It was a frankly doomed cry now; had there been an executioner in waiting behind an orchard tree, had Mary-Jane Peg been the sheriff whose business it was to hurry a victim off to an untimely end, the voice could not have carried more pathetic conviction.
“Die! Lord ha’ mercy! who’s talking about dying?—not you, Kitty? You talking about ‘stepping out’ at the advanced age of fourteen!” came a blusterous voice, suddenly breezing-up among the apple and cherry trees.
The doomed one, the occupant of the hammock and owner of the muslin knees, dropped, startled, to her feet and whisked around like a shaken leaf, the orchard zephyr fluttering the hem of her green muslin frock, lengthened to suit her years, but falling shrunkenly short in that respect.
“You don’t want to die, eh?” challenged the breezy voice again in an orchard gust. “You don’t want to die before that pampered pig that’s hazaracking round here, surfeiting herself with windfall apples. Well! she’s sure to lie down an’ grunt her last, some time, if she don’t make tasty bacon first, but where’s the fun of sitting in a hammock, talking to her about it? That’s what I’d like to know!”
“She’ll never make bacon—although she may after I’m gone!” This last was a plaintive after-clap of thought; the wearer of the muslin dress of shrunken green looked up with melting defiance into the face which upon a far-away city playground had reminded a Camp Fire Girl of “sheltering flame.”
It flamed protectively now all over the massive features as its narrowed blue eyes from under their heavy, weather-beaten eyelids dropped a glance half of amusement, half of deep concern, that floated downward quite a distance like the petal of a flower to alight on the brown head of the little four-feet-seven figure in green.
Yes, it was scarcely half an inch taller, that figure, than the buoyant little form of Betty Ayres, whose Camp Fire name was Psuti, the Holly, chosen from a book of symbols because the holly is “gayest when other trees are bare.”
There was a sort of grimness rather than gaiety about this other small girlish figure palpitating under the orchard trees as if at its core there was a spike rather than an elastic spring, that steely spike being fairly well covered up by the rounded, childish form, whose curves were not quite as well-filled out as they ought to be, the curly brown hair and dimpling face—quite a shade paler than nature intended—and the mischievous brown eyes, more liquid than Sally’s, now amber pools of sunlight in which a tiny brown trout seemed perversely to leap, refusing to be caught.
Captain Andy, looking down upon the brown head, made up his mind that, now or never, he would catch that little perverse troutlet which had been dodging him and everybody else for some months and extract the spiky hook about which it played in Kitty’s being; in other words, that he would get at the grim core of secret fear, or whatever it might be, which, as he put it to himself, seemed to be eating the very heart out of the child.
“Come! let’s sit down an’ talk a while; I’m just full to the hatches with things I want to tell you, Kitty,” he said. “That hammock looks too skittish to bear my weight; let’s put for the seat under the cherry-tree there, the tree that you an’ I did some grafting on last spring,” indicating a bandaged trunk on which a surgical operation had been performed. “Neat piece of vegetable surgery it was, too, grafting a slip from a tree bearing fine ox-heart cherries on to one bearing mighty poor bleeding-hearts, eh?” muttered the captain as he caught the hand of his little grandniece, Kitty Sill. “Sounds some like a parable that!” under his breath. “Maybe there’s the same ticklish job ahead o’ me, now, to graft something on to this little bleeding heart,” glancing askance at Kitty’s face with its set lips in contrast to the fluctuating dimples. “But, first, to find out why it bleeds—and there I’ve got my work before me!... Let’s see, what d’ye call that crunching pig that you swap secrets with, here, secrets you won’t tell your mother?” he asked aloud.