“And what did you do, little Kitty?” Captain Andy was much interested, although he knew he had not got at the spiky secret yet.
“Me!” Kitty raised her level brown eyebrows; the dimples flashed. “Me! Why, I just came home, all tuckered out, and went down to the bottom of the orchard there and picked out that big, tall rock near the stream that has a bed of soft earth under it, an’ I thought that, if worst came to worst, I’d lie down and call on that rock to fall, for ’twas the earth that would, really, tumble on to me—an’ that wouldn’t hurt very much!”
If only the preacher could have seen Kitty’s outwitting expression, her swinging shoe!
Her granduncle stared at her a minute. Then the orchard rang with his gusty laugh.
“Great Kingdom! if you ain’t the sly-boots,” he blankly ejaculated. “If you haven’t an eye to business, picking out a rock that’s bedded in good soft earth so’s the earth might smother, but not mangle you, cheating the anger of the Almighty!”
But Captain Andy’s laughter was a brief puff. It died summarily. He rose and paced the orchard, thrusting Mary-Jane out of the way with his meditative foot, his figure looming massively against the background of fruit-trees.
Just as suddenly he sat down again and touched Kitty’s hand with a horny forefinger, his face at this moment a sheltering flame, indeed, fed by an inner fire.
“Kitty child! listen to me,” he said. “You ain’t so ready to tell me things, but I’m going to tell you something that I never told yet to a soul outside my wife—your gran’aunt, Kitty—who died more’n five years ago. Kitty, I’ve led a rough an’ racking life, take it all together, with maybe more storm than shine in it—I’ve gone winter-fishing for years to the far-away ocean fishing-grounds an’ that’s about the hardest life a man can lead—an’ he’s sure to ask at times what’s the meaning of it all. Kitty, I don’t set up to know the meaning. But two or three times in my life, once when I was a boy of your age, again when I was a tossed seaman standing to the wheel o’ my vessel at twilight, something has come to me like a flash an’ I’ve seemed to see surer than sunlight the Power behind everything an’—and it was the ‘Big Good Thing,’ as somebody calls it, Fatherhood an’ Truth an’ Understanding—and it isn’t dropping rocks on anybody. Pretty often we roll ’em on to ourselves, though, or get on the rocks, whichever way you like to put it, by taking false bearings, by our mistakes and the like. Now, little girl, don’t you go and make the big mistake of shutting up tighter’n a clam on any secret that’s troubling you—sharing it only with a pig!
“Bless your heart!” went on the moved captain after an interval during which tears had begun to steal down his grandniece’s cheeks. “Why, bless your heart, dearie, Death and I ain’t strangers. I’ve seen him and his shadow often enough to know him pretty well, an’ two-thirds of the time I’ve ousted him, too, when he was just setting up a claim.” Something superb stirred in the speaker’s tones at memory of the lives he had saved. “An’, maybe, if he was casting an eye on you at all—else why should you talk about ‘dying young’—I might be able to drive him off again.”
“It—’twas what Aunt Hannah said,” began Kitty weakly, no longer perverse. “She said it to Aunt Kate, sitting on this very seat under the cherry-tree, only last spring. I”—with a stifled sob—“was playing ’round with Mary-Jane and my little topknot duck; she thought I didn’t hear.”