“They stand for Pauline Chester Brewster!” he said, “and I do not for a minute doubt but that you are my own dear little sister; but all that can be settled when we see those sisters you speak of, in New Orleans, and the garments they have kept all these years are shown. You will not be afraid of me any longer, will you?”
He was drawing very close to her when he said this. The little girl’s bright eyes were fastened upon his face. What she saw there must have given her complete confidence in the boy, for she suddenly extended both hands toward him.
“No, I am not afraid of you. Why should I be when you have brought me such splendid news? And you look just like what I have always thought a brother must be. Oh! I do hope I won’t wake up and find that it’s all only a dream; because that has happened so many times. It always made me cry, because I was so very much disappointed. But then this time it seems different, because I’ve heard you speak, and you have told me the things I’ve always wanted to know. And so my name is Pauline?”
“Yes, or Polly for short,” the delighted boy went on, as he took both her extended hands in his; “do you think you will like it better than Mary? It was my mother’s name too, and she was a Chester before she married my father. I am Thad Brewster, your own brother Thad.”
“How queer it seems to me—to have a real brother,” she went on to say; “but oh! we forget about him. He will be very, very angry if he finds me talking to you in this way; because he has always told me I must never say a single word to a stranger.”
“Well, it’s different when you’re talking with your brother, you see,” Thad replied; but her words had awakened him to the fact that it was most unwise to continue to linger so close to the shack where Jasper was staying; and that the safest policy would be for them to reach the spot where Sheriff Badgely and his posse lay concealed, and leave the rest to that astute peace official.
He wondered at such a young girl talking so well, but then she had been all of her life in the charge of the sisters at the convent school, and consequently was somewhat old-fashioned in her ways.
“But what will you do about it?” she asked him; “because I am sure he will never let me go away with you, even if you are my brother.”
“I don’t mean to ask him,” Thad told her. “All you have to do is to walk off now with me, and we can laugh at him.”
“Oh! but you don’t know what a terrible man he can be!” she said, laying a little hand earnestly on his sleeve; “once I saw him furiously angry, and he frightened me very much, even if he did tell me I mustn’t think he was meaning me when he said such awful things. He will follow after us, and do something wicked, I know he will.”