The girl shook her head. The moon had peeped over the shoulder of a sugar-loaf peak, and flooded the world in cobalt. The stark sycamores along the creek-bank rose gaunt and gray, and the ragged picket fence and stile and barn were black etchings against the frosted hills. On the boy's face the silver light showed a tracery of bitterness and weariness. To Minerva it ceased to be the face of an ex-convict and a vindictive criminal. It was only the rather thin and wizened visage of a prematurely aged boy, who had, in his wild-animal sort of way, undertaken to be her champion. He had undertaken it much as the dog with a name for ferocity might indicate its devotion to someone whose hand had not been afraid to caress its unlovely muzzle. She impulsively stretched out her hand and laid it on his coat-sleeve, and his arm shook, not alone with the cold, but with a strange new agitation under a touch of kindness.
"Newty," she said softly, "why don't you shake the dirt of this place offen your feet?" Her talk mixed up strangely mountain vernacular and the more correct form of speech which they had striven to teach her, at the school.
Newt only looked at her with a short laugh.
"Whar'd I go?" he demanded fiercely. "What do I know? What could I do? This is whar I b'longs." With a contemptuous jerk of his head toward the cabin, he added: "Them's my kind o' folks. I was born amongst 'em, an' I hain't been nowhars else except ther penitentiary."
It was on the point of her tongue to remind him that he had been to school; that he could read and write, and was young and strong, and that all the world lay open to him, but she waited. If she was to influence him, she must go slowly and guardedly. So, instead, she asked a question about the thing of which he had wanted to speak and concerning which he found himself suddenly tongue-tied.
"What's the new room, Newty?" she demanded.
"Oh, hell!" ejaculated the boy with a sudden rush of color that even the moonlight failed to hide. "Damned ef I didn't plumb fergit hit!" That was a lie, for he had not forgotten, only he had been too bashful to speak. Now he led her over and opened the door.
A fire was roaring inside on the hearth. The place was unfurnished except for a chair, a bed and a table, all home-made, but all clean and soundly carpentered. In the Frankfort prison, Newt had worked in the chair-factory.
"Ye see, M'nervy," he went on, floundering for words, "ye see, I hain't had nothin' much ter do round hyar, an' I thought hit mout kill some time ter sort of build this-hyar contraption. I 'lowed ye mout be a little more satisfied ef ye had a room of yore own, whar ye could go to, an' put ther bar acrost the door, when them women folks pestered ye, an' tell 'em ter go ter hell."
As the girl looked about the place—all her own—tears came welling to her eyes. How could this boy—more nearly a wild beast than any other human creature she had ever known—have had the delicacy to understand that longing for privacy and self-withdrawal which at times had almost maddened her with its intensity? She sank down in the one chair and sat with the flames playing on her face and lighting the tears that flowed noiselessly, and, when she looked up to thank her champion, he was gazing down on her with a face set in a mask-like tautness,—less it betray emotion of which he was ashamed.