"I've been a fool, Davy," he said, speaking quietly. "I've been an idle, worthless fool and now I must pay for it. Soon they'll be coming for me and I must run. But I'll come back; I'll make it all up--some day Penelope will be proud of me. Until then, Davy, my friend, you'll take care of Penelope, won't you--till I come back?"

Hearing this, Penelope dragged his face down to hers imploring him to take her with him. He kissed her. Then he lifted her high in his arms as though in play and held her off that she might see how gayly he was smiling and take heart from it.

"I don't know where I am going, child," he said, "but I am coming back for you very soon, and you will see what a man your father really is.

I haven't been fair to you, Penelope--but wait--wait till I come back.

And Davy will take care of you--won't you, Davy?"

"Yes, sir," I said boldly.

What else could a boy have said in such a case, when every pa.s.sing moment meant danger to his friend? I had no thought of the full meaning of my promise, for I did not look beyond that day, and that day my goal was home. Home there was safety for me and for Penelope as well. Home all perplexing problems solved themselves. Home was a place of great peace, and my father and mother benign genii who lived only to make others happy. It was easy to lead Penelope home, and I was sure that if I told my father and mother of my promise to take care of her, they would make the way easy for me. So when the Professor had kissed the child and lowered her to the floor, I put out my hand and took hers in a self-reliant grasp.

The Professor picked up the fallen rifle and put it away in its corner; he pushed the kettle to the back of the stove; he seemed to be tidying up the house. He blew the dust from his hat and crushed it down on his head. Then standing in the open doorway, he surveyed the room critically as if to make sure that all was in order before he strolled down to the village.

"Good-by, Penelope," he said in a quiet voice. "Stay with Davy till I come back--I'll come back soon."

For a moment Penelope believed him. "Good-by, father," she called as he turned and walked away.

He had pa.s.sed the door. Hearing her voice, he gave a start, then broke into a run. He ran as never I had seen a man run. He was not alone a man in flight. Every limb was filled with fear and moving for its life. Even his hat and coat were sensate things, struggling madly to get away to a safe refuge. Seeing him flying thus across the clearing toward the mountains, Penelope broke from me with a cry, but I caught her and held her in my arms. She called to him wildly, yet he did not turn, and in a moment had plunged into the bush.

Long after he had gone we two stood in the cabin door searching the silent wall of green for some sign of him. None was given. The shadow of the ridge crept away as the sun climbed higher and the clearing was bathed in its brightness. A crow called pleasantly from a tall pine.

The birds, back from their hiding, sang as though on such a day there could be no trouble.

I felt the blue ribbon brush my cheek, and two small bare arms about my neck.

I turned to Penelope and said: "Don't cry, little 'un. I'll take care of you."

CHAPTER V

To Nathan, the white mule, I owed it that I was able to take good care of Penelope Blight in the first hours of my guardianship. But for him I should have brought her face to face with the mob that rode out of Malcolmville to storm the clearing. I knew but one road home from the gut, and that was the way James had brought me fishing. Had we followed it, we should have hardly crossed the ridge before we met the van of an ill-organized but determined army, and then to her grief terror must have been added by the wagons filled with men armed as though they were going into battle. The obstinate temperament of the mule served us a good turn. When Penelope and I led him from the barn and climbed to his back, he must have supposed that we were going to the store and should leave him tied for hours in the hot sun, switching flies, while we sat comfortably in the shade of the porch discussing the universe's affairs. Believing this, he protested, stopping in the middle of the clearing to enjoy a few tidbits of sprouting corn.

Discovering that the small boy on his back lacked his master's strength and courage, he decided to go on, but as he chose. He chose first a trot. To Penelope and me it seemed a mad gallop, and I clung desperately to his scanty mane while she clutched my waist and pleaded with me to halt him and let her down. In this eternity of suffering--ten minutes really--her greater grief was forgotten, and she was spared the pang of a last look at her deserted home, for when Nathan decided to walk she turned her head to see only a long archway of trees ending in a green wall.

"Davy," she cried, "please let me get off!"

Now I wanted to get off myself, but I suspected her desire to run back to the clearing, and my over-powering thought was to carry her away from that forbidding place. I had promised the Professor to take care of the girl, and responsibility had added years to my age and inches to my stature. I was no longer a shivering, frightened boy clinging to her hand, and, though I was not the master of the mule, while we stayed on his back I was Penelope's master, and that was what I had determined to be.

"Don't be afraid, little 'un," I returned boldly, when I had recovered my breath and balance. "I can handle him all right."

To make good my boast, I even dared to kick Nathan, fearing lest a pause in our journey might allow her to slip from his back.

"I want to find father--to go with him," she pleaded. It was the hundredth time she had told me that.

"He said you were to come with me, Penelope," I argued. "And he told me particular that he wouldn't be home till a week from Monday."

