“I reckon I can manage him,” Bonbright suggested, looking about. “Oh, Givens!” he called to a man hurrying past. “When you get over there ask Haley not to take any definite action—I reckon he wouldn’t anyhow. I’m going to represent the prisoners, and I’ll be there inside of half an hour. Now let me put you on your horse, Miss Judith, and I’ll lead the mules up the road a piece for you.”
And so it came about that Judith sprang to the back of the sorrel nag from Creed Bonbright’s hand. Creed, still bareheaded, and wholly unconscious of the fact, walked beside her leading the mules. They passed slowly up the street towards the mountainward edge of Hepzibah, talking as they went in the soft, low, desultory fashion of their people.
The noises of the village, aroused from its usual dozing calm, died away behind them. Beyond the last cabin they entered a sylvan world all their own. While he talked, questioning and replying gravely and at leisure, the man was revolving in his mind just what action would be best for the prisoners whose cause he had espoused. As for Judith, she had forgotten that such persons existed, that such trivial mischance as their arrest had just been; she was concerned wholly with the immediate necessity to charm, to subjugate the man.
“Creed walked beside her leading the mules.”
A rustic belle and beauty, used to success in such enterprises, in the limited time at her command she brought out for Creed’s subduing her little store of primitive arts. She would know, Pete suggesting the topic, if he didn’t despise a mule, adding encouragingly that she did. The ash, it seemed, was the tree of her preference; didn’t he think it mighty sightly now when it was just coming into bloom? His favourite season of the year, his favoured colour, of such points she made inquiry, giving him, in an elusive feminine fashion, ample opportunity to relate himself to her. And always he answered. When all was spoken, and at the first sharp rise she drew rein for the inevitable separation, she could not have said that she had failed; but she knew that she had not succeeded.
“Ye can jest turn Pete a-loose now,” she told him gently. “He’ll foller from here on.”
Bonbright, on his part, was not quite aware why he paused here, yet it seemed cold and unfriendly to say good-bye at once, Again he assured her that he would go immediately to the jail and find what could be done for her cousins. There was no more to be said now—yet they lingered.
It was a blowy, showery March day, its lips puckered for weeping or laughter at any moment, the air full of the dainty pungencies of new life. Winged ants, enjoying their little hour of glory, swarmed from their holes and turned stone or stump to a flickering, moving grey. About them where they stood was the awakening world of nature. Great, pale blue bird-foot violets were blooming on favoured slopes, and in protected hollows patches of eyebright made fairy forests on the moss, while under tatters of dead leaves by the brookside arbutus blushed. Above their heads the tracery of branches was a lace-work overlaid with fanlike budding green leaves, except where the maples showed scarlet tassels, or the Judas tree flaunted its bold, lying, purple-pink promise of fruitage never to be fulfilled.