But she could not avoid that. If one of them was there he was, that was all, and she felt that by acting as she had decided to do, she had, at all events, everything to gain and nothing to lose.
The road from the boarding-house to the station was perfectly straight for about three-quarters of a mile, and parallel with the railroad tracks. Then, when the road came to a point opposite the station, it came also to a crossroad, and, about a hundred yards down this crossroad was the station itself.
Bessie reached that point without anything to alarm her or upset her plans, and there she was lucky enough to find a big billboard at the corner, which happened to be a vacant lot. Behind this billboard she took shelter thankfully, feeling sure that it would enable her to see what Jake was doing without any danger of being discovered by him.
As she had expected, Jake did not enter the station. She had no sooner taken up her position in the shelter of the billboard than she was able to single him out from the men who were lounging about, waiting for the train. His movements were still furtive and sly, and Bessie had to repress a shudder of disgust. Such work seemed to bring out everything small and mean and sly in Jake’s nature, and Bessie’s thoughts were full of sympathy for his father. After all, Paw Hoover had always been good to her, and when she and Zara had run away from Hedgeville, he had helped them instead of turning them back, as he might so easily have done. It seemed strange to Bessie that so good and kind a man should have such a worthless son.
Twice, as Bessie looked, she saw Jake approach one of the windows of the station building furtively, but each time he was scared away from it before he had a chance to look in.
“Trying to make sure that I’m in there, and afraid of being seen at his spying,” decided Bessie. “That’s great! If he doesn’t see me, he’ll just decide that I must be there anyhow, and take a chance. It’s a good thing he’s such a coward. But I wonder what he thinks we’d do to him, even if we did see him?”
She laughed at the thought. Never having had a really guilty conscience herself, Bessie had no means of knowing what a torturing, weakening thing it is. She could not properly imagine Jake’s mental state, in which everything that happened alarmed him. Having done wrong, he fancied all the time that he was about to be haled up, and made to pay for his wrongdoing. And that, of course, was the explanation of his actions, when, as a matter of fact, he could have walked with entire safety into the station and the midst of the Camp Fire Girls.
Soon the whistle of the train that was to carry the Camp Fire Girls to Plum Beach was heard in the distance, and a minute later it roared into the station, stopped, and was off again. Seeing a great waving of handkerchiefs from the last car, Bessie guessed what they meant. Miss Eleanor had agreed to her plan, and this was the way the girls took of bidding her good-bye and good luck.
As soon as the train had gone Jake rushed into the station, and Bessie walked boldly toward it, a new idea in her mind. She had made up her mind that to be afraid of Jake Hoover was a poor policy. If the guess she and Dolly had made concerning his relations with those who were persecuting her was correct, Jake must be a good deal more afraid of them, or of what he had done, than she could possibly be of him, and Bessie knew that there should be no great difficulty in dealing very much as she liked with a coward.
Moreover, the presence of a policeman at the station gave her assurance that she need fear no physical danger from Jake, and she felt that was the only thing that need check her at all.