Blacksheep! Blacksheep! by Meredith Nicholson (best books for students to read TXT) 📕

"I should think it would be," Archie admitted, recalling that his mother used to express the greatest annoyance when the servants made her kitchen a social center. "Give me a towel and I'll promise not to break anything."

"You don't look as though you'd been used to work much," she said, "but take off your coat and I'll hang an apron on you."

His investiture in Mrs. Walker's ample apron made it necessary for Sally to stand quite close to him, and her manner of compressing her lips as she pinned the bib to the collar of his waistcoat he found wholly charming. His heart went pit-a-pat as her fingers, moist from the suds, brushed his chin. She was quite tall; taller than Isabel, who had fixed his standard of a proper height for girls. Sally did not giggle, but acted as normal sensible girls should act when pinning aprons on young men.

She tossed him a towel and bade him dry the plates as she placed them on the drain board. She worked quickly, and it was evident that she was a capable and efficient young woman who took an honest pride in her work.

"You've never stopped here before? I thought. I didn't remember you. Well, we're always glad to see the Governor, he's so funny; but say, some of the people who come along—!"

"I hope," said Archie, turning a dish to the light to be sure it was thoroughly polished, "I hope my presence isn't offensive?"

"Cut it out!" she returned crisply. "Of course you're all right. I knew you were a real gent the first squint I got of you. You can't fool me much on human nature."

"You've always lived up here?" asked Archie, meek under her frank approval.

"Certainly not. I was born in Missouri, a grand old state if I do say it myself, and we came here when I was twelve. I went through high school and took dairying and the domestic arts in college and I'm twenty-three if you care to know."

He had known finishing-school girls and college girls and girls who had been educated by traveling governesses, but Sally was different and suffered in no whit by comparison. Her boasted knowledge of the human race was negligible beside her familiarity with the mysterious mechanisms of cream separators and incubators. Fate had certainly found a strange way of completing his education! But for the shot he had fired in the lonely house by the sea, he would never have known that girls like Sally existed. As he assisted her to restore the dishes to the pantry, she crossed the kitchen with queenly stride. Isabel hadn't a finer swing from the hips or a nobler carriage. When he abandoned his criminal life he would assemble somewhere all the girls he had met in his pilgrimage. There should be a round table, but where Isabel sat would be the head, and his sister should chaperone the party. When it dispersed he would tell Isabel, very honestly, of his reaction to each one, and if she took him to task for his susceptibility it would be a good defense that she was responsible for sending him forth to wrestle with temptation.

When the kitchen was in perfect order they reported the fact to Mrs. Walker and Sally suggested that they stroll to a trout brook which was her own particular property. The stream danced merrily from the hills, a friendly little brook it was—just such a ribbon of water as a girl like Sally would fancy for a chum.

"We must have a drink or you won't know how sweet and cool the water is!" She cupped her hands and drank; but his own efforts to bring the water to his lips were clumsy and ineffectual.

"Oh you!" she laughed. "Let me show you!"

Drinking from her hands was an experience that transcended for the moment all other experiences. If this was a rural approach to a flirtation, Miss Seebrook's methods were much safer, and the garden of the Cornford tavern a far more circumspect stage than a Vermont brookside shut off from all the world.

He had decided to avoid any reference to the secrets of the underground trail, but his delicacy received a violent shock a moment later, when they were seated on a bench beside the brook.

"Do you know," she said, "you are not like the others?"

"I don't understand," he faltered.

"Oh, cut it out! You needn't try to fool me! When I told you awhile ago I thought you were nice, I meant more than that; I meant that you didn't at all seem like the crooks that sneak through here and hide at our house. You're more like the Governor, and I never understand about the Governor. It doesn't seem possible that any one who isn't forced by necessity into crime would ever follow the life. Now you're a gentleman, any one could tell that, but I suppose you've really done something pretty bad or you wouldn't be here! Now I'm going to hand it to you straight; that's the only way."

"Certainly, Miss Walker; I want you to be perfectly frank with me."

