shunk advanced. His coming was a sign that reason was to be used before force, and with his first step he began to gesticulate and to protest his friendly purpose. But he could not argue with any acumen while his bare feet were traversing a carpet of briers, and a silence followed, broken by exclamations as he came on slowly but resolutely as though he walked on eggs. Half-way over the clearing he stopped with a cry of pain, and the herald's mission was forgotten in the search for a thorn. The picture of Stacy Shunk balancing on one foot while he nursed the other in his hands made the Professor laugh hilariously and he called to him to hurry.
But Stacy would come no farther. He planted himself firmly on his bleeding feet; his great black hat-brim hid his face, but the voice which came from under it was soft, and he held out his hands as though he offered his dear friend the protection of his arms.
"You know what these other fellows want, Professor, and you know I'd only come along to help you. The whole thing was only a joke first off, but you've gone and assaulted the constable, and there'll be trouble if you don't settle it and be reasonable. Now, my advice is——"
"Thank you for your advice, Stacy Shunk," exclaimed the Professor. "But you know as well as I do that I have done nothing that I can be arrested for."
"Of course I do," returned the herald. "But you hadn't otter upset the preacher so. You'd otter believe what he says, and when he preaches about Noah and the like you hadn't otter produce figures in public to show that Noah and his boys couldn't have matched up all the animals and insects in the time they was allowed, let alone stabling 'em in a building three hundred cupids long and thirty cupids wide and three stories high. Now I allus held——"
"I don't care what you held," said the Professor sharply. "You can't get me into an argument now. I suppose it was unwise of me to try to make you people think, but you can't arrest a man for simply being unpopular. This is my home, and no law of your twopenny village can make me leave it."
"I'm not going to argue about Noah," protested Stacy Shunk. "As your friend, I'm trying——"
"As my friend, you had best go home and take your other friends with you." The Professor's voice was dry and crackling.
He reached behind the door and took up the long rifle which leaned against the wall. There was no threat in his action, for he held it under his arm and looked off to the mountain-top as though he were trying to make up his mind whether or not it was a good day for hunting. Stacy Shunk saw another purpose beneath this careless air, and he abandoned argument. Without heeding the briers, he fled to his friends; he did not even stop there, but plunged into the bushes, and above them I saw his head and hands moving together in an excited colloquy. The ludicrous figure which he cut in his retreat excited the Professor to laughter, in which Penelope joined, clapping her hands with mirth. I, wiser than she as to the danger of firearms, and trusting less to her father's mild intentions, broke into tearful pleading.
"Please don't shoot, Professor," I whimpered, tugging at his coat-tails to drag him back. "They won't hurt you, I know they won't."
"Don't worry, Davy," the Professor said with a reassuring smile. "They wouldn't hurt any one, nor would I. Didn't Shunk run at the mere sight of a gun? Why, if I pointed it at the rest of them they would fly like birds."
It was not fair to judge the courage of the others by the cowardice of Stacy Shunk. The constable's boasts came out of the past to goad him into action, and while Joe Holmes, the blacksmith, might have been very weak in the knees, he was not ready to retreat so early in the action when his helper, Thaddeus Miller, was watching him. As for James, despite the fall his moral qualities had taken in my estimation, I believed him to be a man of unflinching bravery, and he it was that I feared most when at last the advance began across the clearing, the four moving abreast with military precision, while Stacy Shunk hurled at them many admonitions to be cautious. I knew that nothing would stop James; that while his comrades might scatter like birds, he would come on to a deadly hand-to-hand conflict, and I pictured the Professor and him swallowing each other like the two snakes of tradition. I forgot my own safety, and threw both arms about one of the Professor's legs and tried to pull him into the house. Penelope, too, lost her courage when she saw the numbers of the enemy and their bold advance, and she clung, wailing, to her father's waist. He shook us off, and for the first time spoke to us sharply, and so sharply that the child reached her hand to mine and together we slunk into a dark corner.
Of what followed we saw nothing. We heard the voices, nearer and nearer. Then the men seemed to halt and to address the Professor in tones of argument. We are a peaceable folk in our valley and little given to the use of firearms, and I suspect that the constable and his aids really knew the Professor to be a peaceable man or they would not have come thus far with such boldness. To come farther they hesitated until they had made it perfectly clear that they acted in his best interests. Even Byron Lukens was willing to let "bygones be bygones."
"I'm just doing of my duty, Mr. Blight," he said in a wheedling tone, "and if you'll come along quiet-like I'll say nothing about it to the squire."
"You can fix it all up with the squire," I heard Joe Holmes say."There's really nothing again you, only you must comply with the law."
Then James spoke—to my astonishment not in a bold demand that theProfessor surrender, but softly, asking him to be careful with the gun.
"Nobody has nothing again you, Professor," he said as gently as he would have spoken to me, and hearing this I took heart, for with James in such a temper there seemed no danger of a serious clash.
"No one has nothing against me," the Professor repeated in a tone of irony. "You only want to drag me through the village before the squire. Tell the squire to come here to me and explain."
There was a moment of silence. It was so quiet outside that even the birds seemed to be listening and watching; then came the swish of weeds trampled under foot.
"Be off, the whole crew of you," cried the man in the doorway, and I saw the butt of the gun rise to his shoulder.
I wanted to cry out, but my throat was parched with fright, andPenelope was clinging to my neck in silent terror.
