Anything Once Part 9

The girl noticed something else also as he turned for a moment to look toward the field where the little boys were so valiantly at work; a red-leather note-book, which she had never known that he carried, bulged now from the all too small overall-pocket.

"You can bet I'll pitch hay for her till sundown," he declared, when Lou had explained the situation to him. He dropped beside the tub the bundle of egg-soaked clothing which he carried, and added: "It is mighty good of her to do all this for us, isn't it? I tell you, Lou, the credit side of the list is going up even if it did have a bit of a jolt this morning, and you're the biggest item on it."

This speech was wholly unintelligible to the girl, but she bent over the tub without reply, and Jim went on hurriedly, aware that he had made a slip of some sort.

"I wonder where all the men of the family are? She can't get any hands----"

"_There_ are all the men of the family." The woman had reappeared in time to catch his last remark, and she pointed out toward the two small toilers with a faint smile. "There was another, their father--my son--but he died; so we're doin' the best we can by ourselves. But there's a little bite ready for you on the end of the kitchen-table, and it's getting cold."

The food tasted good, and the little red cloth beneath the dishes was clean, but the signs of carefully concealed poverty were everywhere visible to Jim's eyes, and he suspected another reason for the lack of farm-hands than scarcity of labor. He hurried through his meal, and went at once to the hay-field, while Lou, after insisting on clearing the dishes away, went back to the wash-tub, and their hostess returned to her own belated ironing.

Upon the girl's usually serene brow there was a frown of perplexity as she worked, and her thoughts were far afield, for in that backward glance which she had given from the egg-wagon to the approaching car just before the crash came she had recognized in its occupants the quartet who sat in front of her at the circus the previous evening. The ladies were closely swathed in their veils, but she remembered the distinctive plaids of their silk coats, and the stout gentleman who sat between them in the tonneau, with goggles and hat s.n.a.t.c.hed off in the excitement of the impending smash-up, was unmistakably the one who had called out "Good work!" when Jim was performing on the horse.

The other gentleman who had made up the quartet was the one who drove the car, and her quick glance showed her that he was even then trying to avoid the crash.

The details had been photographed upon her brain with instantaneous clarity, but it was not with these that her thoughts were busied; the remark which the younger lady had made at the circus just before Jim rode toward the exit-flap of the curtain had returned and could not be banished from her mind:

"Didn't he look like Jimmie Abbott?"

Her companion had told the girl that his name was Botts, but beyond that, and the fact that he was on the way to New York, he had vouchsafed no further information about himself, nor had Lou asked. She could not understand why his journey was hedged about with so many silly rules, nor why he chose to obey them; that was his affair, and he was just a part of this wonderful adventure which had started with her departure from the Hess farm.

Yet away down in her heart was a little hurt feeling for which she could not have a.s.signed a cause even to herself. Of course she trusted him, and he would not have lied to her, but could there really be another "Jim" in the world who looked quite like him, and whose name was so nearly the same?

She had sensed instinctively, and the more clearly perhaps because of her lack of worldly experience, that he was different, not only from herself, but from all whom they had encountered upon their journey, yet could he really be that grand young lady's "Jimmie," after all?

As she stepped aside to lift the basket into which the sodden garments had fallen from the wringer, her foot chanced to crunch upon something that yielded with a crisp rustle, and she glanced down. It was the little red note-book which she had seen in Jim's overall-pocket when he came from the barn; it must have fallen out as he crossed the porch to go to the hay-field.

It had opened, and the front cover was pressed back, with the stamp of her heel, showing plainly upon the first page, and as she stooped slowly and picked it up Lou could not help reading the three words which were written across it in a bold, characteristic hand:

JAMES TARRISFORD ABBOTT

There was something else, an address, no doubt, written below, but Lou closed the book quickly and dropped it upon a near-by bench, as though it burned her fingers. For a moment she stood very still with her eyes closed and her little water-shriveled hands tightly interlocked, and in that instant of time the happy, careless co-adventurer of the last two marvelous days vanished, and in his place there appeared a stranger, a man of the world, in which that young lady of the motor-car moved.

For the first time in Lou's life a panic seized her, a desperate longing to run away. She opened her eyes and looked across the hay-fields to where that tall, stalwart figure worked beside the two smaller ones.

Even from that distance he looked different, somehow; he wasn't the same Jim.

Slowly, with a mist before her eyes she picked up the heavy basket, and, descending the steps of the porch, spread the garments upon the bleaching gra.s.s to dry. The glittering glories of the circus had turned all at once to a black shadow in her memory, and she wished fervently that she had never seen it nor those rich people who had come to make a mock of it, but had stayed to applaud Jim.

But why shouldn't they, even if they hadn't recognized him? He belonged to their world, not hers. Then a new, inexpressibly forlorn thought came to her; what was her world, anyway? She didn't belong anywhere; there was no place for her unless she made one for herself, some time.