This last was a little fiction of mine, which seemed warranted by the circ.u.mstances, and had Penelope pressed me and asked me when her father had made such a definite statement I was ready to go to any extent with like imaginings if only I could keep her with me. She did not, and her cheerier tone quieted my conscience.

"Is he?" she cried. "Do you really think he will come home, Davy?"

"Didn't he tell me so?" I returned haughtily. "And besides, what would he stay away any longer for?"

Still Penelope was inclined to doubt. She knew that the morning's strange events had brought her father into great trouble, and she could not believe that a vain search for him would satisfy his enemies. Two weeks, she thought, would suffice to wear them out, but two weeks in her small mind was an eternity when it was to be faced without him.

"Oh, Davy, I wish he hadn't done it," she cried. "If he hadn't shot Mr. Lukens, then he wouldn't have to run away, would he?"

"That was just a mistake," I replied, as though shooting constables were quite a favorite sport where I lived. "He told me particular he didn't mean it, but having done it, and they not understanding that he didn't mean it, he kind of had to get out till things blowed over."

"Didn't he do wrong to shoot Mr. Lukens?"

"Wrong?" My tone expressed the greatest astonishment at such an idea.

"Why, Penelope, if I was him I'd have done exactly the same thing--exactly."

My approval of her father's act was a great consolation to her. The pressure of her encircling arms made me gasp, and there was a note of grat.i.tude in her voice. "Oh, Davy, I know you would; you are so brave."

"And I'll take care of you, Penelope," I said, quite as though I seconded her approval of my courage and had forgotten that there were such things as rattlesnakes. "As long as you are with me you needn't be afraid of anything."

Nathan's pace was quieter and steadier, and being secure on his back I felt capable of any heroism. We had pa.s.sed the worst part of the road.

It was broader, the trees parted overhead, letting in the sunshine, and danger never seems so near when one moves in the bright day; so my heart grew lighter, and, had I known the words of any rollicking song, I should have sung, like James, but lacking these I had recourse to whistling. Nerves which had been set on edge by the rifle's report, the fumes of smoke, the cries of pain and fright, were quieted first by long-drawn, melancholy notes, and then I swung into a bold trilling, more suited to my adventurous spirit, throwing back my head, extending my lips heavenward, addressing my melody to the sky. Pausing, exhausted, I expected to hear from behind me some expression of astonishment and pleasure at my birdlike song. Instead there was only a m.u.f.fled sobbing.

"Little 'un," I said in a chiding voice, "you hadn't otter cry when I'm taking care of you. There's nothing to be afraid of. Why, we're going home."

Oh, wise Nathan! Then I thought him obstinate and contradictory.

Halting, he planted his feet as though no power on earth could move him, and shot forward his long ears. Then it seemed to me that he was trying to show how futile my boast, and in my anger I dared to kick him. A fly would have moved him as well. His long ears trembled as he watched the road rising to cross the ridge, and he seemed to see over the crest and to hear noises too distant and indistinct for me. Then I thought him obstinate; now I suspect that while the Professor had given Penelope to my care, he must have ordered Nathan to watch over us both.

The mule looked right through that hill. He saw the threatening army charging the other slope. He turned. The bushes opened, and we plunged into a narrow path which skirted the base of the ridge. In vain I tried to pull him back. In vain Penelope addressed to him her appeals. He was fixed in his purpose neither to hear nor to obey, and struck into a steady canter. I clung to his mane; Penelope, to me.

The earth swung around us. Solid became fluid. The path moved up and down, and flowed beneath us like running water. Great trees broke from their roots and ran at us, and when Nathan dodged them, they swung down their branches to blind us with their leaves, and sometimes almost to lift us in the air like Absalom. The memory of Absalom was very clear in my mind, for just a week before I had seen his picture in our Sunday-school quarterly, and now, confused in my eyes with the dancing trees, I saw him, as I had seen him in the picture, suspended from a limb by his long hair, quietly waiting to be taken down. There was something more than a mere coincidence in that Sunday-school lesson.

Here was another warning neglected. With Mr. Pound and Stacy Shunk, Miss Spinner took a place as a prophetess. She had taught me that boys who mocked their respectable elders were eaten by bears, and I believed her. She had demonstrated beyond all doubt that boys who defied their parents and ran away from home must come to a dreadful end in the entangling limbs of trees. With Absalom's example before me I had run away from home, and here I was being carried through the forest on a mad steed, and here were the trees running at me from every side, reaching out their forked limbs to seize my hair. Penelope was forgotten. More than once I tried to avert my impending fate by letting go of Nathan's mane and taking my chances with his heels and the stony path, but as I was about to close my eyes and let myself go he rose in the air, and the distance between me and the earth seemed so stupendous as to become the greater peril. Had the mule kept on his wild career I might at last have gathered courage for the fall, but the path came to an end, our pace slackened, the trees took root again; I was conscious of Penelope's encircling arms, and raising my head saw that we were in a broad road, and, better still, we were climbing the hill; each step was carrying us nearer the clearest and bluest of skies that always held over my home; I knew that from that line where ridge and sky met, I should look down and see home itself.

