“I wouldn’t like to do that, Bart. After his arrangin’ to go, an’ a-hirin’ the skiff hisself. I don’t know but what he’s got somebody else to go along of us.”
“Why, does he ever?”
“Well, I don’t recollect that he ever has; but then he might of, this time, I say, for all I know.”
There was another silence. Then the big hand patted the girl’s shoulder affectionately and the honest eyes bent on her the look of patient tenderness that Diller had considered pathetic.
“All right, Laviny; you go along of him, just by yourself, an’ I’ll stop home with your paw an’ your maw. I want you to know, my girl, that I trust you, an’ believe every word you say to me. I ain’t even thought o’ much else besides you ever sence I saw you first time at the liberry sociable, an’ I won’t ever think o’ much else, I don’t care what happens. Bein’ afraid to trust a body ’s a poor way to show how much you think about ’em, is my religion; so you go an’ have a good time, an’ don’t you worry about me.” He tucked one of her runaway curls behind her ear awkwardly. “I’ll slip down to the liv’ry stable now, an’ tell ’em about the rig.”
“All right,” said Lavinia.
Her mother came in one door, after a precautionary scraping of her feet and an alarming paroxysm of coughing, and looked rather disappointed to see Bart going out at the other, and to realize that her modest warnings had been thrown away. “Well, ’f I ever!” she exclaimed. “Laviny Vaiden, whatever makes you look so? You look just ’s if you’d seen a spook! You’re a kind o’ yellow-gray—just like you had the ja’ndice! What ails you?”
“I got a headache,” said the girl; and then, somehow, the pan slid down off her lap, and the potatoes and the parings went rolling and sprawling all over the floor; Lavinia’s head went down suddenly on the table, and she was sobbing bitterly.
Her mother looked at her keenly, without speaking, for a moment; then she said dryly, “Why, I guess you must have an awful headache. Come on kind o’ sudden like, didn’t it? I guess you’d best go up and lay down, an’ I’ll bring a mustard plaster up an’ put on your head. Ain’t nothin’ like a plaster for a headache—’specially that kind of a headache.”
Bart Winn walked into the livery stable with an air of indifference put on so stiffly that it deceived no one. It was not that he did not feel perfectly satisfied with Lavinia’s explanation, but he was a trifle uneasy lest others should not see the thing with his eyes.