"I was too old," she defended. "I ought not to have stayed so long as I did, only nobody knew what to do with me." She was looking up into her companion's face close, that she might find something more of help in it. "Maybe you know some one that might want me? I know lots of things, cleanin' and cookin' some – " She would like to have continued to pour out her poor list of accomplishments, but Ambrose stopped her.
For some time the fear had been growing upon him that the child he believed himself to have rescued was not so much a child as he had first supposed. Of course he had never seen her very plainly and there was nothing to judge by in her short, scant dress. "Would you mind," he now inquired, "tellin' me just about how old you are?"
"Sixteen."
Ambrose groaned. For in Kentucky half a century ago, you must remember, sixteen was thought an age nearer that of a woman than of a girl.
"Then I've got to take you back to the orphans," he announced.
However, his declaration had not even the distinction of being listened to, for the girl, with her chin sunk in her clasped hands, was plainly thinking of something else. Now she put one hand timidly on his coat sleeve, and Ambrose could see that she had a curiously pointed chin and that her eyes were like deep wells with the moonlight shining down into them. "Maybe you'll tell me where you're thinkin' of stayin' the night?"
"The Lord knows only." And here yesterday's adventurer had a sudden vision of himself setting forth on his journey to be alone with nature. On the morning of the second day he had been almost caught in a trap of his own setting, and now at nightfall was probably in a worse fix. "I had been thinkin', though, of spendin' the night somewhere peaceful-like in the woods," he growled.
The girl clapped her hands together and, yawning, drew closer to her new friend, almost as if she meant to rest her head upon his shoulder.
"Then let me stay with you, please," she begged, and Ambrose could feel her warm breath on his cheek. "The woods is big and there's plenty of room for me, too. I shan't be afraid with you, and I've never seen the stars, except through the window."
The boy rose. "No," he said harshly, "you can't stay alone in the woods at night with me. I reckon before this I understood you didn't know nothing."
Half an hour afterward they found old Liza cropping grass, a little off the main road where they had left her. When both of them had returned to the gig Ambrose drove on in silence with an uncommonly bored face.
Later the moon went behind a cloud and a light mist fell, and then the girl's body began swaying gently backward and forward. Once she fell too far forward, when, still frowning, her companion slipped an arm about her, and a moment later she was fast asleep with her head resting on his shoulder.
Ambrose breathed deeply of the odour of the fresh wet earth. It was like the perfume of her young body; the moist curls about her face like the damp tendrils of new vines. Soon the boy's shoulder ached, and his entire left side, including his leg, seemed to have gone to sleep. Now and then he wondered if it ever should wake again in this world; and yet try as he might Ambrose Thompson could not make up his mind that he actually disliked the presence of the girl with him, and never from youth to old age had he the talent for deceiving himself.
"Poor kid," he murmured more than once, "she must 'a' been lyin' awake nights plannin' to run away, with no place on God's earth to run to."
Seldom did he allow himself the pleasure of looking long at her, and only once did his lips move toward hers, and then, though his face worked, they were drawn sharply back.
"Lord!" he whispered after this, "whatever shall I do with her?" A stranger in that part of the country himself, he knew of no one to ask to shelter the girl, and take her back to the asylum he would not. Should he turn her over to a stranger she would promptly be sent back there in the morning. Yet here were the lights of a village showing close ahead of them, and every now and then old Liza stumbled, almost falling from weariness.
Ambrose's prayer half awakened the girl. Anyhow, she sat up for a moment rubbing her eyes, to hear him asking: "Whatever is your name?"
"Sarah," and then her head swayed again.
But Ambrose sat straight up giving his reins an unexpected joyous flap. "Glory, why ain't I thought of it before?" he asked of no one. Then aloud: "When Abraham drew near to the land of the Egyptians didn't he admonish Sarah, his wife, to say she was his sister that it might be well with him and that his soul should live?" He grinned silently. "I'm findin' the patriarchs pretty useful this trip, but I reckon if Abraham could say that his wife Sarah was his sister to save his own skin, I can tell the same kind of a one to save a girl."
"Wake up, Sarah," he urged, when a few moments later he drew rein before a red brick tavern door, "and if anybody asks questions, recollect you are to say you're my sister."
