His fingers trifled with the shingle and string. His brain going ahead of those fingers was already attaching the one to the other when—the paintless door opened and Ma’am Baldwin stepped out.
She did look like a wind-torn corn-stalk, short and withered, with the breeze catching at the many-colored strips of shawls that hung around her, uniting to protect her somewhat against that marsh-wind driving straight from the river through her home.
From her left hand drooped a pale lantern, the one with which boyish imagination had accused her of working spells.
It made an island of yellow light about her as she stepped slowly forth into the dusk. And Leon saw her raise her right arm to her breast with that timid, pathetic movement characteristic of old people—especially of those whom life has treated harshly—as if she was afraid of what might spring upon her out of the gusty darkness.
Not for nothing had Starrie Chase been for two months a boy scout! Prior to those eight weeks of training that feebly defensive arm would have meant naught to him; hardly would he have noticed it. But just as his eyes had been opened to consider at length, with a dazzled thrill, that distant Sugarloaf Sand-Pillar and other of Nature’s beauties as he had seldom or never contemplated them before; so those scout’s eyes were being trained to remark each significant gesture of another person and to read its meaning.
Somehow, that right arm laid across an old woman’s breast told a tale of loneliness and lack of defenders which made the boy wince. The distance widened between his two hands holding respectively the shingle and string.
There was a wood-pile within a few yards of him. Ma’am Baldwin stepped toward it, breathing heavily and ejaculating: “My sen-ses! How it do blow!” While Leon restrained the terrier with a “Quiet, Blink! Don’t go for her!”
Ma’am Baldwin, intent on holding fast to her shawls and procuring some chunks from the wood-pile—nearsighted as she was, to boot—did not notice the boy and dog standing in the blackness beneath the bare apple-tree.
She set the lantern atop of the pile. As she bent forward, groping for a hatchet, its yellow rays kindled two other lanterns in her eyes by whose light the lurking boy gazed through into her heart and saw for a brief moment how tired, lonely, and baffled it was.