“So am I, sir! But not in your company.”
“Oh, come on and be sociable! We’re the only two of our kind up among these bushwhackers.”
Miss Elsham’s fellow operative was stressing his play; he grabbed away her bag. “We may as well get a quick rise out of him,” muttered Crowley. It was a plan they had devised in case their man should help their luck by being at the railroad station.
“I’ll call an officer!” she threatened.
“You don’t need to,” Latisan informed her. He had followed the couple. “Besides, there isn’t any. The only place they need officers is in a city where a rab like this is let run loose.” He leaped to the stout chap and yanked away the girl’s bag. “I’ll carry it if you’re going to the tavern.”
She accepted his proffer with another smile—a smile into which she put a touch of understanding comradeship. They walked along together.
There was no conversation. The spring flood of the Noda tumbled past the village in a series of falls, and the earth was jarred, and there was an everlasting grumble in the air. The loungers stared with great interest when the drive master and the girl went picking their way along the muddy road.
The volunteer squire delivered the traveling bag into the hand of Martin Brophy, who was on the porch of the tavern, his eye cocked to see what guests the train had delivered into his net. Mr. Brophy handled the bag gingerly and was greatly flustered when the self-possessed young lady demanded a room with a bath.
Latisan did not wait to listen to Brophy’s apologies in behalf of his tavern’s facilities. He touched his cap to the discomposing stranger and marched up to the big house on the ledges; he was not approaching with alacrity what was ahead of him.
He had arrived in Adonia from headwaters the previous evening, and had spent as much of that evening as his endurance would allow, listening to Echford Flagg, sitting in his big chair and cursing the fetters of fate and paralysis. Unable to use his limbs, he exercised his tongue all the more.