However, on that same evening, when Sarah put up her lips for a sister's good night kiss, it was the boy who turned away. There was something in this girl that called to him too strongly, something fragrant and as yet unawakened, and then he had not dreamed she was so pretty, with her scarlet cheeks and big, heavy-lidded eyes, some poor little child of Eve from a far different land than his blond Kentucky. It looked, too, as though the little force the girl had, had now spent itself in her one effort of running a way, and hereafter some one would surely have to look after her. "Not only had she never been taught at the asylum to think for herself," the boy reflected, "she ain't never even been allowed to."
Nevertheless the girl slept untroubled in her high-post bed in the best guest chamber of the tavern, while Ambrose in a tiny room close under the roof, lay awake for a long time. He was not in the woods alone as he had dreamed of being, and yet he was not unhappy. He was not listening to the voices of nature as he knew her, but to the stirrings of his own blood, to the beating of his own heart.
More than once in order to stay his restlessness Ambrose had risen from his bed and stood leaning and looking out of his window at the stars and breathing deep the odours of the night. Still he could see nor feel nothing except the presence of the strange girl near him, the appeal of her utter helplessness. And yet the boy did not understand that the song of life he had come forth to hear was being sung to him for the first time to-night. For he only kept repeating to himself over and over: "Whatever am I to do with her, poor little kid?" until he also fell asleep.
CHAPTER V
THE RETURN
It was the fourth morning since Ambrose's departure, and county court day in Pennyroyal. The hour was just before noon, so the men had already left the court-house and were standing around in groups talking politics, while the younger ones paraded, walking shoulder to shoulder for mutual support and encouragement. The main street was also fluttering with girls, a variety of household errands having brought them forth at this hour; on their arms fresh sunbonnets trembled, in their eyes wonderful things danced, and indeed almost all of them were fair. Yet in the doorway of the drygoods firm of Hobbs & Thompson Miner Hobbs stood wrapped in gloom; the girls had giggled for him and at him vainly. More than eighty-six hours had passed bringing no word from his partner.
Suddenly a vibration swept through the air as tangible as the pealing of bells. Ambrose was on his way back into Pennyroyal. The news must have had its origin somewhere out of sight, for now it was travelling swiftly by word of mouth.
One moment the older men ceased arguing and spat widely, the girls turned their eyes away from their admirers, even the youths glanced up the hill, for the story grew that not only was Ambrose returning, but that he did not ride alone.
By and by, though still some distance off, Miner beheld old Liza drawing the familiar gig. About her neck hung a garland of buttercups and daisies, above one twitching ear appeared a bouquet of wild flowers and sweet fern tied with flowing streamers of white cotton-back satin ribbon, while upright on the floor of the gig stood Ambrose.
As the equipage advanced Miner leaned against his door frame.
Ambrose was wearing a new stove-pipe hat, his swallow tailed coat revealed a new beflowered waistcoat, and in his buttonhole blossomed a rose. But Miner swept details aside. On Ambrose's face was the expression that has lit up the world, and by his side rode a strange girl never before seen in Pennyroyal.
Ambrose was bowing from right to left, waving his hat in joyous circles of greeting, while the girl clung with one hand to an end of his coat and with the other clutched her paper-flower bouquet.
When the gig had turned the corner into Linden street and was moving on toward the rose cottage the news of its approach had preceded it, for the wooden sidewalk close by was lined and there in the forefront stood Susan Barrows, her hands on her hips and her bunches of corkscrew curls bobbing.
"Where on earth did you find that girl, Ambrose Thompson?" she called out as soon as the couple were in hailing distance.
Ambrose drove closer. "I didn't find her, Miss Susan," he answered, lying like a saint.
Mrs. Barrows' eyes bored like old gimlets sharpened from long use. "She's too young to be your housekeeper, and she ain't ugly," she said. "The town'll talk."
But now Liza had stopped of her own accord in front of home, and Ambrose, letting go of his reins, put his arm about the girl. Under the new poke bonnet her face was pale except for the scarlet of her lips and her dark eyes that never left their refuge.
The sensitive point to her companion's long nose quivered. Coming toward them he could see Miner's six pink-and-white, blond sisters, and in their wake the dark little man. Miner was walking like a man at a funeral, with his head bowed, and that he did not wear a band of crêpe upon his arm was only that he had lacked opportunity; everything else suggested a pall. At the same instant, round the corner of the cottage, trotted Moses, waving his tail and wearing a smile of forgiveness. One look, and ignoring his master's friendly whistle, the little dog disappeared, not to be seen again for three days.
