"Dav-id Malcolm," she cried, "the idea of you lettin' such a little 'un as her set on such a dangerous animal. Stop! Get down, I say, both on you!"

I could not break through that ap.r.o.n, and my heart sank, for, instead of riding grandly home and presenting Penelope to my parents with a proper speech, we were threatened with an ignominious journey in the Savercool buggy. With Mrs. Savercool's charge that we were foolish children, and that she could never forgive herself if she did not stop our wild career at once, years dropped from my age and inches from my stature, and I was at the point of obeying her meekly. But Nathan took offence at her tone. He bolted. Just what happened I could not see, for I had to take myself to his mane again, and he held his terrific pace until we reached the pike, and along the pike to the fork where the road branched off to our farm. When he paused here it was to consider whether he would go on toward Malcolmville or into the quiet, shaded lane. He must have recalled the hitching-rail, the sun, and the flies, and preferred to risk even a road that he did not know, for on he went--quietly.

We crossed the little knoll and the house came into view. The cry of exultation which rose to my lips was checked when I saw, stretching from the gate down the road, a long line of vehicles. The first held the hitching-post. The others took to the fence--buggies, buckboards, phaetons, single horses, and teams, an ominous picture. Not since my grandfather's funeral had I seen quite such a sight before our house, and my heart sank. Could death have come in my absence? On second thought I remembered how brief that absence had been, measured in hours, and I sought another reason for the gathering. I began at the last vehicle and carried my eye along the line, to find that I knew them all. There was Doctor Pearl's buckboard, with his mustang eating a fence post; Squire Crumple's gray mare in his narrow courting buggy; old Mr. Smiley's ponderous black with his comfortable phaeton, speaking the presence of Mr. Pound and Mrs. Pound, who used it as their own; the Buckwalters' rockaway and the Rickabachs' spring-wagon. Even Miss Agnes Spinner's bicycle had a fence panel all to itself, as though it were very skittish and likely to kick and set the whole road in commotion. To my own unimportant self I never attributed this a.s.sembly of all the great folk of the valley. There was some more potent reason. As I pondered, hunting for it, we came to the lane. Until I found that reason it seemed wise for me to turn there, and under the cover of the orchard to reach the hiding of the barn, where I could leave Penelope while I scouted and had a peep through the keyhole of the back door. But Nathan saved me from such an ignominious return.

He kept right on. My efforts to stop him only made him trot, and in a moment we were at the gate. He seemed to like the house and the shade of the oaks, for he halted, let himself down on three legs complacently and began to switch at flies. And I, with nothing left to do, was measuring the distance to a safe landing when I heard a cry from the door.

"Davy! Davy!" I saw my mother running down the path with her arms outstretched, and after her came a great company.

"Davy--Davy, dear--we thought you had been drowned!" she cried.

Here, then, was the reason for this great gathering. What a commotion for so small a reason--as though a boy's chief end were to tumble into the water, as though he never were to be trusted out of his mother's sight? I dropped the reins; my eyes and my mouth opened wide with astonishment.

"Your father's dragging the mill-dam for you this very minute." She was at the gate. "Where--where have you been?"

She did not let me answer. She lifted her hands and caught me in her embrace, and Penelope's arms were clutching me about the neck as she was swung with me from Nathan's back.

My mother was crying, from gladness I took it, for there certainly was joy in her eyes when she held me off and looked down at me. Then came astonishment, and she lowered her spectacles from the top of her head to make sure that she saw aright.

"But who--who is this?" she said.

For answer I took Penelope's hand and faced the whole company; faced Mr. Pound and the squire, old Mr. Smiley and Miss Spinner, Mrs. Pound, and a score of others of the great folk of the valley. I faced them with defiance in my eyes, for were not they the authors of the Professor's troubles and was I not his only friend?

"It's Penelope Blight," I said, "and I promised the Professor to take care of her."

"What?" cried Mr. Pound. "The Professor's daughter--the man who almost killed Constable Lukens? Dav-id!"

"Yes, sir," I said. Penelope's hand was tightening in mine, and I glanced to my side, to see her standing very straight, and the blue ribbon was tilted as proudly as on that morning when we met by the mountain brook.

"Dav-id!" cried my mother.

"Yes, sir," I said, looking right at Mr. Pound. "I promised the Professor that I would take care of her--always."

