“That’s good,” Lou said, but without enthusiasm. “Do we start at sun-up?”
“I thought I’d like to work for Mrs. Bemis for a couple of hours first and get the hay turned in that south field,” Jim answered. 98“She’s been so good to us, and she’ll need the stuff this winter for those two old plugs out there.”
He pointed out into the pasture, where two horses made mere blotches of deeper shadow beneath a tree.
Lou laughed suddenly, softly, but it seemed to him that the rippling, liquid note had vanished.
“What’s funny?” he asked.
“Oh, nothin’. I was just thinkin’ of you last night in that circus. You rode so–so wonderfully. I wasn’t laughin’ at that, but it just come to me how funny it would have been if any of your friends was to have seen you!”
Jim glanced at her sharply, but in the starlight her face seemed merely amused as at a whimsical thought.
“Why would it have been funny?” he insisted. “Of course I never rode in a real circus before, and I guess I was pretty rotten, but why would my friends have laughed?”
“I dunno.” Lou dropped her arms from the fence-rail and turned away. “Let’s go back to the house. I–I’m pretty tired.”