She added the last almost reluctantly, and Jim shuddered. The knife-thrower! What wouldn’t the little dare-devil be willing to try next?
“I guess you have got the nerve,” he admitted grimly. “But we’re going to be in New York by Saturday night, remember. As soon as I get my quarter from the stout gentleman over there with the striped vest, we’ll be on our way.”
But it was nearly an hour before they took to the road again. The boss insisted on starting them off with a hearty breakfast, and there were good-bys to be said to the rough, kindly folk who had taken them in as friends. Except for the litter of hand-bills and peanut-shells, the last vestiges of the circus were 74being removed from the lot as they finally departed, and what had been to Lou a wondrous, glittering pageant had become but a memory.
“I dunno but I’d as lief join a circus,” she observed, meditatively, after they had traveled a mile or more. “Maybe I could learn in New York how to do some of them tricks. I could git the hang of that business up on them swings in no time, only I don’t like the way that girl dressed─”
“Nonsense!” Jim snapped, and wondered at his own indignation. “We’ll find something suitable for you to do, or you can go to school─”
“School!” she interrupted him in her turn. “I–I’d like to learn things an’ be like other folks, but I ain’t–I mean I’m not–goin’ to any institootion.”
He glanced at her curiously. This was the first time she had made any conscious effort to correct herself, the first evidence she had given that she had noted the difference between his speech and hers.
“I didn’t mean an institution, but a real school, Lou,” he explained gently. “One 75where you’ll have no uniform to wear, and no work to do except to learn.”
“I quit learnin’ when I was twelve.” There was an unconscious note of wistfulness in her tones. “I kin read an’ do a little figgerin’, but I don’t know much of anythin’ else. I couldn’t go to school an’ begin again where I left off, Jim; I’d be sort of ashamed. Oh, look at that big wagon drivin’ out of that gate! Maybe we’ll git a lift.”
She had turned at the creak of wheels, and now, as the cart loaded with crates and pulled by two lean, sorry-looking horses passed, she gazed expectantly at the driver. He was as lean as his team, with a sharp nose and a tuft of gray hair sticking out from his chin, and his close-set eyes straight ahead of him, as though he were determined not to see to the two wayfarers.