“Well, I’ll think it over to-day,” said his wife.
“Yes’m—an’ what you say goes”—and, whistling, the light-hearted, hard-working gypo man started toward his gang.
But he turned back immediately. “Oh, ’Lizabeth!” he called, and came swinging to her side again.
“This here boy,” he said, “has taken quite a fancy to Madge, don’t you think? He’s gettin’ about the age when they begin to think they’re good f’r somethin’ more’n to have their hair yanked. An’ say—course I know they’re only kids an’ all that—but ’twouldn’t be th’ worst thing in th’ world that ever happened. The boy’s mother was a Florence, they say, and th’ Florences are big folks in Maryland. They got a pile o’ money, and, even if they did turn a cold shoulder on this boy’s mother, that ain’t sayin’ they’ve forgot about her kids.”
“George! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself!”
Bloodmop Mundy’s face grew fiery red. “’Lizabeth, it ain’t the money that I’m thinkin’ about so much. He might never get a cent, and the chances are he won’t. But you come of a good family, and I ain’t ever forgot it. You run away with me, a no-’count tramp of a dirt-mover, just because I said I’d be good to you an’ treat you right. Well, I done that. That part’s all right. But I don’t know nothin’ and never did—and never will. I’m just nobody—or worse’n that, because I work but don’t get anywhere. And it always hurt me to think that I drug you down to a gypsy life like ours, an’—”
But here she laid a work-worn hand across his lips.
“Hush!” she said softly. “You do all the complaining, George, and you’re only manufacturing reasons for complaint.”
“Well, anyway,” he laughed, “Sundays, when I shave and dress up like, I ain’t so bad lookin’, am I? And I’m a fightin’ fool! We’ll win out some day, ’Lizabeth. Wait’ll we hit th’ West, where a man c’n swing his arms and hit a lick that counts!”
But what her husband had said caused Elizabeth Mundy to think that morning. She knew her daughter pretty well. Born in a gypo camp, raised with rough men from infancy, Madge was not like other girls in her treatment of the few boys that she met. She had never had a girl associate. Men had babied her from her cradle. So it was only natural that she could not feel the backwardness and restraint that most young girls experience in their early dealings with the opposite sex. She wanted no puppy-love affair between these two, with Madge eleven and Joshua fourteen. But for some unaccountable reason she had taken a fancy to the boy and would have risked the difficulties that might arise from their enforced close association in the gypo camp, were she able to make herself believe it just to take the runaway under her wing. And this last was the problem that faced her during the day.