There was another moment of silence. Then James began to laugh in that vast ebullient way of his, and a bit of dry brush snapped sharply under some foot. The report of the rifle shook the cabin. It must have shaken the mountains too, it seemed to me, for the floor beneath me rocked in time to the echoes of it rattling among the hills, and I heard a wild scream, the cry of a man hurt to death, and the shrill cries of startled birds fleeing to the hiding of the trees. A puff of wind swept a thin veil of smoke into the room, but for me the air was filled with sickening fumes, and I sank to my knees and closed my eyes as a child does at night to shut out the perils of the darkness. I felt Penelope's arms gripped tightly about my neck, her dead weight dragging me down. I heard the last echoes of the shot, faintly, down the narrow valley, and outside the incoherent shouts of men. Then there was a silence, broken only by Penelope's sobs. It seemed to me long hours I was there on my knees before I dared to open my eyes and bring myself into the world again. And when I did it was to see the room darkened and the Professor leaning against the closed door with his hands wide-spread, as though with every muscle braced to hold it against an onslaught. Yet he trembled so that a child might have brushed him aside.
There was no onslaught. I waited the moment when the door would be crashed in. I heard the clock ticking monotonously on the cupboard and the wood crackling in the stove. The birds were singing again, and outside in the clearing it was as peaceful as on that day when I first came upon it, wet and shivering, to find joy in its cheerful sunniness.
I broke from Penelope's embrace and got to my feet. The Professor, hearing me, raised his head from the door and turned to me a face chalky-white, whiter for the dishevelled hair that hung about it.
"Davy," he whispered, "look out of the window and tell me what you see."
I had no care for any trouble that might lie ahead for me. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be taken from this stifling cabin with its deafening noises and sickening fumes and above all from this mad fellow who looked as I had seen a rat look when cornered in a garner. I ran to the window and peered through the smutted panes, but there was no one outside to see or to help me. The clearing was as quiet as in the earlier morning when I had looked over it at the Professor studying the distant tree-top.
"What do you see, Davy?" he asked in a hoarse voice.
"Nothing," I answered. "They've gone away."
"And isn't Lukens there—out there in the weeds?"
I rubbed the smutted glass and peered through it again into every corner of the clearing. "No," I said, "there's nothing there."
The Professor drew back from the door and stood before me brushing his matted hair from his face.
"I didn't mean it, Davy," he said. "It was all a mistake. They were going away and I was dropping the gun, and somehow I touched the trigger and Lukens fell. They've taken him home, but they'll come back—a hundred of them this time. Oh, Davy, Davy, help me!"
I knew that I could not help him. My thought then was for myself, and I did not answer, but measured the distance to the door and waited my chance to dart to it and get away, for in him before me, driving his long fingers through his hair and staring at me with frightened eyes, I saw the man whom I had pictured in fear that first morning when I came to the mountains. This was the real Professor and I was caught.
"Oh, let me go!" I cried.
"Why, Davy!" He gave a start of surprise. The frightened look passed and he reached out his hands to my shoulders. I shrank back. The scream of Byron Lukens still rang in my ears, and to me there was something very terrible in this man who had dared to kill, this man for whom all the valley would soon be hunting, this man who even now might be standing in the shadow of the gallows. He saw the terror in my face; to his eyes came that same look my dog would give me when I struck him.
"Why, Davy," he said, holding out two trembling hands. "Boy, I thought you were my only friend."
This was the cry of a man worse hurt than Byron Lukens, and in a rush of boyish pity for him I forgot my dread and running to him threw my arms about him, hugged him as I should have hugged my dog in a mute appeal for pardon. So we three stood there in silence, the Professor, Penelope, and I, with arms intertwined and our heads close together. Then after a moment he raised himself and shook us off gently.
"I've been a fool, Davy," he said, speaking quietly. "I've been an idle, worthless fool and now I must pay for it. Soon they'll be coming for me and I must run. But I'll come back; I'll make it all up—some day Penelope will be proud of me. Until then, Davy, my friend, you'll take care of Penelope, won't you—till I come back?"
Hearing this, Penelope dragged his face down to hers imploring him to take her with him. He kissed her. Then he lifted her high in his arms as though in play and held her off that she might see how gayly he was smiling and take heart from it.
"I don't know where I am going, child," he said, "but I am coming backfor you very soon, and you will see what a man your father really is.I haven't been fair to you, Penelope—but wait—wait till I come back.And Davy will take care of you—won't you, Davy?"
"Yes, sir," I said boldly.
What else could a boy have said in such a case, when every passing moment meant danger to his friend? I had no thought of the full meaning of my promise, for I did not look beyond that day, and that day my goal was home. Home there was safety for me and for Penelope as well. Home all perplexing problems solved themselves. Home was a place of great peace, and my father and mother benign genii who lived only to make others happy. It was easy to lead Penelope home, and I was sure that if I told my father and mother of my promise to take care of her, they would make the way easy for me. So when the Professor had kissed the child and lowered her to the floor, I put out my hand and took hers in a self-reliant grasp.
The Professor picked up the fallen rifle and put it away in its corner; he pushed the kettle to the back of the stove; he seemed to be tidying up the house. He blew the dust from his hat and crushed it down on his head. Then standing in the open doorway, he surveyed the room critically as if to make sure that all was in order before he strolled down to the village.
"Good-by, Penelope," he said in a quiet voice. "Stay with Davy till I come back—I'll come back soon."
For a moment Penelope believed him. "Good-by, father," she called as he turned and walked away.
He had passed the door. Hearing her voice, he gave a start, then broke into a run. He ran as never I had seen a man run. He was not alone a man in flight. Every limb was filled with fear and moving for its life. Even his hat and coat were sensate things, struggling madly to get away to a safe refuge. Seeing him flying thus across the clearing toward the mountains, Penelope broke from me with a cry, but I caught her and held her in my arms. She called to him wildly, yet he did not turn, and in a moment had plunged into the bush.
Long after he had gone we two stood in the cabin door searching the silent wall of green for some sign of him. None was given. The shadow of the ridge crept away as the sun climbed higher and the clearing was bathed in its brightness. A crow called pleasantly from a tall pine. The birds, back from their hiding, sang as though on such a day there could be no trouble.
I felt the blue ribbon brush my cheek, and two small bare arms about my neck.
I turned to Penelope and said: "Don't cry, little 'un. I'll take care of you."
