“That child won’t be allowed to go out of the gate alone again in a hurry, I guess,” laughed Belle.
“It wasn’t the child’s fault,” remarked the stranger. “I was going altogether too fast. If I’d been moving at a moderate rate I could have stopped in plenty of time. Fact is, I was thinking of something else—none too pleasant thoughts they were either—and I didn’t realize just how fast I was going.”
“You were very lucky to get off as well as you did, Mr.——” Cora hesitated inquiringly.
“Morley,” supplemented the stranger. “Bless my heart, here I am accepting all this service from you young ladies and forgetting to introduce myself. Samuel Morley is my name, and I live in the town of Saxton, about twenty miles from here. Yes, as you were saying, I was very lucky to get off as well as I did—a good deal luckier than I deserved. Though perhaps it would have been just as well if I had been killed after all.”
He brought out the last sentence so savagely that the girls were startled.
“You mustn’t mind what I say,” he said apologetically, as he noted the look on their faces. “I’m just a crabbed old stick anyway. If I hadn’t been that, I wouldn’t have so many painful memories now. Sometimes they come crowding in upon me until it seems as though I couldn’t stand them. But I wouldn’t want to say anything that would shadow the faces of young girls. There was a young girl once——”
He caught himself up sharply.
“But here I am doing all the talking,” he said. “That’s a sign I’m getting old. Now suppose you girls turn the tables. Tell me all about yourselves and where you are going.”
The conversation became general then, and from that time on he carefully refrained from saying anything bearing on himself, although the girls, who scented a romance or a tragedy somewhere, would gladly have forborne their own talk in order to hear more of his story.
“There’s the garage over there,” he said, as they drew near the outskirts of a town, pointing to a low building on the right.