“You can bet I’ll pitch hay for her till sundown,” he declared, when Lou had explained the situation to him. He dropped beside the tub the bundle of egg-soaked clothing which he carried, and added: “It is mighty good of her to do all this for us, isn’t it? I tell you, Lou, the credit side of the list is going up even if it did have a bit of a jolt this morning, and you’re the biggest item on it.”
This speech was wholly unintelligible to the girl, but she bent over the tub without reply, and Jim went on hurriedly, aware that he had made a slip of some sort.
88“I wonder where all the men of the family are? She can’t get any hands─”
“There are all the men of the family.” The woman had reappeared in time to catch his last remark, and she pointed out toward the two small toilers with a faint smile. “There was another, their father–my son–but he died; so we’re doin’ the best we can by ourselves. But there’s a little bite ready for you on the end of the kitchen-table, and it’s getting cold.”
The food tasted good, and the little red cloth beneath the dishes was clean, but the signs of carefully concealed poverty were everywhere visible to Jim’s eyes, and he suspected another reason for the lack of farm-hands than scarcity of labor. He hurried through his meal, and went at once to the hay-field, while Lou, after insisting on clearing the dishes away, went back to the wash-tub, and their hostess returned to her own belated ironing.
Upon the girl’s usually serene brow there was a frown of perplexity as she worked, and her thoughts were far afield, for in that backward 89glance which she had given from the egg-wagon to the approaching car just before the crash came she had recognized in its occupants the quartet who sat in front of her at the circus the previous evening. The ladies were closely swathed in their veils, but she remembered the distinctive plaids of their silk coats, and the stout gentleman who sat between them in the tonneau, with goggles and hat snatched off in the excitement of the impending smash-up, was unmistakably the one who had called out “Good work!” when Jim was performing on the horse.
The other gentleman who had made up the quartet was the one who drove the car, and her quick glance showed her that he was even then trying to avoid the crash.
The details had been photographed upon her brain with instantaneous clarity, but it was not with these that her thoughts were busied; the remark which the younger lady had made at the circus just before Jim rode toward the exit-flap of the curtain had returned and could not be banished from her mind:
90“Didn’t he look like Jimmie Abbott?”
Her companion had told the girl that his name was Botts, but beyond that, and the fact that he was on the way to New York, he had vouchsafed no further information about himself, nor had Lou asked. She could not understand why his journey was hedged about with so many silly rules, nor why he chose to obey them; that was his affair, and he was just a part of this wonderful adventure which had started with her departure from the Hess farm.