Girl Alone Part 6

"No, she was telling the truth when she said that she hadn't seen the pin," David answered, flipping the pin contemptuously to the kitchen table. "But next time I think you'd better put it away in your own room.

And Pearl, you really must try to overcome this absentmindedness of yours. It may get you into trouble sometime."

Pearl s.h.i.+vered, seemed to shrink visibly under her fussy pink georgette dress.

"Oh!" she wailed suddenly, her face crumpling up in a spasm of weeping.

"You'll hate me now! And you used to like me, before _she_ came! You-oh, I hate you! Quit looking at me like that!"

"Hadn't you better go back to church?" David suggested mildly. "Tell your mother you found your pin just where you'd left it," that contemptuous smile deepening on his lips.

"You won't tell Papa, will you?" Pearl whimpered, as she turned toward the door. "And you won't tell _her_?" She could not bear to utter Sally's name.

"No, I won't tell," David a.s.sured her. "But I'm sure you'll make up to Sally for having been mistaken about the pin."

"She's all you think of!" Pearl cried, then, sobbing wildly, she ran out the kitchen door.

"Guess I'd better not bother you any longer, or they'll be blaming me if dinner is late," David said casually, but he paused long enough to pat the little hand that was clenching the table.

Sally was so puzzled by the strangeness of the scene she had witnessed, so tormented by brief glimpses of something near the truth, so weak from reaction, so stirred by grat.i.tude to David, that she was making poor headway with dinner when Clem Carson, who had not gone to church, came in from the barns, dressed in overalls in defiance of the day.

"Got a sick yearlin' out there," he grumbled. "A blue-ribbon heifer calf that Dave's grandpa persuaded me to buy. I don't believe in this blue-ribbon stock. Always delicate-got to be nursed like a baby. I give her a whopping dose of castor oil and she s...o...b..red all over me."

He took the big black iron teakettle from the stove and filled the granite wash basin half full of the steaming water. As he lathered his hands until festoons of soap bubbles hung from them, he c.o.c.ked an appraising eye at Sally, who was busily rolling pie crust on a yellow pine board.

"Dave been hanging around the kitchen this morning, ain't he?"

Sally's hands tightened on the rolling pin and her eyes fluttered guiltily as she answered, "Yes, sir."

"Better not encourage him, if you know which side your bread's b.u.t.tered on," the farmer advised laconically. "I reckon you know by this time that Pearl's picked him out and that things is just about settled between 'em. Fine match, too. He'll own his granddad's place some day-next farm to this one, and the young folks will be mighty well fixed. I reckon Dave's pretty much like any other young whippersnapper-ready to c.o.c.k an eye at any pretty girl that comes along, before he settles down, but it don't mean anything. Understand?"

"Yes, sir," Sally murmured.

"I reckon any fool could see that Pearl's mighty near the apple of my eye," Carson went on, as he dried his hands vigorously on the Sunday-fresh roller towel. "And if she took a notion that maybe some other girl from the orphanage would suit us better, why I don't know as I could do anything else but take you back. And I'd hate that. You're a nice, pretty little thing, real handy in the kitchen, but, yes sir, I'd have to tell the matron that you just didn't suit.... Well, I got to get back to that yearlin'."

Somehow Sally managed to finish cooking the big Sunday dinner before the family returned from church. Out of deference for the day she decided to change from her faded gingham to her white dress before serving dinner.

Surely she had a right to look decent! Clem Carson couldn't construe her humble "dressing up" as a bid for David's attention.

In her little garret room she scrubbed her face and hands, pinned the heavy braid of soft black hair about her head, and then reached under her low cot bed for her small bundle of clothes, in which was rolled her only pair of fine-ribbed white lisle stockings. As she drew out the bundle she discovered immediately that other hands than her own had touched it; the stockings had been unrolled and then rerolled clumsily, not at all in her own neat fas.h.i.+on. Then suddenly full comprehension came to her. The pieces of the puzzle settled miraculously into shape.

It was here, in this bundle, that David had found the bar-pin. Somehow he had seen Pearl slip into the room that morning, had guessed that her secret visit boded no good for Sally; had spied on her, and then later had retrieved the bar-pin from the bundle in which Pearl had hidden it.

If David had not seen-But she could not go on with the thought.

Trembling so that her teeth chattered she dressed herself as decently as her orphanage wardrobe permitted, and then went downstairs to "dish up"

the dinner she had prepared.

Immediately after dinner David went across fields to call on his grandfather, a grouchy, sick old man who almost hated the boy because he would soon own the lands which he himself had loved so pa.s.sionately. He did not return for supper, and at breakfast on Monday there was not time for more than a smile and a cheerful "Good morning," which Sally, with Clem Carson's eyes upon her, hardly dared return.