To Nathan, the white mule, I owed it that I was able to take good care of Penelope Blight in the first hours of my guardianship. But for him I should have brought her face to face with the mob that rode out of Malcolmville to storm the clearing. I knew but one road home from the gut, and that was the way James had brought me fishing. Had we followed it, we should have hardly crossed the ridge before we met the van of an ill-organized but determined army, and then to her grief terror must have been added by the wagons filled with men armed as though they were going into battle. The obstinate temperament of the mule served us a good turn. When Penelope and I led him from the barn and climbed to his back, he must have supposed that we were going to the store and should leave him tied for hours in the hot sun, switching flies, while we sat comfortably in the shade of the porch discussing the universe's affairs. Believing this, he protested, stopping in the middle of the clearing to enjoy a few tidbits of sprouting corn. Discovering that the small boy on his back lacked his master's strength and courage, he decided to go on, but as he chose. He chose first a trot. To Penelope and me it seemed a mad gallop, and I clung desperately to his scanty mane while she clutched my waist and pleaded with me to halt him and let her down. In this eternity of suffering—ten minutes really—her greater grief was forgotten, and she was spared the pang of a last look at her deserted home, for when Nathan decided to walk she turned her head to see only a long archway of trees ending in a green wall.
"Davy," she cried, "please let me get off!"
Now I wanted to get off myself, but I suspected her desire to run back to the clearing, and my over-powering thought was to carry her away from that forbidding place. I had promised the Professor to take care of the girl, and responsibility had added years to my age and inches to my stature. I was no longer a shivering, frightened boy clinging to her hand, and, though I was not the master of the mule, while we stayed on his back I was Penelope's master, and that was what I had determined to be.
"Don't be afraid, little 'un," I returned boldly, when I had recovered my breath and balance. "I can handle him all right."
To make good my boast, I even dared to kick Nathan, fearing lest a pause in our journey might allow her to slip from his back.
"I want to find father—to go with him," she pleaded. It was the hundredth time she had told me that.
"He said you were to come with me, Penelope," I argued. "And he told me particular that he wouldn't be home till a week from Monday."
This last was a little fiction of mine, which seemed warranted by the circumstances, and had Penelope pressed me and asked me when her father had made such a definite statement I was ready to go to any extent with like imaginings if only I could keep her with me. She did not, and her cheerier tone quieted my conscience.
"Is he?" she cried. "Do you really think he will come home, Davy?"
"Didn't he tell me so?" I returned haughtily. "And besides, what would he stay away any longer for?"
Still Penelope was inclined to doubt. She knew that the morning's strange events had brought her father into great trouble, and she could not believe that a vain search for him would satisfy his enemies. Two weeks, she thought, would suffice to wear them out, but two weeks in her small mind was an eternity when it was to be faced without him.
"Oh, Davy, I wish he hadn't done it," she cried. "If he hadn't shotMr. Lukens, then he wouldn't have to run away, would he?"
"That was just a mistake," I replied, as though shooting constables were quite a favorite sport where I lived. "He told me particular he didn't mean it, but having done it, and they not understanding that he didn't mean it, he kind of had to get out till things blowed over."
"Didn't he do wrong to shoot Mr. Lukens?"
"Wrong?" My tone expressed the greatest astonishment at such an idea. "Why, Penelope, if I was him I'd have done exactly the same thing—exactly."
My approval of her father's act was a great consolation to her. The pressure of her encircling arms made me gasp, and there was a note of gratitude in her voice. "Oh, Davy, I know you would; you are so brave."
"And I'll take care of you, Penelope," I said, quite as though I seconded her approval of my courage and had forgotten that there were such things as rattlesnakes. "As long as you are with me you needn't be afraid of anything."
Nathan's pace was quieter and steadier, and being secure on his back I felt capable of any heroism. We had passed the worst part of the road. It was broader, the trees parted overhead, letting in the sunshine, and danger never seems so near when one moves in the bright day; so my heart grew lighter, and, had I known the words of any rollicking song, I should have sung, like James, but lacking these I had recourse to whistling. Nerves which had been set on edge by the rifle's report, the fumes of smoke, the cries of pain and fright, were quieted first by long-drawn, melancholy notes, and then I swung into a bold trilling, more suited to my adventurous spirit, throwing back my head, extending my lips heavenward, addressing my melody to the sky. Pausing, exhausted, I expected to hear from behind me some expression of astonishment and pleasure at my birdlike song. Instead there was only a muffled sobbing.
"Little 'un," I said in a chiding voice, "you hadn't otter cry when I'm taking care of you. There's nothing to be afraid of. Why, we're going home."
Oh, wise Nathan! Then I thought him obstinate and contradictory. Halting, he planted his feet as though no power on earth could move him, and shot forward his long ears. Then it seemed to me that he was trying to show how futile my boast, and in my anger I dared to kick him. A fly would have moved him as well. His long ears trembled as he watched the road rising to cross the ridge, and he seemed to see over the crest and to hear noises too distant and indistinct for me. Then I thought him obstinate; now I suspect that while the Professor had given Penelope to my care, he must have ordered Nathan to watch over us both. The mule looked right through that hill. He saw the threatening army charging the other slope. He turned. The bushes opened, and we plunged into a narrow path which skirted the base of the ridge. In vain I tried to pull him back. In vain Penelope addressed to him her appeals. He was fixed in his purpose neither to hear nor to obey, and struck into a steady canter. I clung to his mane; Penelope, to me. The earth swung around us. Solid became fluid. The path moved up and down, and flowed beneath us like running water. Great trees broke from their roots and ran at us, and when Nathan dodged them, they swung down their branches to blind us with their leaves, and sometimes almost to lift us in the air like Absalom. The memory of Absalom was very clear in my mind, for just a week before I had seen his picture in our Sunday-school quarterly, and now, confused in my eyes with the dancing trees, I saw him, as I had seen him in the picture, suspended from a limb by his long hair, quietly waiting to be taken down. There was something more than a mere coincidence in that Sunday-school lesson. Here was another warning neglected. With Mr. Pound and Stacy Shunk, Miss Spinner took a place as a prophetess. She had taught me that boys who mocked their respectable elders were eaten by bears, and I believed her. She had demonstrated beyond all doubt that boys who defied their parents and ran away from home must come to a dreadful end in the entangling limbs of trees. With Absalom's example before me I had run away from home, and here I was being carried through the forest on a mad steed, and here were the trees running at me from every side, reaching out their forked limbs to seize my hair. Penelope was forgotten. More than once I tried to avert my impending fate by letting go of Nathan's mane and taking my chances with his heels and the stony path, but as I was about to close my eyes and let myself go he rose in the air, and the distance between me and the earth seemed so stupendous as to become the greater peril. Had the mule kept on his wild career I might at last have gathered courage for the fall, but the path came to an end, our pace slackened, the trees took root again; I was conscious of Penelope's encircling arms, and raising my head saw that we were in a broad road, and, better still, we were climbing the hill; each step was carrying us nearer the clearest and bluest of skies that always held over my home; I knew that from that line where ridge and sky met, I should look down and see home itself.
