“What is your name? Mine is James–er–Botts.”
“Lou Lacey. It was ’L’ day, you know, an’ there was a teeny bit of lace on my dress. I ain’t ever had any since.”
She added the last with unconscious pathos in her tones, but in his increasing interest and mystification the man who called himself “Botts” was unaware of it. What on earth could she mean about L day, and if she were running away why did she appear so serenely unconcerned about the future as her manner indicated?
He felt that he must draw her out, and he seemed to have hit upon the right method by giving confidence for confidence; but just how 13much could he tell her about himself? James Botts’s own face reddened.
“I’m walking to my home in New York,” he explained. “But I’m late; I ought to make it by a certain date, and I don’t think I’ll be able to, since my encounter with Terwilliger’s bull. Where do you live? I mean, where are you going? Where is your home?”
“Nowheres,” Lou Lacey replied offhandedly, following with her eyes the graceful swoop of a dragonfly over the tumbling waters of the little stream.
“Great Scott!” The astounded young man sat up suddenly, with his hand to his head. “Why, everybody has a home, you know!”
“Not everybody,” the girl dissented quietly.
“But–but surely you haven’t been walking the roads?”
There was genuine horror in his tones. “Where did you come from this morning when you found me?”