“When there’s lots of them, ham sandwiches, together with spring water, ain’t so bad, an’ it’s near noon,” the girl observed, beginning to cut the loaf into meager slices with a practised hand. “I should’ve made them thicker, but I forgot.”
A starving gleam had come into the young man’s eyes at the sight of food, but he paused with the sandwich half-way to his lips to glance keenly at his companion.
“You’ve enough here for an army,” he declared. “Were you taking it to men working in the fields somewhere?”
“No,” she replied without hesitation, but with the same air of finality with which she 9had responded to his first question. “You can rest easy here till sundown, when the men begin to come in from the harvestin’, an’ then if you holler real loud some of them will maybe stop an’ give you a lift on your way. There’s a railroad about four miles from here, an’ the slow freight goes by along about ten.”
The slow freight! So the girl thought he was a tramp! The young man smiled, and glanced down ruefully at his shabby attire. Well, so had others thought, whom he had encountered in his journey.
But who and what was the girl herself? She had asked no questions as to how he had come to the condition in which she found him, but had nursed his hurt, brought him to this cool resting-place; and was sharing her food with him as unconcernedly as though she had known him all her life.
That quantity of provisions, the package of humble toilet articles, and her furtiveness and haste to get away from the open road all pointed to one fact–the girl was running away. But from whom or what? She had taken him at his face value, and he had no 10right in the world to question her, at least without giving some sort of account of himself.
“I have no intention of traveling by rail,” he assured her. “A little while before you found me–I don’t quite know how long–I was crossing that pasture which adjoins the wheat-field, thinking that this road might be a short cut to Hudsondale, when something came after me from behind and butted me over the fence. I think my head must have been cut open by striking against a stone, for I don’t remember anything more until you poured that water over my face.”
The girl nodded.
“I seen the stone with blood on it right near you; you must have bumped off it an’ turned over,” she averred. “Anybody who goes traipsin’ through old Terwilliger’s pasture is apt to meet up with that bull of his.”