We reached the top of the ridge, and the valley lay beneath us. It was young and cheerful in its fresh green, with here a brown checkering of fallow, and there a white barn glistening in the sun, and orchards in the full glory of their blossom. Below us a stone mill grumbled over its unending task, and from the meadows came the blithe call of the killdee. It was all home to me from the fringing pines on the ridge-top, across the land to the mountains by the river, for on such a threshold one casts off fear. Danger might lurk about us in the shadows of the woods, but never out there in the broad day under the kindly eye of God. Nathan might gallop through tangled brush, but here even his mood changed and he walked sedately. Even the strange road was friendly to me, for it led into a friendly land. It descended the ridge, passed the mill, rose again over a hill; there at the crest I lost it, but only for a moment while it crossed the hollow and came into view on the easy slope beyond, going straight into the valley's heart and beckoning me on.
"It's all right now, Penelope," I cried, and I pointed to the two steeples of Malcolmville, and then led her eyes to the right to a long stone house, almost hidden in a clump of giant oaks. I could find it by our barn, for our barn would dominate any land. In the distance it seemed a mighty marble pile, lifting its white walls into the blue, and then ambitiously reaching higher with red-tipped cupolas. The Colosseum to-day is not half so large as our barn when placed in memory beside it. So there was pride in my voice as I spoke.
"Yon's our home, little 'un, and yon's our barn, and just the other side is the meadow and the creek where I'll take you fishing."
The splendid promise of fishing had little effect on Penelope's spirits. Such a prospect as I offered, such a home, a Babylonian palace beside the cabin in the clearing, with the added joys of the meadow and the creek, should have compensated in part, at least, for the temporary loss of her father, and I was much surprised that she gave no sign of pleasure. She made no answer even, and I had no evidence of her nearness to me but the two brown hands clasped before me and the brush of the ribbon against my neck. So we rode on in silence, save when I whistled, and I did not whistle very much, for my thoughts were too busy with the morning's adventure and forecasting the days to come. My mind was wonderfully clear about the future; the way seemed very easy. Thereafter I should listen to warnings. I had brought myself to unpleasant passes by a reckless disregard of warnings, and now if Mr. Pound told me to beware, or Stacy Shunk to look out, or Miss Spinner to remember Absalom, I should heed their admonitions, yet those unpleasant passes became in retrospect delightful adventures, and I congratulated myself that I was coming through them with so much credit. That I was conducting myself with credit, I had no doubt. My father could not have accepted the Professor's charge more confidently than I, nor could he have used more adroitness in persuading Penelope to leave the clearing. So I was sure of commendation when I brought her home. Home was such a bountiful place. My mother had impressed that on me very often. She had laid emphasis on my obligation to share my riches with others—generally when I had to carry heavy baskets down to the parsonage. To-day I was mindful of that injunction, and to take care of Penelope was a pleasant task, since for the present it meant simply to share with her from an inexhaustible store. Considering the future, I wandered into hazy and very muddled dreams. Did the Professor never return, I was quite willing to keep my promise and to care for his daughter always. This did not mean that I was contemplating matrimony at some remote time. Matrimony, to my youthful observation, was a prosaic state. It did not seem to me that my father and mother led an interesting life. If they were happy in it, then it was in a very strange way, for they only knew a dull routine of work and worry. Sometimes they laughed, and when they did it was hard to discover the sources of their mirth. How my father could find pleasure in Mr. Pound's sermons was a mystery, and when my mother declared that the meeting of the Ladies' Aid had been most enjoyable I was sure that she was pretending. No; the future held something better for me than such dull days. Somehow, somewhere, when I became a man I should live days like this day, I should live as now I rode, with every sense keyed to the joy of living, and Penelope's arms would encircle me and the blue ribbon would gently brush my neck.
These pleasant dreams were disturbed by realities. I had come to one of those dreadful moments when danger rises like an appalling cloud, through which we can see no gleam of light beyond. This cloud, "at first no larger than a man's hand," arose from a fence in the person of Piney Savercool. I saw him with pleasure, for I knew that I was coming to familiar roads, and then he was such a very small boy that I had not that sense of humiliation which I must have felt had one of my own age seen me riding with a girl.
"Morning, Piney," I said grandly.
For an answer Piney simply opened his mouth very wide, and his eyes started from his head.
My effect upon him was very pleasing to me, and I ventured still more grandly: "Pleasant day, Piney."
Then he found his voice, "Ma-ma—come quick!" he shrieked. "DavyMalcolm's runnin' away with a lady!"
This announcement brought Mrs. Savercool from the house, and in a few bounds she was before us, checking our further advance with a wide-spread apron.