Silently Ambrose lifted the stranger down to the boardwalk and with his arm still about her turned to face Susan. Perhaps there was something of appeal in the familiar solemnity of his gaze and in his whimsical drawl:
"We'll let the town talk, Susan, won't we, or it'll bust?" he replied quietly. "No, ma'am, she ain't my hired housekeeper; no ma'am, she ain't no relation of mine; that is, no born blood kin." With this he began leading Sarah to the shelter of his own yard and, drawing her in, closed the gate.
"But we're pretty closely related, Susan." Purposely Ambrose's voice was raised. He then took a few irresistibly jubilant steps backward and forward, swinging the girl with him. "She's my wife!"
PART TWO
HIS SECOND WIFE
"Heaven mend us all"
CHAPTER VI
RECONSTRUCTION
"How long has it been since, Mrs. Barrows?" asked the Baptist minister.
"Eight years, Brother Bibbs," Susan answered.
They were standing in front of Susan Barrows' cottage one late June afternoon in the summer of 1866.
The minister sighed, flapping his worn coat-tails as a signal of distress. Mrs. Barrows was gazing at the house next door. There the lilac bush which had showed its first blossoms on that morning of Ambrose's runaway had grown to full estate. Its season having passed, however, it was no longer in bloom, but instead, the climbing rose, known in the South as the "Seven Sisters," was spreading itself above the front door, bestowing its flowers against the background of the once rose-coloured cottage.
Susan's black curls moved reminiscently, eight years having wrought no changes in her beyond the deepening of the original plan. "Yes, eight years since Ambrose Thompson brought that orphan child home, and two since she passed away. Seems that Ambrose wouldn't never have got off even one year to the war if she hadn't gone on before, seein' as she wasn't never willing to let him out of her sight a minute longer'n she could help."
"A deeply affectionate nature," remarked the minister.
"A powerful clinger," retorted Susan, "but men is forgivin' to regular features with a high colour." She turned at this instant to look down the street. "I call it chokin' myself to hang on to a man the way Sarah done to Ambrose plumb up to the hour she died. What's always needin' proppin' ain't to my mind worth the prop. Howsomever, the child is dead, and I'm hopeful death does change us right considerable, though I can't see as it changes nothin' of what we were nor what we done in this world – and more's the pity!"
Assuredly Brother Bibbs was growing restless, and Mrs. Barrows talking to cover time. For five minutes before had she not seen him attempting to sneak past her gate to gain refuge in the Thompson cottage unobserved before its owner could possibly have returned from work?
Then, too, the minister's face was uncommonly harassed, and these were disjointed days in the Pennyroyal as well as throughout the entire country. True, the Civil War was over, which Susan called "the uncivilest ever fit on God's earth," but while its wounds and differences were patched up they were by no means healed. And Pennyroyal's disposition to regard herself as one family had made her dissensions peculiarly bitter. There were times in this past year since the close of the war when the minister had wondered if it had not been the bitterest year of all, for notwithstanding that Kentucky did not suffer from reconstruction as the states further south, remember that she was, during and after the war, a state divided within herself.
There was trouble in the Pennyroyal air this afternoon.
"Farewell, Susan," Brother Bibbs suggested, as getting out his pocket handkerchief he removed a slight moisture from his eyes. "Ambrose and Sarah loved one another, that was the main thing. Theirs was a spring mating, and, like the birds whose season they chose, brief, too brief in passing." Attempting now to move, Brother Bibbs found it impossible, since in his moment of sentiment Mrs. Barrows, leaning over her fence, had linked her arm through his.
"Well, thank the Lord the little love bird didn't leave a young one in the nest for me and the male to look after," she argued more leniently. "Come right on in, Brother, and rest yourself, as I kin see Ambrose and his two shadders advancin' toward us up the street, and a peskier pair of shadders than Miner Hobbs and that dog, Moses, I ain't never seen, but it's true the two of 'em ain't left Ambrose to himself a minute since his wife died."
With her free hand Susan now waved a friendly greeting, even releasing at the same time the vigour of her clutch with the other, for Brother Bibbs was a fragile gentleman, an elderly widower, and, excepting in matters pertaining to heaven or hell, greatly subject to the sisters in his congregation.
Also the three figures were almost in plain sight, the little man leaning as usual on the arm of the tall one, with Moses following but a few steps behind.
Miner Hobbs walked with a slight limp. Wounded in the battle of Resaca, he had never entirely recovered, and although not yet thirty years old already showed signs of advancing age in his shrivelled appearance, like a nut whose kernel has failed to ripen.
Moses, however, was remarkably well preserved and, barring a stiffness in his legs and a few grizzled hairs, lighter of heart than in many a year. For since that girl who had come to his home had suddenly gone away with equal mysteriousness his master was once more his slave.