"Well, my advice would be to give yourself up, do your time like a man and then live straight. You're young enough to begin all over again and you might make something of yourself. The Governor has romantic ideas about the great game but that's no reason why you should walk the thorny road. Now pop would kill me if he knew I was talking this way. It's a funny thing about pop. All I know about him I just picked up a little at a time, and he and ma never wanted me to know. Ma's awful nervous about so many of the boys stopping here, for she hung on to pop all the time he was shooting up trains out West, and having a husband in the penitentiary isn't a pleasant thing to think about. Ma's father ran a saloon down in Missouri; that's how she got acquainted with pop, but ma was always on the square, and they both wanted me brought up right. It was ma's idea that we should get clean away from pop's old life, and she did all the brain work of wiping the slate clean and coming away off here. We were a couple of years doing it, trying a lot of other places all over the country before they struck this ranch and felt safe. Pop's living straight; you needn't think he isn't, but he's got a queer hankering to see the sort of men he used to train with. It's natural, I suppose."

"I suppose it is. But you must have suffered; I can imagine how you feel," said Archie, who had listened to her long speech with rapt attention.

"Well, I don't know that I've suffered so much," she replied slowly, "but I do feel queer sometimes when I'm around with young folks whose fathers never had to duck the cops. Not that they've any suspicions, of course; I guess pop stands well round here."

"I can understand perfectly how your father would like to see some of the old comrades now and then and even give them shelter and help them on their way. That speaks highly for his generosity. It's a big thing for me right now to be put up here. I'm in a lot of trouble, and this gives me a chance to get my bearings. I shall always remember your father's aid. And you don't know how wonderful it is to be sitting beside you here and talking to you just as though nothing had ever happened to me; really as though I wasn't a lost sheep and a pretty black one at that."

"I'm sorry," she answered. "When I told you you'd better go and do your time and get done with it, I didn't mean to be nasty. But I was thinking that a man as sensitive as I judge you to be would be happier in the long run. Now pop had an old pal who drifted along here a couple of years ago, and pop had it all figured out to shoot him right up into Canada, but, would you believe it, that man simply wouldn't go! The very idea of being in a safe place where he was reasonably certain of not being bothered worried him. He simply couldn't stand it. He was so used to being chased and shot at it didn't seem natural to be out of danger, and pop had to give him money to take him to Oklahoma where he'd have the fun of teasing the sheriffs along. And he had his wish and I suppose he died happy, for we read in the papers a little while afterward that he'd been shot and killed trying to hold up a bank."

Archie expressed his impatience of the gentleman who preferred death in Oklahoma to a life of tranquillity in the Canadian wilds.

"Oh, they never learn anything," Sally declared. "I wouldn't be surprised if pop didn't pull out some time and beat it for the West. It must be awful tame for a man who's stuck pistols into the faces of express messengers and made bank tellers hand out their cash to settle down in a place like this where there's nothing much to do but go to church and prayer meeting. I don't know how many men pop's killed in his time but there must be quite a bunch. But pop doesn't seem to worry much. It seems to me if I'd ever pumped a man full of lead I'd have a bad case of insomnia."

"Well, I don't know," remarked Archie, weighing the point judicially. "I suppose you get used to it in time. Your father seems very gentle. You probably exaggerate the number of his—er—homicides."

He felt himself utterly unqualified to express with any adequacy his sympathy for a girl whose father had flirted with the gallows so shamelessly. Walker had courageously entered express cars and jumped into locomotive cabs in the pursuit of his calling and this was much nobler than shooting a man in the back. Sally would probably despise him if she knew what he had done.

She demurred to his remark about her father's amiability.

"Well, pop can be pretty rough sometimes. He and I have our little troubles."

"Nothing serious, I'm sure. I can't imagine any one being unkind to you, Sally."

"It's nice of you to say that. But I'm not perfect and I don't pretend to be!"

Sympathy and tenderness surged within him at this absurd suggestion that any one could harbor a doubt of Sally's perfection. Her modesty, the tone of her voice called for some more concrete expression of his understanding than he could put into words. Her hand, dimly discernible in the dusk of the June stars, was invitingly near. He clasped and held it, warm and yielding. She drew it away in a moment but not rebukingly. The contact with her hand had been inexpressibly thrilling. Not since his prep school days had he held a girl's hand, and the brook and the stars sang together in ineffable chorus. It was bewildering to find that so trifling an act could afford sensations so charged with all the felicity of forbidden delight.

"I wonder," she said presently; "I wonder whether you would—whether you really would do something for me?"

"Anything in my power," he declared hoarsely.

"What time is it?" she asked with a jarring return to practical things.

She bent her head close as he held a match to his watch. It was half past eight.

"We'll have to hurry," she said. "When I told you pop and I didn't always agree about everything I was thinking—"

"Is it about a man?" he asked, surmising the worst and steeling himself