Anything Once.
by Douglas Grant.
CHAPTER I
A Roadside Meeting
The white dust, which lay thick upon the wide road between rolling fields of ripened grain, rose in little spirals from beneath the heavy feet of the plodding farm-horses drawing the empty hay-wagon, and had scarcely settled again upon the browning goldenrod and fuzzy milkweed which bordered the rail fences on either side when Ebb Fischel"s itinerant butcher-jitney rattled past. Ebb Fischel"s eyes were usually as sharp as the bargains he drove, but the dust must have obscured his vision. Otherwise he would have seen the man lying motionless beside the road, with his cap in the ditch and the pitiless sun of harvest-time caking the blood which had streamed from an ugly cut upon his temple.
But the meat-cart jolted on and out of sight, and for a long time nothing disturbed the stillness except the distant whirring of a reaper and nearer buzzing of a fat, inquisitive bluebottle fly, which paused to see what this strange thing might be, and then zoomed off excitedly to tell his a.s.sociates.
At length there came a dry rustling in the tall standing wheat in the field on the opposite side of the road, and a head and shoulders appeared above the topmost fence-rail. It was a small head covered with tow-colored hair, which had been slicked back and braided so tightly that the short, meager cue curled outward and up in a crescent, as though it were wired, and the shoulders beneath the coa.r.s.e blue-and-white striped cotton gown were thin and peaked.
The girl darted a swift, furtive glance up and down the road, and suddenly thrust a bundle tied in a greasy ap.r.o.n between the rails, letting it fall in the high, dusty weeds by the roadside. Next she climbed to the top of the fence, and for a moment perched there, displaying a slim length of coa.r.s.e black stocking above clumping, square-toed shoes at least two sizes too large for her.
She looked like a very forlorn, feminine _Monte Cristo_ indeed, as she scanned the world from her vantage-point, and yet there was a look of quiet satisfaction and achievement in her incongruously dark eyes which told of a momentous object accomplished.
Then all at once they stared and softened as she caught sight of that still figure lying across the road, and in two bounds she was beside him and lifted his head against her sharp knees. She noted only casually that he was a clean-shaven, tanned young man with brown hair bleached by the sun to a warm gold, and that he wore shabby, weather-beaten clothes.
Had she realized that those same worn, faded garments bore the stamp of one of New York"s most exclusive tailors! that the boots were London-made, and the golf-stockings which met the corduroy knickerbockers came from one of Scotland"s famous mills, it would have meant just exactly nothing in her young life.
Her immediate attention was concentrated upon the jagged gash which ran unpleasantly close to his temple, and which had begun to bleed afresh as she raised his head.
The girl looked about her again and saw that a short distance ahead the road was bisected by a bridge of planks with willows bordering it at either side. She pulled at the strings which held a blue sunbonnet dangling between her narrow shoulder-blades, regarded the sleazy headgear ruefully, and then spying the cap in the ditch, she deposited her burden gently upon the gra.s.s once more and scrambled over to investigate her find.
The cap had an inner lining of something which seemed to be like rubber, and the girl flew off down the road to return with her improvised bowl filled with clear, cold spring water. Dropping on her knees beside the unconscious figure, she poured the contents of the cap over his face and head.
The young man sputtered, gasped, moaned a little, and opened astonished brown eyes upon her.
"How--how the devil did you come here?" he asked ungallantly.
"Over the fence." Her reply was laconic, but it bore an unmistakable hint that further query along that line would be highly unwelcome. "Just you lay still while I git some more water, an" I"ll tie up that head of yourn."
The young man"s hand went unsteadily to his aching brow and came away brightly pink, so he decided to take this uncomely vision"s advice, and remained quiescent, wondering how he himself had come to be there, and what had happened to him.
According to the map, he had surely been on the right road, yet it had as a.s.suredly not looked like this one; the other had been a broad, State highway, while this----
He closed his burning eyes to shield them from the glare of the sun, and a confused memory returned to him of that invitingly green, shady pasture which had tempted him as a short cut toward the next village, and of something which thundered down upon him from behind and lifted him into chaos. Good Lord, and he had only six days left!
"You"d better take a drink of this first an" I kin use the rest on your head." A composed, practical voice advised by his side, and he looked up gratefully into the snub-nosed, freckled face of his benefactress as she held the br.i.m.m.i.n.g cap to his lips.