On the surface Ambrose seemed to have changed more than either Miner or the dog. His face had lost its look of easy laughter, the crow's feet about the corners of his eyes spoke of nights of hard service. Perhaps he was even longer and leaner than ever, while the hair upon his forehead was slowly beginning to recede like a wave from the shore.
Now his familiar spirit of fun took hold on him. The little man was talking to him earnestly. "Go easy, Miner," he whispered, bending his tall head, "ef you want to keep your secret from the women; there's Miss Susan less'n a block away." He also continued his teasing even after joining the minister and Mrs. Barrows, managing in a few moments to pass with the two men into his house, leaving the lady bristling with anger.
"There's somethin' fermentin' in the head of every man in this here town," she flared, coming out on to the sidewalk and then following the trio into Ambrose's yard the better to deliver her message, "somethin' you're hidin' from the women, and what men keeps to themselves ain't no good and never was! Suppose we ain't noticed you plottin' new mischief together? Like it wasn't enough," she ended bitterly, "that women has had to bear a war, go half starved, and do man's work as well as their own 'thout bein' asked whether they'd like a war or not. Wonder if the good time's comin' when women kin reveal what they think and not have to stand fer the things they don't have no hand in the makin' of."
Although during this tirade her audience had disappeared, eternal vigilance was forever Mrs. Barrows' motto. So now she went on with her watching, while the three men remained a long time inside the cottage, and by and by, when darkness had fallen, other men with their faces hidden followed in after them. Soon these men came out, and last of all Miner, Ambrose, and Brother Bibbs. Miner was scowling; nevertheless his scowl was concealing an expression of triumph; the minister's figure plainly showed defeat, but Ambrose, whatever his former look, laughed aloud, catching sight of his neighbour through the gloom, standing on a kitchen chair and leaning across the dividing rails between her house and his in order to peep through the closed slats of his sitting-room window.
"Look out, Miss Susan, the meetin' is over, and high places is rickety," he called suddenly.
Mrs. Barrows started guiltily, accomplishing her own downfall, and over she went with the wreck of her chair, only to spring up so quickly afterward that her hoopskirts appeared to carry her higher than the laws of gravity.
Although assistance from Ambrose arrived too late, still he lingered. "Ain't you no faith in what men undertakes 'thout advice from women, Miss Susan?" he inquired, and when that lady, breathless for once, was able only to shake her head, he gave her a slow, anxious smile, whispering, "I'm none too sure but you're right," before moving along.
Notwithstanding, at midnight on the same night Ambrose and Miner were riding side by side through the Kentucky woods at the head of a small cavalcade that had come together silently on the outskirts of Pennyroyal. The riders wore masks, excepting Ambrose, who, with face uncovered, squirmed restlessly upon the sunken back of old Liza.
"The men have give their word there ain't nobody goin' to git hurt," he repeated three or four times, until finally Miner turned upon him.
"Mebbe you'd better not have went, Ambrose, ef you haven't the nerve," he remarked testily.
And at this the tall man stiffened. "It ain't nerve, Miner. I just ain't never liked a ten-man-against-one game in my life, and I ain't hidin' my sentiments. No more than the rest of you do I want this Yankee teacher bein' brought into Pennyrile to show us our business, but I'm with this crowd to-night to see he don't get hurt 'cept in his feelin's."
"He's got to git, notwithstandin'!" Miner's attitude was that of a fierce little dog, who even when he couldn't change a situation liked to bark in order to hear the noise.
These men had both fought on the Southern side in the Civil War, but with a difference. Miner had plunged into it at once with pigheadedness and with passion; the full story of why Ambrose had failed to go south when his comrades did has not been told by Mrs. Barrows. At that time most men's hearts were on the one side or the other. Ambrose Thompson's heart was on both sides at once. Indeed, during the first hateful years of the war he had felt like a child whose equally beloved parents were engaged in getting a divorce, and not until after Miner was wounded and the South had showed herself the weaker did he heed her mothering call. And then he was never much of a success as a soldier because of his habit of so frequently misplacing his gun while he helped on a weaker brother, and because of his never having been known to fire at anything in particular. Still his companions did not count him a coward, merely recognizing that his imagination had a longer reach than theirs.
