The Wrong Twin Part 57

He rose to his feet, with a dry laugh at his own credulity, taking some slow steps forward, expecting each stride to resolve the post to its true dimensions. He was within a dozen feet of it before he saw it could not be a post--anyway, not the same post. His scalp crept into minute wrinkles at the back of his head. He knew the feeling--fear! But, as in other times, he could not make his feet go back. Two other steps and he saw she must be there. She had not stirred, but the rising light caught her wan face and a pale glint of eyes.

All at once his fear was greater--greater than any he had known in battle. His feet dragged protestingly, but he forced them on. He wanted her to speak or move to break that tension of fear. But not until he reached out stiffening fingers to touch her did she stir. Then she gave a little whispered cry and all at once it was no longer moonlight for him, but full day. A girl in nurse's cap and a faded, much laundered dress of light blue stood before a battered church, beside a timbered breach in its gray stone wall. He was holding her.

The song was coming to him, harsh and full throated from many men: "Where do we go from here, boys, where do we go from here?"

"We don't go anywhere from here," he heard himself say in anger. They were the only words he had spoken.

The girl was shaking as she had shaken back at that church; uttering little shapeless cries from a throat that by turns fluttered and tightened. One clenched hand was fiercely thumping his shoulder. They were on strange land, as if they had the crust of the moon itself beneath their feet. They seemed to know it had been true.

They were sitting on a log in shadow. He rose and stepped into the light, facing his watch to the moon, now gone so high it had paled from gold to silver. He went to her again.

"Do you know it's nearly one?"

"It must be that--I suppose so."

"Shouldn't you be going?"

She leaned forward, shoulders drooping, a huddled bit of black in the loose cloak she wore. He waited. At length she drew her shoulders up with a quick intake of breath. She held this a moment, her chin lifted.

"There, now I've decided," she said.

"What?"

"I'm not going back."

"No?"

"Not going through any more fuss. I'm too tired. It seemed as if I'd never get here, never get out of that dreadful place, never get out of Paris, never get out of Brest, never get off the boat, never get home!

I'm too tired for any more never gets. I'm not going to have talking and planning and arguments and tearful relatives forever and a day more. See if I do! I'm here, and I'm not going to break it again. I'm not going back!"

He reached down to pat her hand with a humouring air.

"Where will you go?"

"That's up to you."

"But what can I----"

"I'm going where you go. I tell you I'm too tired to have any talk."

He sat down beside her.

"Yes, you're a tired child," he told her.

She detected the humoring inflection.

"None of that! I'm tired, but I'm stubborn. I'm not going back. I'm supposed to be sleeping soundly in my little bed. In the morning, before I'm supposed to be up, I'll issue a communique from--any old place; or tell 'em face to face. I won't mind that a little bit after everything's over. It's telling what's going to be and listening to talk about it that I won't have. I'm not up to it. Now you talk!"

"You're tired. Are you too tired to know your own mind?"

"No; just too tired to argue with it, fight it; and I'm free, white, and twenty-one; and I've read about the self-determination of small peoples."

"Say, aren't you afraid?"

"Don't be silly! Of course I'm afraid! What is that about perfect love casting out fear?--don't believe it! I'm scared to death--truly!"

"Go back till to-morrow."

"I won't! I've gone over all that."

"All right! Shove off!"

He led her to the ambushed Can, whose blemishes became all too apparent in the merciless light of the moon.

"What a lot of wound chevrons it has!" she exclaimed.

"Well, I didn't expect anything like this. I could have got----"

"It looks like a permanent casualty. Will it go?"

"It goes for me. You're sure you don't think it's better to----"

"On your way!" she gayly ordered, but her voice caught, and she clung to him a moment before entering the car. "No; I'm not weakening--don't you think it! But let me rest a second."

She was in the car, again wearily gay. The Can hideously broke the quiet.

"Home, James!" she commanded.

Dawn found the car at rest on the verge of a hill with a wide-sweeping view over and beyond the county seat of Newbern County. Patricia slept within the fold of his arm. At least half of the slow forty miles she had slept against his shoulder in spite of the car's resounding progress over a country road. Once in the darkness she had wakened long enough to tell him not to go away.

The rising sun lighted the town of Halton below them, and sent level rays across a wide expanse of farmland beyond it, flat meadows and rolling upland. White mist shrouded the winding trail of a creek. It was the kind of landscape he had viewed yesterday with a rising distaste; land that had tricked people from their right to wander; to go places on a train when they would.

He brought his eyes back from the treacherous vista and turned them down to the face of the sleeping girl. A pale scarf was wound about her head, and he could see but little beyond it but the tip of her nose, a few scattered, minute freckles on one cheek. She was limp, one bare hand falling inertly over the edge of the seat between them. He looked out again at the checkerboard of farms. He, too, had been tricked.

"But what a fine trick!" he said aloud. "No wonder it works!"

He dozed himself presently, nodding till his forward-pitching head would waken him. Afterward he heard Spike saying: "So dark you can't see your hand before your face." He came awake. His head was on Patricia's shoulder, her arm supporting him.

"You must have gone to sleep and let the car stop," she told him. He stared sleepily, believing it. "But I want my breakfast," she reminded him. He sat up, winking the sleep from his eyes, shaking it from his head.

"Of course," he said.

He looked again out over the land to which an old device had inveigled him. A breeze had come with the dawn, stirring the grain fields into long ripples. At the roadside was the tossing silver of birch leaves.