The Wild Olive Part 4

"It would gratify my curiosity. I should think you might do as much as that for me."

"I'm doing a great deal for you as it is. I don't think you should ask for more."

Her tone was one of reproach rather than of annoyance, and he was left with a sense of having committed an indiscretion. The consciousness brought with it the perception that in a measure he was growing used to his position. He was beginning to take it for granted that this girl should come and minister to his wants. She herself did it so simply, so much as a matter of course, that the circ.u.mstance lost much of its strangeness. Now and then he could detect some confusion in her manner as she served him, but he could see too that she surmounted it, in view of the fact that for him the situation was one of life and death. She was clearly not indifferent to elementary social usages; she only saw that the case was one in which they did not obtain. In his long, unoccupied hours of darkness it distracted his thoughts from his own peril to speculate about her; and when she appeared his questions were the more blunt because of the small opportunity she allowed for asking them.

"Won't they miss you at home?" he inquired, on the next occasion when she entered his cell.

She paused with a look of surprise.

"At home? Where do you mean?"

"Why--where you live; where your mother lives."

"My mother died a few months after I was born."

"Oh! But even so, you live somewhere, don't you?"

"I do; but they don't miss me there, if that's what you want to know."

"I was only afraid," he said, apologetically, "that you were giving me too much of your time."

"I've nothing else to do with it. I shall be only too glad if I can help you to escape."

"Why? Why should you care about me?"

"I don't," she said, simply; "at least, I don't know that I do."

"Oh, then you're helping me just--on general principles?"

"Quite so."

"Well," he smiled, "mayn't I ask why, again?"

"Because I don't like the law."

"You mean that you don't like the law as a whole?--or--or this law in particular?"

"I don't like any law. I don't like anything about it. But," she added, resorting to her usual method of escape, "we mustn't talk any more now.

Some men pa.s.sed here this morning, and they may be coming back. They've given up looking for you; they are convinced you're up in the lumber camps, but all the same we must be careful still."

He had no further speech with her that day, and the next she remained at the cabin little more than an hour.

"It's just as well for me not to excite curiosity," she explained to him before leaving; "and you needn't be uneasy now. They've stopped the hunt altogether. They say there's not a spot within a radius of ten miles of Greenport that they haven't searched. It would never occur to any one that you could be here. Every one knows me; and so the thought that I could be helping you would be the last in their minds."

"And have you no remorse at betraying their confidence?"

She shook her head. "Most of them," she declared, "are very well pleased to think you've got away; and even if they weren't I should never feel remorse for helping any one to evade the law."

"You seem to have a great objection to the law."

"Well, haven't you?"

"Yes; but in my case it's comprehensible."

"So it is in mine--if you only knew."

"Perhaps," he said, looking at her steadily, "this is as good a time as any to a.s.sure you that the law has done me wrong."

He waited for her to say something; but as she stroked Micmac's head in silence, he continued.

"I never committed the crime of which they found me guilty."

He waited again for some intimation of her confidence.

"Their string of circ.u.mstantial evidence was plausible enough, I admit.

The only weak point about it was that it wasn't true."

Even through the obscurity of his refuge he could feel the suspension of expression in her bearing, and could imagine it bringing a kind of eclipse over her eyes.

"He was very cruel to you--your uncle?--wasn't he?" she asked, at last.

"He was very cantankerous; but that wouldn't be a reason for shooting him in his sleep--whatever I may have said when in a rage."

"I should think it might be."

He started. If it were not for the necessity of making no noise he would have laughed.

"Are you so bloodthirsty--?" he began.

"Oh no, I'm not; but I should think it is what a man would do. My father wouldn't have submitted to it. I know he killed one man; and he may have killed two or three."

Ford whistled under his breath.

"So that," he said, after a pause, "your objection to the law is--hereditary."

"My objection to the law is because it is unjust. The world is full of injustice," she added, indignantly, "and the laws men live by create it."

"And your aim is to defeat them?"

"I can't talk any more now," she said, reverting to an explanatory tone of voice. "I must go. I've arranged everything for you for the day. If you are very quiet you can sit in the studio and read; but you mustn't look out at the window, or even draw back the curtain. If you hear a step outside, you must creep in here and shut the door. And you needn't be impatient; because I'm going to spend the day working out a plan for your escape."

But when she appeared next morning she declined to give details of the plan she had in mind. She preferred to work it out alone, she said, and give him the outlines only when she had settled them. It chanced to be a day of drenching summer rain, and Ford, with a renewed effort to get some clew to her ident.i.ty, expressed his surprise that she should have been allowed to venture out.

"Oh, no one worries about what I do," she said, indifferently "I go about as I choose."

"So much the better for me," he laughed. "That's how you came to be wandering on old Wayne's terrace, just in the nick of time. What stumps me is the promptness with which you thought of stowing me away."

"It wasn't promptness, exactly. As a matter of fact, I had worked the whole thing out beforehand."