CHAPTER VI

It was well for me that in my hours of absence fear had brought my parents to a just estimate of my character and to a truer appreciation of my essentiality to their happiness. My mother had long been haunted by a conviction that I should meet an early death by drowning or an accidental gunshot, and this very morning she had awakened from a dream in which she saw her only child floating on the murky waters of the mill-dam. Rushing to my room and finding me gone, she had had her worst fears confirmed, and at the moment of my reappearance Mr. Pound was endeavoring to console her for her loss and to bring her to a state of Christian resignation.

So all was forgotten in the joy of my unexpected return, and though in the eyes of the minister, Miss Spinner, and the others I was just a small black sheep about whose absence an unnecessary pother had been raised, there was only rejoicing in the home fold. Even my father did not humiliate me with forgiveness, but took me in his arms silently and held me there, as he might have held me had he just rescued me from the depths of the mill-dam. To follow such a greeting with chastis.e.m.e.nt, however well merited, was quite out of the question. In the seclusion of my own room I did meet with gentle chiding for the anguish I had caused, but my mother remembered her dream, and my father his hours of futile searching, and I knew that the hands which pressed mine would not be raised against me in harsh reproof. Below us, I was sure, ears were strained to hear some real evidence that I was receiving my deserts, for there was a silence there like that outside of the prison wall when the crowd waits for the doleful tidings tolled by the prison bell. Perhaps the listeners were disappointed. I remember that Mr. Pound looked rather nonplussed as he saw us coming down-stairs, my father leading the way, smiling gravely, my mother following, clutching my hand as though she would never release it.

I had told them everything then. The story I had tried in vain to tell them at dinner on the previous day was now listened to with eagerness, and my father, knowing the truth of James's fall from grace, was outspoken in his declaration that an injustice had been done the Professor. In a solemn conference in the parlor, with Mr. Pound and the squire, Doctor Pearl, Mr. Smiley, and all the other important men of the neighborhood, he decried the attack on Henderson Blight as an outrage; he found solace alone in the fact that the constable had been more frightened than hurt, for it seemed that the bullet had only clipped the flesh of his leg; he took upon himself all the blame for the affair, on the ground that he, at least, should have known better. Squire Crumple heartily agreed with my father, and pointed out that on his part he had only allowed the warrant to issue under protest; henceforth he would rely on his own judgment and would not interpret the law to suit the whims of his friends. Mr. Pound was contrite, but he took comfort in the thought that they had acted for the best in the light of their knowledge of the circ.u.mstances, but now, knowing the facts, he advised that the whole matter be allowed to simmer down quietly. He still took issue with his respected friend the squire on the illegality of the means used to rid the community of a most undesirable member. The squire replied with heat, referring to the case of The Commonwealth _versus_ Hodgins, and the subsequent action of Hodgins _versus_ The Commonwealth for damages. It was very evident that he would be relieved in mind if the case of The Commonwealth _versus_ Blight did simmer down. But there was one obstacle to this programme of forgetting. It was not the constable. Lukens could be quieted easily. It was Penelope. Even the gentlest ministrations of Miss Spinner had failed to bring the small girl to a realization of the happy change in her lot. Even Mr. Pound was touched by her grief and so troubled that he offered amends in a home under the parsonage roof. He realized now that the reason he had never been blessed with a child of his own was that when the time came there might be a place at his board and a nook in his heart for this abandoned little girl. On the strength of her husband's offer Mrs. Pound was claiming Penelope as her own, and very soon was complaining that she had a most troublesome child to deal with. Penelope had divined that Mr. Pound was her father's arch-enemy, and she met his most benign approach with her head tilted defiantly and her eyes flashing, so that now, in a quandary, he asked: "What shall we do with the child?"

The question was a sign that he surrendered her. He had shown an honest desire to take her under his roof, and no one could say that if he had fired the train which had wrecked her home, he was not willing to make atonement.

"What shall we do with the child?" my father repeated. He rose to show that the conference was ended and the question settled. "David has already answered that," he said, laying a hand upon my shoulder. "My boy promised Henderson Blight to take care of her until he returned. They have settled it among themselves, and I shall do nothing to interfere with them."

He spoke so firmly that no one dared to remonstrate, and so it came that I kept my promise to the Professor as far as it was in my power. He must have said himself that Penelope had a home better than any he could have given her. She had a mother's care--a care so loving that I should have grown jealous had I not found a certain compensation in the fact that the watchfulness over me relaxed and I was less hampered in my comings and goings. Before a month had pa.s.sed my mother was confessing a dread that the Professor might return and claim the child; she was pleading with my father to abandon what she called a useless and an expensive search.