"Dav-id Malcolm," she cried, "the idea of you lettin' such a little 'un as her set on such a dangerous animal. Stop! Get down, I say, both on you!"
I could not break through that apron, and my heart sank, for, instead of riding grandly home and presenting Penelope to my parents with a proper speech, we were threatened with an ignominious journey in the Savercool buggy. With Mrs. Savercool's charge that we were foolish children, and that she could never forgive herself if she did not stop our wild career at once, years dropped from my age and inches from my stature, and I was at the point of obeying her meekly. But Nathan took offence at her tone. He bolted. Just what happened I could not see, for I had to take myself to his mane again, and he held his terrific pace until we reached the pike, and along the pike to the fork where the road branched off to our farm. When he paused here it was to consider whether he would go on toward Malcolmville or into the quiet, shaded lane. He must have recalled the hitching-rail, the sun, and the flies, and preferred to risk even a road that he did not know, for on he went—quietly.
We crossed the little knoll and the house came into view. The cry of exultation which rose to my lips was checked when I saw, stretching from the gate down the road, a long line of vehicles. The first held the hitching-post. The others took to the fence—buggies, buckboards, phaetons, single horses, and teams, an ominous picture. Not since my grandfather's funeral had I seen quite such a sight before our house, and my heart sank. Could death have come in my absence? On second thought I remembered how brief that absence had been, measured in hours, and I sought another reason for the gathering. I began at the last vehicle and carried my eye along the line, to find that I knew them all. There was Doctor Pearl's buckboard, with his mustang eating a fence post; Squire Crumple's gray mare in his narrow courting buggy; old Mr. Smiley's ponderous black with his comfortable phaeton, speaking the presence of Mr. Pound and Mrs. Pound, who used it as their own; the Buckwalters' rockaway and the Rickabachs' spring-wagon. Even Miss Agnes Spinner's bicycle had a fence panel all to itself, as though it were very skittish and likely to kick and set the whole road in commotion. To my own unimportant self I never attributed this assembly of all the great folk of the valley. There was some more potent reason. As I pondered, hunting for it, we came to the lane. Until I found that reason it seemed wise for me to turn there, and under the cover of the orchard to reach the hiding of the barn, where I could leave Penelope while I scouted and had a peep through the keyhole of the back door. But Nathan saved me from such an ignominious return. He kept right on. My efforts to stop him only made him trot, and in a moment we were at the gate. He seemed to like the house and the shade of the oaks, for he halted, let himself down on three legs complacently and began to switch at flies. And I, with nothing left to do, was measuring the distance to a safe landing when I heard a cry from the door.
"Davy! Davy!" I saw my mother running down the path with her arms outstretched, and after her came a great company.
"Davy—Davy, dear—we thought you had been drowned!" she cried.
Here, then, was the reason for this great gathering. What a commotion for so small a reason—as though a boy's chief end were to tumble into the water, as though he never were to be trusted out of his mother's sight? I dropped the reins; my eyes and my mouth opened wide with astonishment.
"Your father's dragging the mill-dam for you this very minute." She was at the gate. "Where—where have you been?"
She did not let me answer. She lifted her hands and caught me in her embrace, and Penelope's arms were clutching me about the neck as she was swung with me from Nathan's back.
My mother was crying, from gladness I took it, for there certainly was joy in her eyes when she held me off and looked down at me. Then came astonishment, and she lowered her spectacles from the top of her head to make sure that she saw aright.
"But who—who is this?" she said.
For answer I took Penelope's hand and faced the whole company; faced Mr. Pound and the squire, old Mr. Smiley and Miss Spinner, Mrs. Pound, and a score of others of the great folk of the valley. I faced them with defiance in my eyes, for were not they the authors of the Professor's troubles and was I not his only friend?
"It's Penelope Blight," I said, "and I promised the Professor to take care of her."
"What?" cried Mr. Pound. "The Professor's daughter—the man who almost killed Constable Lukens? Dav-id!"
"Yes, sir," I said. Penelope's hand was tightening in mine, and I glanced to my side, to see her standing very straight, and the blue ribbon was tilted as proudly as on that morning when we met by the mountain brook.
"Dav-id!" cried my mother.
"Yes, sir," I said, looking right at Mr. Pound. "I promised theProfessor that I would take care of her—always."
It was well for me that in my hours of absence fear had brought my parents to a just estimate of my character and to a truer appreciation of my essentiality to their happiness. My mother had long been haunted by a conviction that I should meet an early death by drowning or an accidental gunshot, and this very morning she had awakened from a dream in which she saw her only child floating on the murky waters of the mill-dam. Rushing to my room and finding me gone, she had had her worst fears confirmed, and at the moment of my reappearance Mr. Pound was endeavoring to console her for her loss and to bring her to a state of Christian resignation. So all was forgotten in the joy of my unexpected return, and though in the eyes of the minister, Miss Spinner, and the others I was just a small black sheep about whose absence an unnecessary pother had been raised, there was only rejoicing in the home fold. Even my father did not humiliate me with forgiveness, but took me in his arms silently and held me there, as he might have held me had he just rescued me from the depths of the mill-dam. To follow such a greeting with chastisement, however well merited, was quite out of the question. In the seclusion of my own room I did meet with gentle chiding for the anguish I had caused, but my mother remembered her dream, and my father his hours of futile searching, and I knew that the hands which pressed mine would not be raised against me in harsh reproof. Below us, I was sure, ears were strained to hear some real evidence that I was receiving my deserts, for there was a silence there like that outside of the prison wall when the crowd waits for the doleful tidings tolled by the prison bell. Perhaps the listeners were disappointed. I remember that Mr. Pound looked rather nonplussed as he saw us coming down-stairs, my father leading the way, smiling gravely, my mother following, clutching my hand as though she would never release it.
