“Why, what on earth brought you here this time o’ day? How’d you find us? Did you stay away from home all night?”
Joshua grinned in confusion, but he felt better immediately. This girl was like no other girl that he had met. While she seemed modest enough and not lacking in that intangible feminine instinct to make no open approaches toward the male of the species, she was free and easy-spoken and friendly to a high degree.
“I just thought I’d—now—sneak down this way,” he told her. “A switchman told me the way. Ole Les quit me, all right. He’s gone home. I had to sleep in a boxcar last night.”
“Did you really?” she laughed. “That’s nothing for a stiff. They’re all tramps—all these railroaders. You’d get used to things like that if you went on the railroad grade. But ain’t you really ever going home again?”
He shook his head. “No more o’ that duckin’ in mine,” he said.
“I think that’s a perfectly awful way for a father to treat his boy,” she sympathized. “I told Pa and Ma about you last night.”
“Didja?”—eagerly. “What’d they say?”
“Well, Pa didn’t just know. He said he didn’t like to interfere in anything like that—you know, come between a boy and his father. But he said putting your head under water that way was mighty mean, and he’d bet a dollar he could whip the man that he saw doing it. You see, Pa isn’t like most folks. He’s lived out in camps so much that he—well, I don’t just know how to say it—but he’s—well, I guess you’d call it liberal. But he said you oughta go home, and maybe they’d forgive you.”
“He don’t know my father,” said Joshua, shaking his head. “No, I won’t go home, Madge, no matter what happens.”
“I don’t blame you, I guess. But say—I’ll bet you haven’t had a bite of breakfast! Of course you haven’t! Well, neither have I. Don’t you want to come and eat with us? Ma’ll be glad to have you.”