Chance had left the door open, and chance had brought me into the hall, so I stopped and stood as silently as I could that I might not disturb their conference. I was frightened by the sternness in my father's voice. He spoke of his duty. To him duty summed up life. He had his duty, even in the matter of so worthless a creature as this Henderson Blight. Declaring this, he stamped the floor in emphasis.

Often in the weeks that followed, when Penelope and I roamed over the fields, when her merriment rang out the highest, and her laughter was so free that it seemed she was forgetting the clearing and the days when her sole companion was the gaunt and bitter-tongued Professor--often then I would hear again the stamp of my father's foot and his stern avowal, and to me it was as though he were conspiring against me in seeking to send away the only comrade I had ever known, and would leave me to pa.s.s my days in the wake of James. I abhorred James now. I had come to know the pleasure of real companionship, and looked back to the old days wondering how I had endured them, and with dread to those that seemed to lie ahead.

Penelope was a girl, to be sure, but she was not like the insipid creatures of the village who were held in such contempt by boys of my age. Where I dared to go she followed. Did I climb to the highest girder in the barn and balance myself on the dizzy height, she was with me. Did I venture to run the wildest rapids of the creek in the clumsy box which I called my canoe, she trusted her newest frock and ribbons to my seamanship. And better than all was the respect and admiration in which she held me. To her I was no longer the frightened, shivering boy of the mountain brook. I was in a land I knew and followed its familiar ways without fear. One day she saw me tumble from the bridge into the deep swimming-hole, and while she cried out in fright I swam nonchalantly ash.o.r.e, a full dozen strokes, and as I dried myself in the sun I reproved her for her little faith in me. On another I presented her to old Jerry Schimmel, sitting, a brown, dishevelled heap on his cobbler's bench, and from my accustomed seat by his stove, in a voice cast into the echoing hollows of my chest, I commanded him to tell us how he had fought in the battle of Gettysburg. From my familiarity with the stirring incidents of the fight as Jerry described them, Penelope thought that I must have had a part in it too, and my modest disclaimer hardly convinced her that I had not been a companion-in-arms of this battle-worn veteran.

What days those were! Even the fear that my father would find the missing Professor grew less. They drifted into weeks, and weeks into months, and there was no sign of the fugitive. I found myself looking into the future as though in the quiet evening I were turning my eyes over the valley to the west and the golden clouds hovering there. I dealt only with results. I crossed mountains without climbing them, and always Penelope shared my glory with me. I look back now smiling at that boyish self-reliance. Mountains have been crossed, but with what heart-breaking struggles? Battles have been won, but with what a toll of suffering?

As I recall the day when I first came face to face with real trouble, with a trouble that leaves in the heart a never-healing wound, it was the brightest of all that summer. It was one of those days when there was not the filmiest cloud to veil the sun; you could see the ether shimmering over the land, and the fields of yellow grain looked like lakes of molten metal. Shaded by our wide straw hats, Penelope and I had no thought of the tropic heat. We were engrossed in the reaper as it cut its way through the wheat; we followed it, counting the sheaves as they dropped with mechanical precision; we stepped along untiringly in its wake, as though the rough stubble were the smoothest of paths, and the clatter of the machine the sweetest of music. Above the raucous clacking I heard my mother calling, and, suspecting some needless injunction not to get overheated, I pretended not to hear and looked the other way. But she was insistent. When we had rounded the field again, she crossed the road to the fence; the reaper stopped, and on a day so still that a dog's bark carried a mile there was no escape from her uplifted voice.

Reluctantly Penelope and I abandoned our enchanting travel and obeyed the summons.

"Penelope," my mother said, taking the girl by the hand, "come into the house. Your uncle is here."

Penelope stopped and looked up into my mother's face, and there was wonder in her eyes. She had forgotten her uncle, so rarely had she heard her father speak of him, and I was quicker than she to grasp the meaning of his coming, for I remembered that Rufus, who never had had a real idea, who made his first success by giving away a prize with every pound of tea. I believed that he had come to take Penelope from me, and with every step I saw my fears confirmed.

"Your Uncle Rufus," my mother said, and she closed her lips very tightly as she walked on.

The parlor shades were up--an ominous sign, for the parlor would only be opened to a person of importance. Had the Professor visited us, the humbler sitting-room would have been quite good enough to receive him in, and it seemed a strange commentary on his harsh judgment that his brother should be ushered into the stately chamber where the very air grew old in dignified seclusion. Still more forcibly was this idea impressed on my mind when I stood at the door and saw my father sitting very erect, on a most uncomfortable chair, listening respectfully to the stranger's rapid words.

