CHAPTER IV
IN UNTRODDEN FIELDS
“You don’t want to have much to do with that fellow,” said Stannard, when Bruce Fearing had gone on about whatever business he had in hand.
“Why not?” Elliott’s tone was short. She had wanted to hear what Bruce was going to say.
“Oh, he is all right, enough, I guess, but nobody knows where he came from. He and that Pete brother of his are no relations of ours, or of Aunt Jessica’s either.”
“How does he happen to be living here, then?”
“Search me. Some kind of a pick-up, I gathered. Nobody talks much about it. They take him as a matter of course. All 64 right enough for them, if they want to, but they really ought to warn strangers. A fellow would think he was—er—all right, you know.”
Stannard’s words made Elliott very uncomfortable. She thought the reason they disquieted her was that she had rather liked Bruce Fearing, and now to have him turn out a person whom she couldn’t be as friendly with as she wished was disconcerting. It was only another point in her indictment of life on the Cameron farm; one couldn’t tell whom one was knowing. But she determined to sound Laura, which would be easy enough, and Stannard’s charge might prove unfounded.
But sounding Laura was not easy, chiefly for the reason Stannard had shrewdly deduced, that the Robert Camerons took Peter and Bruce Fearing in quite as matter-of-fact a way as they took themselves. Laura even failed to discover that she was being sounded.