To make good my boast, I even dared to kick Nathan, fearing lest a pause in our journey might allow her to slip from his back.
"I want to find father—to go with him," she pleaded. It was the hundredth time she had told me that.
"He said you were to come with me, Penelope," I argued. "And he told me particular that he wouldn't be home till a week from Monday."
This last was a little fiction of mine, which seemed warranted by the circumstances, and had Penelope pressed me and asked me when her father had made such a definite statement I was ready to go to any extent with like imaginings if only I could keep her with me. She did not, and her cheerier tone quieted my conscience.
"Is he?" she cried. "Do you really think he will come home, Davy?"
"Didn't he tell me so?" I returned haughtily. "And besides, what would he stay away any longer for?"
Still Penelope was inclined to doubt. She knew that the morning's strange events had brought her father into great trouble, and she could not believe that a vain search for him would satisfy his enemies. Two weeks, she thought, would suffice to wear them out, but two weeks in her small mind was an eternity when it was to be faced without him.
"Oh, Davy, I wish he hadn't done it," she cried. "If he hadn't shot
Mr. Lukens, then he wouldn't have to run away, would he?"
"That was just a mistake," I replied, as though shooting constables were quite a favorite sport where I lived. "He told me particular he didn't mean it, but having done it, and they not understanding that he didn't mean it, he kind of had to get out till things blowed over."
"Didn't he do wrong to shoot Mr. Lukens?"