We reached the top of the ridge, and the valley lay beneath us. It was young and cheerful in its fresh green, with here a brown checkering of fallow, and there a white barn glistening in the sun, and orchards in the full glory of their blossom. Below us a stone mill grumbled over its unending task, and from the meadows came the blithe call of the killdee. It was all home to me from the fringing pines on the ridge-top, across the land to the mountains by the river, for on such a threshold one casts off fear. Danger might lurk about us in the shadows of the woods, but never out there in the broad day under the kindly eye of G.o.d. Nathan might gallop through tangled brush, but here even his mood changed and he walked sedately. Even the strange road was friendly to me, for it led into a friendly land. It descended the ridge, pa.s.sed the mill, rose again over a hill; there at the crest I lost it, but only for a moment while it crossed the hollow and came into view on the easy slope beyond, going straight into the valley's heart and beckoning me on.

"It's all right now, Penelope," I cried, and I pointed to the two steeples of Malcolmville, and then led her eyes to the right to a long stone house, almost hidden in a clump of giant oaks. I could find it by our barn, for our barn would dominate any land. In the distance it seemed a mighty marble pile, lifting its white walls into the blue, and then ambitiously reaching higher with red-tipped cupolas. The Colosseum to-day is not half so large as our barn when placed in memory beside it. So there was pride in my voice as I spoke.

"Yon's our home, little 'un, and yon's our barn, and just the other side is the meadow and the creek where I'll take you fishing."

The splendid promise of fishing had little effect on Penelope's spirits. Such a prospect as I offered, such a home, a Babylonian palace beside the cabin in the clearing, with the added joys of the meadow and the creek, should have compensated in part, at least, for the temporary loss of her father, and I was much surprised that she gave no sign of pleasure. She made no answer even, and I had no evidence of her nearness to me but the two brown hands clasped before me and the brush of the ribbon against my neck. So we rode on in silence, save when I whistled, and I did not whistle very much, for my thoughts were too busy with the morning's adventure and forecasting the days to come. My mind was wonderfully clear about the future; the way seemed very easy. Thereafter I should listen to warnings. I had brought myself to unpleasant pa.s.ses by a reckless disregard of warnings, and now if Mr. Pound told me to beware, or Stacy Shunk to look out, or Miss Spinner to remember Absalom, I should heed their admonitions, yet those unpleasant pa.s.ses became in retrospect delightful adventures, and I congratulated myself that I was coming through them with so much credit. That I was conducting myself with credit, I had no doubt. My father could not have accepted the Professor's charge more confidently than I, nor could he have used more adroitness in persuading Penelope to leave the clearing. So I was sure of commendation when I brought her home. Home was such a bountiful place. My mother had impressed that on me very often. She had laid emphasis on my obligation to share my riches with others--generally when I had to carry heavy baskets down to the parsonage. To-day I was mindful of that injunction, and to take care of Penelope was a pleasant task, since for the present it meant simply to share with her from an inexhaustible store. Considering the future, I wandered into hazy and very muddled dreams. Did the Professor never return, I was quite willing to keep my promise and to care for his daughter always. This did not mean that I was contemplating matrimony at some remote time.

Matrimony, to my youthful observation, was a prosaic state. It did not seem to me that my father and mother led an interesting life. If they were happy in it, then it was in a very strange way, for they only knew a dull routine of work and worry. Sometimes they laughed, and when they did it was hard to discover the sources of their mirth. How my father could find pleasure in Mr. Pound's sermons was a mystery, and when my mother declared that the meeting of the Ladies' Aid had been most enjoyable I was sure that she was pretending. No; the future held something better for me than such dull days. Somehow, somewhere, when I became a man I should live days like this day, I should live as now I rode, with every sense keyed to the joy of living, and Penelope's arms would encircle me and the blue ribbon would gently brush my neck.

These pleasant dreams were disturbed by realities. I had come to one of those dreadful moments when danger rises like an appalling cloud, through which we can see no gleam of light beyond. This cloud, "at first no larger than a man's hand," arose from a fence in the person of Piney Savercool. I saw him with pleasure, for I knew that I was coming to familiar roads, and then he was such a very small boy that I had not that sense of humiliation which I must have felt had one of my own age seen me riding with a girl.

"Morning, Piney," I said grandly.

For an answer Piney simply opened his mouth very wide, and his eyes started from his head.

My effect upon him was very pleasing to me, and I ventured still more grandly: "Pleasant day, Piney."

Then he found his voice, "Ma-ma--come quick!" he shrieked. "Davy Malcolm's runnin' away with a lady!"

This announcement brought Mrs. Savercool from the house, and in a few bounds she was before us, checking our further advance with a wide-spread ap.r.o.n.