With that, in spite of this strange, new weariness which dragged at her heart, Lou's indomitable spirit rea.s.serted itself, and her small teeth clamped together. She _would_ make herself a place somewhere, somehow.

Returning to the house, she took the ironing from her tired hostess's hands, and worked steadily until at sundown the high treble of childish voices came to her ears, and Jim's merry, laughing tones in reply sent a quick stab through her, but she put down the iron and went determinedly out on the porch.

The two little boys came shyly on up the steps, but Jim had paused to feel of his coat, as it lay on the gra.s.s, and looked ruefully at her.

"It's wet still, I'm afraid," she remarked composedly, as she picked up the red note-book and held it out to him. "Is this yourn? It looks as though it must have dropped out of your pocket an' somebody stepped on it."

If the girl noted the swift change which came over his face she gave no sign as he came forward and took the book from her hands.

"Yes, it's mine." He opened and closed it again, and then looked up uncertainly into her face as she stood on the steps above him, but Lou was gazing in seeming serenity out over the fields, which were still s.h.i.+mmering in the last rays of the sun. "I--I'll tell you about this some time, Lou. It's funny."

"What's funny?" she asked, with a little start, as though he had interrupted some train of thought of her own, far removed from hateful little red books.

"If you think it's goin' to be funny to travel in wet clothes to-night, just wait till you git started."

But they did not start upon their journey again that night, after all.

Their kindly hostess insisted upon their remaining until the morning, at least, and when the supper dishes were cleared away Lou wandered off by herself down the little lane which led to the pasture.

There would be three days more, and then their journey's end. Upon one thing she had decided: there would be no school for her! She was going to work as quickly as she could find something to do. Mr. James Abbott must be paid back for the little pink-checked frock and the hat with the green bow, and then she would drop from his sight. Surely in that great city, with its hundreds and hundreds of people, she would be able to disappear.

Reaching the pasture, she stood at the gate with her arms resting upon the topmost rail, and was so deep in reflection that she did not hear a step behind her until a hand touched her shoulder, and Jim's voice asked quietly:

"What are you doing off here by yourself, Lou? Mrs. Bemis didn't know what had become of you, and I've been looking everywhere."

"I dunno," Lou answered truthfully enough. "I been thinkin' 'bout the inst.i.tootion where I come from; it was seein' them little boys put me in mind of it, I reckon. I was kinder wonderin' what it would be like to really belong to anybody."

There was neither pathos nor self-pity in her tone, but rather a cold, dispa.s.sionate speculation that froze the words of awkward sympathy which rose to his lips, and he remained silent.

"I did once, you know," she continued, "belong to some--body, I mean. I had on a white dress all trimmed with lace when they found me in the station at the junction an' took me up to the inst.i.tootion; it was the only white dress I ever had."

"Where was this inst.i.tution, Lou?" Jim asked. "You've never told me, you know."

Lou shrugged.

"Oh, it was 'way up at a place called Mayfield's Corners; I was most three hours on the train before I got to the station nearest Hess's farm."

A vicious desire came over her to shock and repulse that inexplicable thing in him which set him apart from her and made him one with the world in which those others moved; that stout gentleman and the young lady who had called him Jimmie. She added deliberately:

"I told you what I did there--at the inst.i.tootion, I mean: scrubbed an'

cooked an' washed an' tended babies an' wore a uniform, just like any other norphin, I guess. Slep' in the garret with the rats runnin' over the floor, an' got up in the mornin' to the same old work. It warn't a State inst.i.tootion, you see; just a kind of a charity one, run by the deacons of the church; I ain't got much use for charity."

"I shouldn't think you would have," he exclaimed. "But it's all behind you now, Lou. We made fourteen miles to-day from Highvale--or will have when we walk down the hill to Riverburgh to-morrow, and it is only sixty miles further to New York."

"That's good," Lou said, but without enthusiasm. "Do we start at sun-up?"

"I thought I'd like to work for Mrs. Bemis for a couple of hours first and get the hay turned in that south field," Jim answered. "She's been so good to us, and she'll need the stuff this winter for those two old plugs out there."

He pointed out into the pasture, where two horses made mere blotches of deeper shadow beneath a tree.

Lou laughed suddenly, softly, but it seemed to him that the rippling, liquid note had vanished.

"What's funny?" he asked.

"Oh, nothin'. I was just thinkin' of you last night in that circus. You rode so--so wonderfully. I wasn't laughin' at that, but it just come to me how funny it would have been if any of your friends was to have seen you!"

Jim glanced at her sharply, but in the starlight her face seemed merely amused as at a whimsical thought.

"Why would it have been funny?" he insisted. "Of course I never rode in a real circus before, and I guess I was pretty rotten, but why would my friends have laughed?"