However, his declaration had not even the distinction of being listened to, for the girl, with her chin sunk in her clasped hands, was plainly thinking of something else. Now she put one hand timidly on his coat sleeve, and Ambrose could see that she had a curiously pointed chin and that her eyes were like deep wells with the moonlight shining down into them. "Maybe you'll tell me where you're thinkin' of stayin' the night?"
"The Lord knows only." And here yesterday's adventurer had a sudden vision of himself setting forth on his journey to be alone with nature. On the morning of the second day he had been almost caught in a trap of his own setting, and now at nightfall was probably in a worse fix. "I had been thinkin', though, of spendin' the night somewhere peaceful-like in the woods," he growled.
The girl clapped her hands together and, yawning, drew closer to her new friend, almost as if she meant to rest her head upon his shoulder.
"Then let me stay with you, please," she begged, and Ambrose could feel her warm breath on his cheek. "The woods is big and there's plenty of room for me, too. I shan't be afraid with you, and I've never seen the stars, except through the window."
The boy rose. "No," he said harshly, "you can't stay alone in the woods at night with me. I reckon before this I understood you didn't know nothing."
Half an hour afterward they found old Liza cropping grass, a little off the main road where they had left her. When both of them had returned to the gig Ambrose drove on in silence with an uncommonly bored face.
Later the moon went behind a cloud and a light mist fell, and then the girl's body began swaying gently backward and forward. Once she fell too far forward, when, still frowning, her companion slipped an arm about her, and a moment later she was fast asleep with her head resting on his shoulder.
Ambrose breathed deeply of the odour of the fresh wet earth. It was like the perfume of her young body; the moist curls about her face like the damp tendrils of new vines. Soon the boy's shoulder ached, and his entire left side, including his leg, seemed to have gone to sleep. Now and then he wondered if it ever should wake again in this world; and yet try as he might Ambrose Thompson could not make up his mind that he actually disliked the presence of the girl with him, and never from youth to old age had he the talent for deceiving himself.
"Poor kid," he murmured more than once, "she must 'a' been lyin' awake nights plannin' to run away, with no place on God's earth to run to."
Seldom did he allow himself the pleasure of looking long at her, and only once did his lips move toward hers, and then, though his face worked, they were drawn sharply back.