She hugged her bundle tight to her breast and reached for his hand, which he had withdrawn as he rose to his feet. “Of course,” she answered simply. “I’m not afraid, David.”
“You’re a plucky kid,” David said gruffly. “I’ll lead the way. Let me know if I set too fast a pace.”
Buoyed up by his praise, Sally trotted almost happily at his heels. She refused to let her mind dwell on the horrors of the day, or to reach out into the future. Indeed, her imagination was incapable of picturing a future for a Sally Ford whose life was not regulated by orphanage routine. She held only the present fast in her mind, passionately grateful for the strong, swiftly striding figure before her, unwilling for this strange night-time adventure to end.
“Thirsty, Sally?” David’s voice called out of the darkness.
Suddenly she knew that she was both thirsty and hungry, for she had not eaten since the twelve o’clock dinner. A cool breeze was rustling the leaves of the trees, and under that whispering rustle came the cool, sweet murmur of a brook. She crouched beside David on the bank of the tiny stream and thirstily drank from his cupped hands. Then he dipped his handkerchief in the water and gently swabbed her face, his hands as tender as Sally had fancied a mother’s must be.
The going was more dogged, less mysteriously thrilling when they had at last reached the dirt road that was eventually to lead them to Stanton, a town of four or five thousand inhabitants, the town in which the woman who had brought her twelve years ago to the orphanage had lived. Days before Sally had memorized the address before destroying the bit of paper on which Miss Pond, out of the kindness of her heart, had copied Sally’s record from the orphanage files.
Half a dozen times during the apparently interminable trudge toward Stanton David abruptly called a halt, drawing Sally off the road and over reeling, drunken-looking fences into meadows or fields for a terribly needed rest. Once, with his head in her lap, her fingers smoothing his crisp chestnut curls from his sweat-moistened brow, he went to sleep, and she knew that she would not have awakened him even to save herself from the orphanage.
Dawn was bedecking the east with tattered pink banners when the boy and girl, staggering with weariness and faint with hunger, caught their first glimpse of Stanton, a pretty little town snugly asleep in the hush that belongs peculiarly to early Sunday morning. Only the dutiful crowing of backyard roosters and the occasional baying of a hound broke the stillness.
“We’ve got to have food,” David said abruptly, as they hesitated forlornly on the outskirts of the little town. “And yet I suppose the alarm has been given and the constables are on the lookout for us. We might stop at a house that has no telephone—they wouldn’t be likely to have heard about Carson—but I don’t like to arouse anyone this early on Sunday morning. There’s an eating house next to the station that stays open all night, to serve train crews and passengers, but more than likely the station agent has been told to keep a lookout for us.”
As he spoke a train whistled shrilly. The two wayfarers stood not a hundred yards from the railroad tracks where they crossed the dirt road. Sally instinctively turned to flee, but David restrained her.