"You got to smoke and chew and curse," he warned her.
"I won"t, either! It says Ben Blunt was a st.u.r.dy lad of good habits.
Besides, I could smoke if I wanted to. I already have. I smoked Harvey D."s pipe."
"Who"s Harvey D.?"
"My father. I smoked his pipe repeatedly."
"Repeatedly?"
"Well, I smoked it twice. That"s repeatedly, ain"t it? I"d have done it more repeatedly, but Miss Murtree sneaked in and made a scene."
"Did you swallow the smoke through your nose?"
"I--I guess so. It tasted way down on my insides."
Plainly there was something to the girl after all. The Wilbur twin here extracted from the dress pocket, to which he had transferred his few belongings, the half of something known to Newbern as a pennygrab. It was a slender roll of quite inferior dark tobacco, and the original purchaser had probably discarded it gladly. The present owner displayed it to the girl.
"I"ll give you a part of this, and we"ll light up."
"Well, I don"t know. It says Ben Blunt was a st.u.r.dy lad of good----"
"I bet you never did smoke repeatedly!"
Her manhood was challenged.
"I"ll show you!" she retorted, grim about the lips.
With his knife he cut the evil thing in fair halves. The girl received her portion with calmness, if not with grat.i.tude, and lighted it from the match he gallantly held for her. And so they smoked. The Merle twin never smoked for two famous Puritan reasons--it was wrong for boys to smoke and it made him sick. He eyed the present saturnalia with strong disapproval. The admiration of the Wilbur twin--now forgetting his ignominy--was frankly worded. Plainly she was no common girl.
"I bet you"ll be all right in the big city," he said.
"Of course I will," said the girl.
She spat between her teeth with a fine artistry. In truth she was spitting rather often, and had more than once seemed to strangle, but she held her weed jauntily between the first and second fingers and contrived an air of relish for it.
"Anyway," she went on, "it"ll be better than here where I suffered so terribly with everybody making the vilest scenes about any little thing that happened. After they find it"s too late they"ll begin to wish they"d acted kinder. But I won"t ever come back, not if they beg me to with tears streaming down their faces, after the vile way they acted; saying maybe I could have a baby brother after Harvey D. got that stepmother, but nothing was ever done about it, and just because I tried to hide Mrs. Wadley"s baby that comes to wash, and then because I tried to get that gypsy woman"s baby, because everyone knows they"re always stealing other people"s babies, and she made a vile scene, too, and everyone tortured me beyond endurance."
This was interesting. It left the twins wishing to ask questions.
"Did that stepmother beat you good?" again demanded Merle.
"Well, not the way Ben Blunt"s stepmother did, but she wanted to know what I meant by it and all like that. Of course she"s cruel. Don"t you know that all stepmothers are cruel? Did you ever read a story about one that wasn"t vile and cruel and often tried to leave the helpless children in the woods to be devoured by wolves? I should say not!"
"Where did you hide that Wadley baby?"
"Up in the storeroom in a nice big trunk, where I fixed a bed and everything for it, while its mother was working down in the laundry, and I thought they"d look a while and give it up, but this Mrs. Wadley is kind of simple-minded or something. She took on so I had to say maybe somebody had put it in this trunk where it could have a nice time. And this stepmother taking on almost as bad."
"Did you nearly get a gypsy woman"s baby?"
"Nearly. They"re camped in the woods up back of our place, and I went round to see their wagons, and the man had some fighting roosters that would fight anybody else"s roosters, and they had horses to race, and the gypsy woman would tell the future lives of anybody and what was going to happen to them, and so I saw this lovely, lovely baby asleep on a blanket under some bushes, and probably they had stole it from some good family, so while they was busy I picked it up and run."
"Did they chase you?"
Wilbur Cowan was by now almost abject in his admiration of this fearless spirit.
"Not at first; but when I got up to our fence I heard some of "em yelling like very fiends, and they came after me through the woods, but I got inside our yard, and the baby woke up and yelled like a very fiend, and Nathan Marwick came running out of our barn and says: "What in time is all this?" And someone told folks in the house and out comes Harvey D."s stepmother that he got married to, and Grandpa Gideon and Cousin Juliana that happened to be there, and all the gypsies rushed up the hill and everyone made the vilest scene and I had to give back this lovely baby to the gypsy woman that claimed it. You"d think it was the only baby in the wide world, the way she made a scene, and not a single one would listen to reason when I tried to explain. They acted simply crazy, that"s all."