He drank deeply, then struggled to a sitting posture, his face whitening beneath its tan at the sudden wrench of pain which twisted the muscles of his back.
"Kin you hold the cap steady?" The girl thrust it into his hands without waiting for a reply, and, sitting down with her back to him, calmly turned back the hem of her gown and tore a wide strip from the coa.r.s.e but immaculately white cambric petticoat beneath.
Dipping it into the water, she bandaged his head not unskilfully, and then rose.
"There! I gotta git you over to the shade of them trees, or you"ll have sunstroke. Wait till I fetch somethin"."
She ran across the road and returned with her greasy bundle under one arm, offering the other to him with a gesture as frank as it was impersonal.
"Lean on me, an" try to git along--and please kinder hurry!"
She added the last with a note of sudden urgency in her tones and the same furtively darting glance with which she had swept the road from the fence-top, but the young man was too deeply engrossed with his painful effort to rise to observe the look, although her change of tone aroused his curiosity. Was this scrawny but good-natured kid afraid some of her people would catch her talking to a stranger by the roadside?
Somehow he managed to hobble, with her aid, across the little bridge and down the bank of the swiftly racing brook at its farther side to a nest in the dense thicket of willow-shoots which completely screened them from the road.
The girl eased him down then upon the sward, and, seating herself beside him, unrolled the ap.r.o.n she had carried.
"It"s the ham that"s greased it all up like that," she remarked. "I"d have brought a pail, only I didn"t want to take any more "n I had to."
The young man gasped with astonishment as the contents of the ap.r.o.n-bundle were exposed: a whole ham glistening with the brown sugar in which it had been baked, a long knife, a huge loaf of bread, and, wrapped separately in a piece of newspaper, a bar of soap, a box of matches, and a bit of broken comb.
"When there"s lots of them, ham sandwiches, together with spring water, ain"t so bad, an" it"s near noon," the girl observed, beginning to cut the loaf into meager slices with a practised hand. "I should"ve made them thicker, but I forgot."
A starving gleam had come into the young man"s eyes at the sight of food, but he paused with the sandwich half-way to his lips to glance keenly at his companion.
"You"ve enough here for an army," he declared. "Were you taking it to men working in the fields somewhere?"
"No," she replied without hesitation, but with the same air of finality with which she had responded to his first question. "You can rest easy here till sundown, when the men begin to come in from the harvestin", an" then if you holler real loud some of them will maybe stop an" give you a lift on your way. There"s a railroad about four miles from here, an" the slow freight goes by along about ten."
The slow freight! So the girl thought he was a tramp! The young man smiled, and glanced down ruefully at his shabby attire. Well, so had others thought, whom he had encountered in his journey.
But who and what was the girl herself? She had asked no questions as to how he had come to the condition in which she found him, but had nursed his hurt, brought him to this cool resting-place; and was sharing her food with him as unconcernedly as though she had known him all her life.
That quant.i.ty of provisions, the package of humble toilet articles, and her furtiveness and haste to get away from the open road all pointed to one fact--the girl was running away. But from whom or what? She had taken him at his face value, and he had no right in the world to question her, at least without giving some sort of account of himself.
"I have no intention of traveling by rail," he a.s.sured her. "A little while before you found me--I don"t quite know how long--I was crossing that pasture which adjoins the wheat-field, thinking that this road might be a short cut to Hudsondale, when something came after me from behind and b.u.t.ted me over the fence. I think my head must have been cut open by striking against a stone, for I don"t remember anything more until you poured that water over my face."
The girl nodded.
"I seen the stone with blood on it right near you; you must have b.u.mped off it an" turned over," she averred. "Anybody who goes traipsin"
through old Terwilliger"s pasture is apt to meet up with that bull of his."
So she had reasoned his predicament out without asking any of the questions that another girl would have heaped upon him.
He turned to her suddenly with a fresh spark of interest in his eyes.
"How did you know that I didn"t belong here?" he demanded.
The corners of her lips curled upward in a comical little grimace of amus.e.m.e.nt, and he realized that before they had been set in a straight line far too mature for her evident youth.
"No grown men "round these parts wears short pants, an", anyhow, I knew you were different from the way you talk; somethin" like the welfare workers, with the h.e.l.l an" brimstone left out," the girl replied soberly. "I"m goin" to talk like you some day."
It was the first remark she had made voluntarily concerning herself, and he was quick to seize his advantage.