Rufus Blight spoke in a loud voice; he lolled in the big walnut rocker, with his arm stretched across the centre table, to the peril of my mother's precious Swiss chalet and the gla.s.s dome which protected it; on the family Bible his fingers were beating a tattoo as carelessly as they might have done on the counter of his general store. There was nothing in his appearance to suggest kin to the lean and cadaverous Professor.

The Professor always seemed to move with effort, but his brother was alive all over. Though short and fat, he had none of the placidity which we a.s.sociate with corpulence. As he talked his hands moved restlessly; his bristling red mustache accentuated the play of his lips; his heavy gold watch-chain moved up and down with his breathing; even his hair was alert.

"He is a remarkable man--I might say, a very remarkable man," were the words that came to us as we entered the hall. "Of course, you couldn't understand him--few could. He had to go his own way and would take help from no one, not even his brother. Upon my word, Judge----"

Our entrance checked him. He rose, and with arms akimbo stood gazing down at Penelope. She, clinging to my mother, her cheek pressed against her as she half turned from him, looked up at him, abashed and wondering, for to her small mind there was in this stranger something awe-inspiring.

The sleek man in spotless, creaseless clothes, with polished boots and close-shaved, powdered, barbered face, was so different from her unkempt father that she could hardly believe him kin. Baal would have seemed as near to her, and had the idol stretched out his arms to take her into his destroying embrace, she could hardly have been more frightened than when she saw Mr. Blight's fat hands reaching toward her. Mr. Blight smiled, and well he might, for this slip of a girl gazing up at him was of his own blood, and all that was good in that blood found expression in her sweetness. He had come prepared to see a slattern, ill-fed, unkempt, the true daughter of shiftless parents and a wretched mountain home; he had found a graceful little body, and he wanted to take her into his possession at once.

"Penelope," he exclaimed, "don't you know your Uncle Rufus?"

There was no particular reason why Penelope should know her Uncle Rufus.

She could have submitted herself as easily to the embrace of any well-dressed, smiling stranger, and she shrank back, but my mother pushed her forward within reach of the restless hands.

"It's your dear uncle, child," she said soothingly. "He has come to take you to a nice home."

"And he is going to bring you up," my father added in a wonderfully cheerful voice, born either from his own escape from responsibility or her brightened prospects. "He is going to give you everything."

Penelope was on the verge of tears, but she held them back. "I don't want everything," she said, as she strove to check her forced advance by planting her feet firmly and leaning back against my mother. "I just want to stay here till father comes."

"But your father will come to us--of course, he will come to us, Penelope," Mr. Blight cried. His hands closed on hers, he hooked an arm about her and held her very cautiously, as though he were as afraid of her as she of him. "You mustn't be frightened, my dear," he went on, and, soothed by his kindly tones, she leaned against his knee. "That's better, child." Encouraged by her half-yielding att.i.tude, he stroked her hair. To me, watching them from the hiding of my mother's skirt, she had fallen into a magician's clutches and was being lulled by soft words into an indifference to danger.

"I'm your father's brother, child," he pursued, in his insinuating tone.

"Next to him I'm nearer to you than any one else, and to me there is no one as near as he. We will try to find him together--you and I, eh? And we'll all live together in Pittsburgh. You'll like Pittsburgh--it's a very lively, pushing town."

"But I want to stay here with Davy," said Penelope in a low voice.

"With Davy?" Mr. Blight stared at her in surprise. Then he began to laugh as though he were contrasting all he could give her with Davy's humble powers. "Child--child--you don't realize what you are refusing.

You don't realize what your Uncle Rufus is going to do for you. I've no one to look after--you will be the joy of a poor old bachelor's heart, won't you, now?"

He spoke as though being a poor old bachelor was quite the pleasantest possible condition, yet he rolled out the phrase twice as if to touch Penelope's heart. Remembering the only other bachelor I had ever seen, I stared at him in wonder. This other was Philip Spangler, who sat all day in the store gazing vacantly at the stove. Once I asked Stacy Shunk why he stayed there, and Stacy, lifting a warning finger, whispered: "He's jest a bachelor, Davy, an old, old bachelor." Contrasting him with Mr.

Blight, I was puzzled. If it was a terrible thing to be an old bachelor, certainly he accepted the condition lightly; he was trying to arouse sympathy when it was plain that he did not need or deserve it, for evidently he was quite well satisfied with a single state, however deplorable it might come to be. Penelope was being enmeshed by unfair means, and it was hard to keep still, but there was nothing that I could do.

Now my father lifted his chin clear of the high points of his collar.