Gordon looked down at the white, drawn face of the girl, and his heart was touched with compassion for her trouble. He must make her some satisfactory explanation at once that would set her heart at rest, but he could not do it here, for every seat about them was filled with noisy chattering folk. He stooped and whispered low and tenderly:
“Don’t worry, little girl! Just try to trust me, and I will explain it all.”
“Can you explain it?” she asked anxiously, as if catching at a rope thrown out to save her life.
“Perfectly,” he said, “if you will be patient and trust me. But we cannot talk here. Just wait in this seat until I see if I can get the stateroom on the sleeper.”
He left her with his courteous bow, and she sat watching his tall, fine figure as he threaded his way among the crowds to the Pullman window, her heart filled with mingling emotions. In spite of her reason, a tiny bit of hope for the future was springing up in her heart and without her own will she found herself inclined to trust him. At least it was all she could do at present.
CHAPTER XII
Back at Milton an hour before, when the shades of dusk were falling and a slender moon hung timidly on the edge of the horizon, a horse drawing a spring wagon ambled deliberately into town and came to a reluctant halt beside the railroad station, having made a wide détour through the larger part of the county on the way to that metropolis.
The sun had been hot, the road much of it rough, and the jolts over stones and bumps had not added to the comfort of the thick-set man, already bruised and weary from his travels. Joe’s conversation had not ceased. He had given his guest a wide range of topics, discoursing learnedly on the buckwheat crop and the blight that might be expected to assail the cherry trees. He pointed out certain portions of land infested with rattlesnakes, and told blood-curdling stories of experiences with stray bears and wild cats in a maple grove through which they passed till the passenger looked furtively behind him and urged the driver to hurry a little faster.
Joe, seeing his gullibility, only made his stories of country life the bigger, for the thick-set man, though bold as a lion in his own city haunts, was a coward in the unknown world of the country.
When the traveler looking at his watch urged Joe to make haste and asked how many miles further Milton was, Joe managed it that the horse should stumble on a particularly stony bit of road. Then getting down gravely from the wagon he examined the horse’s feet each in turn, shaking his head sadly over the left fore foot.