"Gee, gosh!" muttered the Wilbur twin. This was indeed a splendid and desperate character, and he paid her the tribute of honest envy. He wished he might have a cruel stepmother of his own, and so perhaps be raised to this eminence of infamy. "I bet they did something with you!"
he said.
The girl waved it aside with a gesture of repugnance, as if some things were too loathsome for telling. He perceived that she had, like so many raconteurs, allowed her cigar to go out.
"Here"s a match," he said, and courteously cupped his hands about its flame. The pennygrab seemed to have become incombustible, and the match died futilely. "That"s my last match," he said.
"Maybe I better keep this till I get to the great city."
But he would not have it so.
"You can light it from mine," and he brought the ends of the two penny grabs together.
"First thing you know you"ll be dizzy," warned the moralist, Merle.
"Ho, I will not!"
She laughed in scorn, and valiantly puffed on the noisome thing. Thus stood Ben Blunt and the Wilbur twin, their faces together about this business of lighting up; and thus stood the absorbed Merle, the moral perfectionist, earnestly hoping his words of warning would presently become justified. It did not seem right to him that others should smoke when it made him sick.
At last smoke issued from the contorted face of Ben Blunt, and some of this being swallowed, strangulation ensued. When the paroxysm of coughing was past the hero revealed running eyes, but the tears were of triumph, as was the stoic smile that accompanied them.
And then, while the reformer Merle awaited the calamity he had predicted, while Wilbur surrendered anew to infatuation for this intrepid soul that would dare any crime, while Ben Blunt rocked on spread feet, the glowing pennygrab c.o.c.ked at a rakish angle, while, in short, vice was crowned and virtue abased, there rang upon the still air the other name of Ben Blunt in cold and fateful emphasis. The group stiffened with terror. Again the name sounded along those quiet aisles of the happy dead. The voice was one of authority--cool, relentless, awful.
"Patricia Whipple!" said the voice.
The twins knew it for the voice of Miss Juliana Whipple, who had remotely been a figure of terror to them even when voiceless. Juliana was thirty, tall, straight, with capable shoulders, above which rose her capable face on a straight neck. She wore a gray skirt and a waist of white, with a severely starched collar about her throat, and a black bow tie. Her straw hat was narrow of brim, banded with a black ribbon. Her steely eyes flashed from beneath the hat. Once before the twins had encountered her and her voice, and the results were blasting, though the occasion was happier. Indeed, the intention of Juliana had been wholly amiable, for it was at the picnic of the Methodist Sunday-school.
She came upon the twins in a fair dell, where they watched other children at a game, and she took very civil notice of them, saying, "How do you do, young gentlemen?" in deep, thrilling tones, and though they had been doing very well until that moment, neither of the twins had recovered strength to say so. To them she had been more formidable than a schoolteacher. Their throats had closed upon all utterance. Now as she faced them, a dozen feet away, even though the words "Patricia Whipple"
applied to but one of their number, the twins took the challenge to themselves and quailed. They knew that deep and terrible voice menaced themselves as well as the late Ben Blunt--for that mere street urchin, blown upon by the winds of desolation, had shrivelled and pa.s.sed. In his place drooped a girl in absurd boy"s clothes, her hair messily cut off, smoking something she plainly did not wish to smoke. The stricken lily of vice drooped upon its stem.
One by one the three heads turned to regard the orator. How had she contrived that noiseless approach? How had she found them at all in this seclusion? The heads having turned to regard her, turned back and bowed in stony glares at the rich Whipple-nourished turf. They felt her come toward them; her shadow from the high sun blended with theirs. And again the voice, that fearsome organ on which she managed such dread effects:
"Patricia Whipple, what does this mean?"
She confronted them, a spare, grim figure, tall, authoritative, seeming to be old as Time itself. How were they to know that Juliana was still youthful, even attired youthfully, though by no means frivolously, or that her heart was gentle? She might, indeed, have danced to them as Columbine, and her voice would still have struck them with terror. She brought her deepest tones to those simple words, "What does this mean?"
All at once it seemed to them that something had been meant, something absurd, monstrous, lawless, deserving a ghastly punishment.
The late Ben Blunt squirmed and bored a heel desperately into the turf above a Whipple whose troubles had ceased in 1828. She made a rough noise in her throat, but it was not informing. The Wilbur twin, forgetting his own plight, glanced warm encouragement to her.
"I guess she"s got aright to run away," he declared, brazenly.