“Kin you hold the cap steady?” The girl thrust it into his hands without waiting for a reply, and, sitting down with her back to him, calmly turned back the hem of her gown and tore a wide strip from the coarse but immaculately white cambric petticoat beneath.
Dipping it into the water, she bandaged his head not unskilfully, and then rose.
“There! I gotta git you over to the shade of them trees, or you’ll have sunstroke. Wait till I fetch somethin’.”
She ran across the road and returned with her greasy bundle under one arm, offering the 7other to him with a gesture as frank as it was impersonal.
“Lean on me, an’ try to git along–and please kinder hurry!”
She added the last with a note of sudden urgency in her tones and the same furtively darting glance with which she had swept the road from the fence-top, but the young man was too deeply engrossed with his painful effort to rise to observe the look, although her change of tone aroused his curiosity. Was this scrawny but good-natured kid afraid some of her people would catch her talking to a stranger by the roadside?
Somehow he managed to hobble, with her aid, across the little bridge and down the bank of the swiftly racing brook at its farther side to a nest in the dense thicket of willow-shoots which completely screened them from the road.
The girl eased him down then upon the sward, and, seating herself beside him, unrolled the apron she had carried.
“It’s the ham that’s greased it all up like that,” she remarked. “I’d have brought a 8pail, only I didn’t want to take any more ’n I had to.”
The young man gasped with astonishment as the contents of the apron-bundle were exposed: a whole ham glistening with the brown sugar in which it had been baked, a long knife, a huge loaf of bread, and, wrapped separately in a piece of newspaper, a bar of soap, a box of matches, and a bit of broken comb.