The boy was seated at a small pine table, covered with books and papers, but as she advanced hesitatingly into the room he rose.
“Come on in,” he invited hospitably. “Wouldn’t you like to see my books? Some of them are fascinating—full of pictures of prize stock and model chicken farms and champion egg-laying hens and things like that. Look,” he commanded snatching up a book as if eager to detain her. “Here’s a picture of a cow that my grandfather owns. She holds the state record for butter-fat production. Her name’s Beauty Bess—look!”
Sally, without a thought as to the impropriety of being in a man’s bedroom, slipped into the chair he was holding for her and bent her little braid-crowning head gravely over her book.
“I’m going to stock the farm with nothing but pedigreed animals when it’s mine,” David told her, enthusiastically. “Look, here’s the kind—” And he bent low over her, so that his arm was about her shoulder as he riffled the pages of the book, seeking the picture he wanted her to see.
A sudden gust of wind, presaging a summer shower, slammed the door shut, but the two were so absorbed they did not hear the faint click of the lock. Nor did they hear, a little later, the sound of the stealthy, futile turning of the knob, the retreat of carefully muted footsteps.
David was bending low over Sally, his cheek almost touching hers, excitedly expounding the merits of crop rotation, and pointing out text-book confirmation of his theories, when sudden, evil words shocked their attention from the fascinations of the agricultural text-book:
“Caught you at last! Thought you was mighty slick, didn’t you?—locking the door! I’ve a good mind to whip you every step of the way back to the orphan asylum, you lying, nasty little—” Carson’s voice, hoarse with anger and exultation over his coming revenge upon the girl who had dared jeopardize his daughter’s happiness, stopped with a gasp upon the evil word he had spat out, for his shoulders, as he tried to wriggle into the room from the small window, were stuck in the too-narrow frame.
If the wind had not been roaring about the house, banging branches of shade trees against the sloping roof upon which David’s window looked, they would necessarily have heard his approach, but as it was they were totally unprepared for the sight of his head and shoulders and breast, framed in the window, his glittering black eyes fixed upon them with evil exultation.
Sally struggled to her feet as David leaped toward the window. She had a fleeting glimpse of his rage-distorted young face, his lips snarled back from his teeth.
“David! Don’t, David!” she cried, her voice a high, thin wail of terror—terror for David, not for Carson.