I had told them everything then. The story I had tried in vain to tell them at dinner on the previous day was now listened to with eagerness, and my father, knowing the truth of James's fall from grace, was outspoken in his declaration that an injustice had been done the Professor. In a solemn conference in the parlor, with Mr. Pound and the squire, Doctor Pearl, Mr. Smiley, and all the other important men of the neighborhood, he decried the attack on Henderson Blight as an outrage; he found solace alone in the fact that the constable had been more frightened than hurt, for it seemed that the bullet had only clipped the flesh of his leg; he took upon himself all the blame for the affair, on the ground that he, at least, should have known better. Squire Crumple heartily agreed with my father, and pointed out that on his part he had only allowed the warrant to issue under protest; henceforth he would rely on his own judgment and would not interpret the law to suit the whims of his friends. Mr. Pound was contrite, but he took comfort in the thought that they had acted for the best in the light of their knowledge of the circumstances, but now, knowing the facts, he advised that the whole matter be allowed to simmer down quietly. He still took issue with his respected friend the squire on the illegality of the means used to rid the community of a most undesirable member. The squire replied with heat, referring to the case of The CommonwealthversusHodgins, and the subsequent action of HodginsversusThe Commonwealth for damages. It was very evident that he would be relieved in mind if the case of The CommonwealthversusBlight did simmer down. But there was one obstacle to this programme of forgetting. It was not the constable. Lukens could be quieted easily. It was Penelope. Even the gentlest ministrations of Miss Spinner had failed to bring the small girl to a realization of the happy change in her lot. Even Mr. Pound was touched by her grief and so troubled that he offered amends in a home under the parsonage roof. He realized now that the reason he had never been blessed with a child of his own was that when the time came there might be a place at his board and a nook in his heart for this abandoned little girl. On the strength of her husband's offer Mrs. Pound was claiming Penelope as her own, and very soon was complaining that she had a most troublesome child to deal with. Penelope had divined that Mr. Pound was her father's arch-enemy, and she met his most benign approach with her head tilted defiantly and her eyes flashing, so that now, in a quandary, he asked: "What shall we do with the child?"
The question was a sign that he surrendered her. He had shown an honest desire to take her under his roof, and no one could say that if he had fired the train which had wrecked her home, he was not willing to make atonement.
"What shall we do with the child?" my father repeated. He rose to show that the conference was ended and the question settled. "David has already answered that," he said, laying a hand upon my shoulder. "My boy promised Henderson Blight to take care of her until he returned. They have settled it among themselves, and I shall do nothing to interfere with them."
He spoke so firmly that no one dared to remonstrate, and so it came that I kept my promise to the Professor as far as it was in my power. He must have said himself that Penelope had a home better than any he could have given her. She had a mother's care—a care so loving that I should have grown jealous had I not found a certain compensation in the fact that the watchfulness over me relaxed and I was less hampered in my comings and goings. Before a month had passed my mother was confessing a dread that the Professor might return and claim the child; she was pleading with my father to abandon what she called a useless and an expensive search. Chance had left the door open, and chance had brought me into the hall, so I stopped and stood as silently as I could that I might not disturb their conference. I was frightened by the sternness in my father's voice. He spoke of his duty. To him duty summed up life. He had his duty, even in the matter of so worthless a creature as this Henderson Blight. Declaring this, he stamped the floor in emphasis.
Often in the weeks that followed, when Penelope and I roamed over the fields, when her merriment rang out the highest, and her laughter was so free that it seemed she was forgetting the clearing and the days when her sole companion was the gaunt and bitter-tongued Professor—often then I would hear again the stamp of my father's foot and his stern avowal, and to me it was as though he were conspiring against me in seeking to send away the only comrade I had ever known, and would leave me to pass my days in the wake of James. I abhorred James now. I had come to know the pleasure of real companionship, and looked back to the old days wondering how I had endured them, and with dread to those that seemed to lie ahead. Penelope was a girl, to be sure, but she was not like the insipid creatures of the village who were held in such contempt by boys of my age. Where I dared to go she followed. Did I climb to the highest girder in the barn and balance myself on the dizzy height, she was with me. Did I venture to run the wildest rapids of the creek in the clumsy box which I called my canoe, she trusted her newest frock and ribbons to my seamanship. And better than all was the respect and admiration in which she held me. To her I was no longer the frightened, shivering boy of the mountain brook. I was in a land I knew and followed its familiar ways without fear. One day she saw me tumble from the bridge into the deep swimming-hole, and while she cried out in fright I swam nonchalantly ashore, a full dozen strokes, and as I dried myself in the sun I reproved her for her little faith in me. On another I presented her to old Jerry Schimmel, sitting, a brown, dishevelled heap on his cobbler's bench, and from my accustomed seat by his stove, in a voice cast into the echoing hollows of my chest, I commanded him to tell us how he had fought in the battle of Gettysburg. From my familiarity with the stirring incidents of the fight as Jerry described them, Penelope thought that I must have had a part in it too, and my modest disclaimer hardly convinced her that I had not been a companion-in-arms of this battle-worn veteran.
What days those were! Even the fear that my father would find the missing Professor grew less. They drifted into weeks, and weeks into months, and there was no sign of the fugitive. I found myself looking into the future as though in the quiet evening I were turning my eyes over the valley to the west and the golden clouds hovering there. I dealt only with results. I crossed mountains without climbing them, and always Penelope shared my glory with me. I look back now smiling at that boyish self-reliance. Mountains have been crossed, but with what heart-breaking struggles? Battles have been won, but with what a toll of suffering?
