“I—I came to know your ways; I would watch for you early in the morning on the edge of the wood near your home—which used to be my home until your mother turned me out; but now—now I’m even with her!” It was a bitter snap. “I watched you among your flowers, dew-wet flowers—and wondered whether you had ever heard of me.... No-o, I suppose you didn’t,” sorely, “but I’m your Aunt, Una, your father’s sister—half sister, I suppose, the world would say—but I loved him as a brother and could influence him—the powers I had!” The woman’s dark eyes flashed.
Una shrank flatter—flatter—until in her abject terror she became one with the wooden bunk.
“But you, when you were a baby, a mite of a dark-eyed child, I loved best of all—and your mother, she feared my influence over you. She turned me out. I have had no home for fourteen years. I have been lonely—hungry. But—always—I have dreamed of you; that, some day, I would have you again, quite to myself—darling!” It was a hungry sob.
“But I suppose people will say I was mad—mad—to carry you off, like this, and because of means—means I have taken to try and draw you to me—”
“You—ar-re—mad,” whispered something in Una—and her flesh crept.
“I knew your parents would not let me see you, but distance—distance is no longer such a barrier, when a whisper can cross it.” In the wildness of the woman’s look there was now a mixture of practical shrewdness, normal enthusiasm, as her glance roved to what Una, in a lifeless way, perceived was the “shack corner” of the cabin—radio instruments upon a bench, or shelf, nailed to the log wall.
“Oh! I’m not behind any amateur in that art,” said the Little Lone Lady, with a flash of cunning, as if she had made use of it a good deal. “Sometimes, as I rode near and far among the mountains, visiting people—poor and rich—who wished to see me, I talked to you by radio. Occasionally—occasionally I sang to you, as I did when you were a little baby, sometimes—sometimes from a station quite near your home.”
The woman opened the door now to let in the daylight. Her eyes went feverishly to the sky. Her wild croon floated back to Una:
“Uk-k!” It was an unintelligible cluck from Una; the little “stand” in her right dark eye was weirdly set, in even blanker terror than before—she lay in the bunk as in a coffin.
Her captor looked at her; and the half-tender, whimsical smile which had played about her lips, blew away like an erratic breeze.