“You’re limping, Lou. Let me see your shoes.”
She drew away from him.
“It’s nothin’,” she denied. “My shoes are all right. I–I must’ve slept too long last night an’ got sort of stiffened up.”
The freckles were swamped in a deep flood of color, but Jim repeated insistently: “Hold up your foot, Lou.”
Reluctantly she obeyed, disclosing a battered 111sole through the worn places of which something green showed.
“I–I stuffed it with leaves,” she confessed, defensively. “They’re real comfortable, honestly. I’m just stiff─”
Jim groaned.
“I suppose they will have to do until we reach the next town, but you should have told me.”
“I kin take care of myself,” Lou asserted. “I’ve walked in pretty near as bad as these in the institootion. We’d better get along to where there’s some houses ’cause it looks to me like a storm was comin’ up.”
The sun was still blazing down upon them, but it was through a murky haze, and the air seemed lifeless and heavy. Great, white-crested thunder heads were mounting in the sky, and behind them a dense blackness spread.