"Lord!" he whispered after this, "whatever shall I do with her?" A stranger in that part of the country himself, he knew of no one to ask to shelter the girl, and take her back to the asylum he would not. Should he turn her over to a stranger she would promptly be sent back there in the morning. Yet here were the lights of a village showing close ahead of them, and every now and then old Liza stumbled, almost falling from weariness.
Ambrose's prayer half awakened the girl. Anyhow, she sat up for a moment rubbing her eyes, to hear him asking: "Whatever is your name?"
"Sarah," and then her head swayed again.
But Ambrose sat straight up giving his reins an unexpected joyous flap. "Glory, why ain't I thought of it before?" he asked of no one. Then aloud: "When Abraham drew near to the land of the Egyptians didn't he admonish Sarah, his wife, to say she was his sister that it might be well with him and that his soul should live?" He grinned silently. "I'm findin' the patriarchs pretty useful this trip, but I reckon if Abraham could say that his wife Sarah was his sister to save his own skin, I can tell the same kind of a one to save a girl."
"Wake up, Sarah," he urged, when a few moments later he drew rein before a red brick tavern door, "and if anybody asks questions, recollect you are to say you're my sister."
However, on that same evening, when Sarah put up her lips for a sister's good night kiss, it was the boy who turned away. There was something in this girl that called to him too strongly, something fragrant and as yet unawakened, and then he had not dreamed she was so pretty, with her scarlet cheeks and big, heavy-lidded eyes, some poor little child of Eve from a far different land than his blond Kentucky. It looked, too, as though the little force the girl had, had now spent itself in her one effort of running a way, and hereafter some one would surely have to look after her. "Not only had she never been taught at the asylum to think for herself," the boy reflected, "she ain't never even been allowed to."
Nevertheless the girl slept untroubled in her high-post bed in the best guest chamber of the tavern, while Ambrose in a tiny room close under the roof, lay awake for a long time. He was not in the woods alone as he had dreamed of being, and yet he was not unhappy. He was not listening to the voices of nature as he knew her, but to the stirrings of his own blood, to the beating of his own heart.
More than once in order to stay his restlessness Ambrose had risen from his bed and stood leaning and looking out of his window at the stars and breathing deep the odours of the night. Still he could see nor feel nothing except the presence of the strange girl near him, the appeal of her utter helplessness. And yet the boy did not understand that the song of life he had come forth to hear was being sung to him for the first time to-night. For he only kept repeating to himself over and over: "Whatever am I to do with her, poor little kid?" until he also fell asleep.