As I recall the day when I first came face to face with real trouble, with a trouble that leaves in the heart a never-healing wound, it was the brightest of all that summer. It was one of those days when there was not the filmiest cloud to veil the sun; you could see the ether shimmering over the land, and the fields of yellow grain looked like lakes of molten metal. Shaded by our wide straw hats, Penelope and I had no thought of the tropic heat. We were engrossed in the reaper as it cut its way through the wheat; we followed it, counting the sheaves as they dropped with mechanical precision; we stepped along untiringly in its wake, as though the rough stubble were the smoothest of paths, and the clatter of the machine the sweetest of music. Above the raucous clacking I heard my mother calling, and, suspecting some needless injunction not to get overheated, I pretended not to hear and looked the other way. But she was insistent. When we had rounded the field again, she crossed the road to the fence; the reaper stopped, and on a day so still that a dog's bark carried a mile there was no escape from her uplifted voice. Reluctantly Penelope and I abandoned our enchanting travel and obeyed the summons.
"Penelope," my mother said, taking the girl by the hand, "come into the house. Your uncle is here."
Penelope stopped and looked up into my mother's face, and there was wonder in her eyes. She had forgotten her uncle, so rarely had she heard her father speak of him, and I was quicker than she to grasp the meaning of his coming, for I remembered that Rufus, who never had had a real idea, who made his first success by giving away a prize with every pound of tea. I believed that he had come to take Penelope from me, and with every step I saw my fears confirmed.
"Your Uncle Rufus," my mother said, and she closed her lips very tightly as she walked on.
The parlor shades were up—an ominous sign, for the parlor would only be opened to a person of importance. Had the Professor visited us, the humbler sitting-room would have been quite good enough to receive him in, and it seemed a strange commentary on his harsh judgment that his brother should be ushered into the stately chamber where the very air grew old in dignified seclusion. Still more forcibly was this idea impressed on my mind when I stood at the door and saw my father sitting very erect, on a most uncomfortable chair, listening respectfully to the stranger's rapid words.
Rufus Blight spoke in a loud voice; he lolled in the big walnut rocker, with his arm stretched across the centre table, to the peril of my mother's precious Swiss chalet and the glass dome which protected it; on the family Bible his fingers were beating a tattoo as carelessly as they might have done on the counter of his general store. There was nothing in his appearance to suggest kin to the lean and cadaverous Professor. The Professor always seemed to move with effort, but his brother was alive all over. Though short and fat, he had none of the placidity which we associate with corpulence. As he talked his hands moved restlessly; his bristling red mustache accentuated the play of his lips; his heavy gold watch-chain moved up and down with his breathing; even his hair was alert.
"He is a remarkable man—I might say, a very remarkable man," were the words that came to us as we entered the hall. "Of course, you couldn't understand him—few could. He had to go his own way and would take help from no one, not even his brother. Upon my word, Judge——"
Our entrance checked him. He rose, and with arms akimbo stood gazing down at Penelope. She, clinging to my mother, her cheek pressed against her as she half turned from him, looked up at him, abashed and wondering, for to her small mind there was in this stranger something awe-inspiring. The sleek man in spotless, creaseless clothes, with polished boots and close-shaved, powdered, barbered face, was so different from her unkempt father that she could hardly believe him kin. Baal would have seemed as near to her, and had the idol stretched out his arms to take her into his destroying embrace, she could hardly have been more frightened than when she saw Mr. Blight's fat hands reaching toward her. Mr. Blight smiled, and well he might, for this slip of a girl gazing up at him was of his own blood, and all that was good in that blood found expression in her sweetness. He had come prepared to see a slattern, ill-fed, unkempt, the true daughter of shiftless parents and a wretched mountain home; he had found a graceful little body, and he wanted to take her into his possession at once.
"Penelope," he exclaimed, "don't you know your Uncle Rufus?"
There was no particular reason why Penelope should know her Uncle Rufus. She could have submitted herself as easily to the embrace of any well-dressed, smiling stranger, and she shrank back, but my mother pushed her forward within reach of the restless hands.
"It's your dear uncle, child," she said soothingly. "He has come to take you to a nice home."
"And he is going to bring you up," my father added in a wonderfully cheerful voice, born either from his own escape from responsibility or her brightened prospects. "He is going to give you everything."
Penelope was on the verge of tears, but she held them back. "I don't want everything," she said, as she strove to check her forced advance by planting her feet firmly and leaning back against my mother. "I just want to stay here till father comes."
"But your father will come to us—of course, he will come to us, Penelope," Mr. Blight cried. His hands closed on hers, he hooked an arm about her and held her very cautiously, as though he were as afraid of her as she of him. "You mustn't be frightened, my dear," he went on, and, soothed by his kindly tones, she leaned against his knee. "That's better, child." Encouraged by her half-yielding attitude, he stroked her hair. To me, watching them from the hiding of my mother's skirt, she had fallen into a magician's clutches and was being lulled by soft words into an indifference to danger.
"I'm your father's brother, child," he pursued, in his insinuating tone. "Next to him I'm nearer to you than any one else, and to me there is no one as near as he. We will try to find him together—you and I, eh? And we'll all live together in Pittsburgh. You'll like Pittsburgh—it's a very lively, pushing town."
"But I want to stay here with Davy," said Penelope in a low voice.
"With Davy?" Mr. Blight stared at her in surprise. Then he began to laugh as though he were contrasting all he could give her with Davy's humble powers. "Child—child—you don't realize what you are refusing. You don't realize what your Uncle Rufus is going to do for you. I've no one to look after—you will be the joy of a poor old bachelor's heart, won't you, now?"
He spoke as though being a poor old bachelor was quite the pleasantest possible condition, yet he rolled out the phrase twice as if to touch Penelope's heart. Remembering the only other bachelor I had ever seen, I stared at him in wonder. This other was Philip Spangler, who sat all day in the store gazing vacantly at the stove. Once I asked Stacy Shunk why he stayed there, and Stacy, lifting a warning finger, whispered: "He's jest a bachelor, Davy, an old, old bachelor." Contrasting him with Mr. Blight, I was puzzled. If it was a terrible thing to be an old bachelor, certainly he accepted the condition lightly; he was trying to arouse sympathy when it was plain that he did not need or deserve it, for evidently he was quite well satisfied with a single state, however deplorable it might come to be. Penelope was being enmeshed by unfair means, and it was hard to keep still, but there was nothing that I could do.