Kentuckians, however, have not the grace of easy forgiveness, and also have a fixed determination to attend to their own affairs. To-night's expedition meant that the teacher sent from the North into the Pennyroyal district to instruct their coloured children must go. Not that Pennyroyal wished her negroes to remain untaught, "seein'," as Ambrose had said, "that readin' and writin' ought to belong to them same as seein' and smellin'," but because they preferred to have time to attend to the matter themselves. Also, the new teacher had been secretly hurried into the county that day, driven through the adjoining town, and finally installed in the Pennyroyal district schoolhouse without Pennyroyal's being allowed a chance to take even a look.
This schoolhouse was an old-fashioned log cabin set in the middle of a clearing in a young papaw grove, and to-night, with a light burning in the front room, the oncoming men could see through a half-opened window the shadow of a figure.
Without waiting for word of command, silently they got down from their horses, forming a line about the house, and then one man, pounding savagely on the closed door, shouted: "Come out from there or we'll drag you out."
There was no answer at first, and when a candle appeared at the opening of the door the wind blew it out so quickly that the person holding it remained in indistinct outline.
Miner, having been previously chosen as spokesman, now advanced toward this door and said: "Ahem!" He was feeling it a different thing to plan to bully a fellow-man by force of numbers and another to make so ugly a statement to his face, while Ambrose in even deeper embarrassment flattened his thin body against the front wall of the cabin until it suggested a tall plank left to rest there over night.
"You got to git away from our district school-house to-night," blurted Miner at last; "Pennyroyal kin take care of its own coloured children 'thout help from the outside. But you needn't be scairt, for nobody's goin' to hurt you if you go peaceable, but there's a horse waitin' fer you out here and we'll 'low you fifteen minutes to clear out."
Then the little man jumped a few steps backward and the hand of each of his companions slipped toward the trigger of his gun. However, whatever of danger the past moment seemed to have had, it passed swiftly, for the weapon, held by the lonely figure in the doorway, dropped to the ground with a peculiar clatter, and an instant later the voice said:
"There aren't men enough in Kentucky to make me run away like a thief; if I am made to go it must be by force." The tones were low and tremulous, but were sufficiently clear and held no hint of surrender. Then, putting out both hands like a child at play in blind man's buff, the figure groped its way forth from the cabin, moving directly toward Miner and saying: "How can I talk with you, though, when I can't see you? Till to-night I never dreamed a Kentuckian would be ashamed to show his face."
Actually Miner's hand shook as he tore off his mask, for the figure approaching him was that of a woman, possibly a girl, and she must have been preparing for bed at the time the men arrived, for her hair was hanging over her shoulders, and through the opening of her wrapper there showed the white glimmer of a gown.
Even in the midst of his own shame and chagrin Ambrose inwardly chuckled, seeing that for the first time in his life Miner had to discuss a question with a woman without his primeval conviction that man was ordained to be always in the right and woman in the wrong.
"Madam, there has been some mistake; surely you can see that – " he began pompously. But the girl shook her head. "I told you I couldn't see anything."
Something of relief hid in Ambrose's grin this time, for if the Yankee school teacher had a sense of humour even the situation in which he and his companions found themselves was not utterly hopeless.
But an impatient voice now spoke from the crowd. "Oh, fer the love of heaven, can't you understand we didn't know you was a woman? Reckon we'd all 'a' come shyin' out here to drive a woman away? You pack up your duds in the mornin' and leave comfortable, and no more said."
"I won't," came the defiant answer. Then changing her tactics, the girl drew nearer Miner, and putting out one hand almost touched his coat sleeve, although actually he seemed to shrivel away under it. "Do let me stay, at least for a while," she pleaded. "My father was killed in the war; I have to make my own living and this is my first chance. I didn't know you would mind so much. And, please, I am not so very Yankee – Indiana is only just across the river."
There were no tears in the voice, but a sound so suspiciously near them that ten men, shuffling their feet, wished one of their number would speak.
At last an answer came from a long shadow against the front wall of the cabin. "Certain you kin stay, Miss, and thank you. Just move on inside your house now and lock the door, for there's some among us that mebbe won't be anxious to be recognized later on as havin' give you – well, a kind of house warmin' in the Pennyrile."
A moment later, while his companions were mounting their horses, Ambrose lingered, groping before the closed door; soon he touched something of strange formation with a smooth back and a prickly arrangement on the underneath side. "Lord, what a weapon of defence – a hairbrush," he drawled, slipping it into his pocket as he visioned the girl's interrupted preparations for the night. And then when old Liza had caught up with the others: "Boys, ain't to-night enough to cure us of Ku-Kluxing, or whatever you want to call this gol darn business?"