Sally wondered if David had been warned, too, for as the days pa.s.sed she seldom saw him alone for as much a minute. Perhaps he was being careful for her sake, suspecting Carson's antagonism, or perhaps, in spite of the shameful trick in which he had caught her, he really cared for Pearl. Evenings he sat for a short time in the living room or on the front porch, Pearl beside him, chattering animatedly; but he was always in his room studying by ten o'clock, a blessed fact which made her own isolation in her little garret room more easy to bear.

On Thursday morning at ten o'clock David appeared at the kitchen door, an axe in his hands.

"Will you turn the grindstone for me while I sharpen this axe blade, Sally?" he asked casually, but his eyes gave her a deep, significant look that made her heart flutter.

Mrs. Carson, standing over her bubbling preserving kettles, grumbled an a.s.sent, and Sally flew out of the kitchen to join him.

The grindstone, a huge, heavy stone wheel turned by a pedal arrangement, was set up near the first of the great red barns. While Sally poured water at intervals upon the stone, David held the blade against it, and under cover of the whirring, grating noise he talked to her in a low voice.

"Everything all right, Sally?"

"Fine!" she faltered. "I get awful tired, but there's lots to eat-such good things to eat-and Pearl's given me some dresses that are nicer than any I ever had before, except they're too big for me-"

"Isn't she fat?" David grinned at her, and she was reminded again how young he was, although he seemed so very grown-up to her. "She wouldn't be so fat if she worked a tenth as hard as you do."

"I don't mind," Sally protested, her eyes misting with tears at his thoughtfulness for her. "I've got to earn my board and keep. Besides, there's such an awful lot to be done, with the preserving and the canning and the cooking and everything. Mrs. Carson works even harder than I do."

David's eyes flashed with indignation and a suspicion of contempt for the meek little girl opposite him. "You're earning five times as much as your board and room and a few old clothes that Pearl doesn't want is worth. It makes me so mad-"

"Sal-lee! Ain't that axe ground yet? Time to start dinner! I can't leave this piccalilli I'm making," Mrs. Carson shouted from the kitchen door.

"Wait, Sally," David commanded. "Wouldn't you like to take a walk with me after supper tonight? I'll help you with the dishes. You never get out of the house, except to the garden. You haven't even seen the fields yet. I'd like to show you around. The moon's full tonight-"

"Oh, I can't!" Sally gasped with the pain of refusal. "Pearl-Mr.

Carson-"

"I want you to come," David said steadily, his eyes commanding her.

"All right," Sally promised recklessly, her cheeks pink with excitement, her eyes soft and velvety, like dark blue pansies.

Sally was eager as a child, when she joined David Nash in that part of the lane that skirted the orchard. Although it was nearly nine o'clock it was not yet dark; the sweet, throbbing peace of a June twilight, disturbed only by a faint breeze that whispered through the leaves of the fruit trees, brooded over the farm.

"I hurried-as fast-as I could!" she gasped. "Grandma Carson ripped up this dress for me this afternoon and while you and I were was.h.i.+ng dishes Mrs. Carson st.i.tched up the seams. Wasn't that sweet of her? Do you like it, David? It was awful dirty and I washed it in gasoline this afternoon, while I was doing Pearl's things."

She backed away from him, took the full skirt of the made-over dress between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and made him a curtsey.

"You look like a picture in it," David told her gravely. "When I saw Pearl busting out of it I had no idea it was such a pretty dress."

"I couldn't have kept it on tonight if Pearl hadn't already left for the party at Willis's. Was she terribly mad at you because you wouldn't go?"

David shrugged his broad shoulders, but there was a twinkle in his eyes.

"Let's talk about something pleasant. Want a peach, Sally?"

And Sally ate the peach he gave her, though she had peeled so many for canning those last few days that she had thought she never wanted to see another peach. But this was a special peach, for David had chosen it for her, had touched it with his own hands.

They walked slowly down the fruit-scented lane together, Sally's shoulder sometimes touching David's coatsleeve, her short legs striving to keep step with his long ones.

She listened, or appeared to listen, drugged with content, her fatigue and the smarting of her gasoline-reddened hands completely forgotten.

"We got a good stand of winter wheat and oats. There's the wheat. See how it ripples in the breeze? Look! You can see where it's turning yellow. Pretty soon its jade-green dress will be as yellow as gold, and along in August I'll cut it. That's oats, over there"; and he pointed to a distant field of foot-high grain.

"It's so pretty-all of it," Sally sighed blissfully. "You wouldn't think, just to look at a farm, that it makes people mean and cross and stingy and ugly, would you? Looks like growing things for people to eat ought to make us happy."