Now my father lifted his chin clear of the high points of his collar. "Penelope," he began, "you are fortunate—very fortunate—in having such an uncle. Mr. Blight is a prominent man, and I might say"—glancing apologetically at the guest—"a rich man." Then, meeting no contradiction, he added—"a very rich man, who can give you such advantages as would be far beyond my means, even were you my daughter."
"I don't want advantages," said Penelope, hardly above a whisper, and for want of a better resting-place she dropped her head on her uncle's shoulder and burst into tears.
"There—there—there—" cried Mr. Blight, patting her clumsily on the back. Had she been a full-grown woman, he could hardly have been more embarrassed, yet he was pleased that she clung to him thus, for he was smiling. "I'll not give you any advantages you don't want—I promise you. I just wish to make you happy. What's the use of my working all my life, piling up money, capturing the steel trade, adding mills and mills to my plants, if I have no one to look after. There—there—there—now, child, don't cry. Won't you come with your poor, lonely, old uncle?"
Even to my prejudiced mind, he was playing his part well, for this awkward kindness touched Penelope at last. She did not reply, nor did she demur, but she clung closer to him in silence. I saw my danger and hers, and ran to him and grasped his knees.
"Oh, Mr. Blight, don't take her away!" I cried. "I promised theProfessor I'd look after her. I promised——"
"Dav-id!" exclaimed my father, and he grasped my arm and began to draw me away.
My fear of him even could not restrain me, and I resisted, digging my fingers into the knees, clutching the folds of the trousers where Mr. Blight had so carefully arranged them to prevent them bagging. He intervened, as much, I think, to save his immaculate clothes as me from being torn asunder.
"Dav-id!" cried my father.
"Mr. Blight—Mr. Blight—don't take her away!" I pleaded.
Mr. Blight began to laugh. "Judge—Judge—release him," he said, and freeing me from the paternal grasp, he drew me toward him. When he had ironed out the wrinkled knees with his hand, he patted me on the head. "You are a good boy, David," he went on, "and I understand exactly how you feel. What you have done for Penelope will never be forgotten, will it, my little girl?" The emphasis on the last phrase of possession extinguished the spark of hope in me, and had he stopped there I should have surrendered feebly, but turning to my father, he added: "You have a fine boy, Judge, and I like him. When I get home I shall send him a gun. What kind of a gun do you want, David?"
Young as I was then, I had not yet learned to value the good things of life in terms of dollars, and to the power of the dollar my eyes were just being opened. This man wielded it. He was enticing Penelope behind the barrier of his fat, oily prosperity where I could not reach her. Holding her there, he was magnanimously compensating me with a gun, as though we were making a trade in which the profit were mine, as though he were valuing her in money. My dislike, born of the Professor's contemptuous reference to him, had turned to distrust and aversion as I watched him weaving his toils about Penelope. Now I hated him and drew back from him as though his touch were baneful; I stamped a foot and shook a fist and shouted: "I don't want your old gun; Penelope doesn't want your money. You have no right——"
My father's arms were about me. He lifted me from my feet and carried me to the door, and as I struggled blindly to free myself and return to the attack I looked back at Rufus Blight. It was not to see him sinking under the shame of my anathema. Signs of anger in him would have incensed me far less than his lofty unconcern. He even interceded for me, but this only proved how secure was his victory, and that to his view what fell to me was of little moment.
"Don't be hard on Davy, Judge," he said, interrupting my father's apologies for my rudeness. "He's just a boy. I don't know but what, if I were in his place, I should do exactly the same thing—feel exactly the same way."
This was small consolation to me, for Penelope's head was buried in his shoulder; her face was hidden by her tousled hair, but I could hear her sobbing: "Uncle—uncle—let me stay with Davy."
In the plea alone she acknowledged her kin to him and surrendered. He could well afford to be generous. By every law of custom I had merited severe punishment at my father's hands, and that his hands were stayed by Mr. Blight's intercession was but another evidence of his power. When my father reasoned with me kindly, instead of whipping me, I yielded, not to his sophistry but to that masterful influence before which even he seemed to bend. I realized the hopelessness of my cause, and found myself facing Mr. Blight again, an humble suppliant for his pardon. Humbly I asked him if I might not soon see Penelope again, and she joined in my petition. Humbly I asked that some day he would bring her back to the valley, and she seconded my prayer, standing at my side, clasping my hand and looking up at her uncle from tearful eyes. He promised everything. He took my hand and hers, and for the moment it seemed that this little circle was my real family, and that my father and mother, standing over us, were hardly more than law-given preceptors. Before our guest's expanding smile and the magic of his tongue the clouds fled. Those which hung heaviest he brushed away with his restless hands. Soon, very soon, I was to go to that bustling, pushing town of Pittsburgh and with Penelope explore its wonders. We should ride behind the fastest pair of trotters in the State—his trotters; we should see the greatest mills in the country—his mills—where steel was worked like wax into a thousand giant forms; we should take long excursions on the river in a wonderful new boat—his boat— Why it would make a boy of him just to have us with him!
Under the spell of his words an hour flew by, and then my mother led Penelope away to make her ready for the journey. She brought her back to us decked in a hat and frock born of many days of planning and three trips to the county town. The humble art of Malcolmville had not been intrusted with so important a commission as Penelope's best clothes. For these the shops of Martinsburg, crammed with the latest fashions of Philadelphia, had been ransacked; the smartest modiste in Martinsburg had trimmed the hat with many yards of tulle and freighted it with pink roses; the smartest couturiere in Martinsburg had created that wonderful blue chintz frock, with ribbons woven through mazes of flounces; the last touch was my mother's—the plait of hair, done so masterfully that even the weight of the great blue bow could not bend it.