Pepsy nodded soberly, her thoughts far away.
“You’ll see me along there,” Mr. Jensen added cheerily, as he patted her little shoulder, “n’ I give you fair warning I’m the champion doughnut eater of Borden County.”
She smiled, still wistfully, and gulped, oh ever so little.
“That’s what I am,” he added with another genial pat. “So now you cheer up and run back home and go to bed n’ don’t you lie awake crying. You tell that little scout feller I’m coming to make you a visit n’ that I usually drink nine glasses of lemonade. Now you run along and get to bed quick.”
“Thanks,” she said, her voice trembling.
So Pepsy took her way silently along the dark road. Her bank had failed, she could do nothing more. This was a strange sequel to follow Pee-wee’s glowing representations about good turns. She did not understand it. And now that she had failed, the catastrophe in the cellar loomed larger, and she saw her nocturnal truancy as a serious thing. What would Aunt Jamsiah think of this? Pepsy had been forbidden to go away from the farm at night, except to weekly prayer meeting.
The crickets sang cheerily as she returned along the dark road, a disconsolate little figure, swinging her lantern. She was weary—weary from exertion and disappointment and foreboding. Her good scout enterprise was suddenly changed into an act of sneaking disobedience. The physical exhaustion which follows nervous strain was upon her now and her little feet lagged in their soaking shoes and once or twice she stumbled with fatigue. For what burden is heavier than a heavy heart? The soothing voices of insect life which soften the darkness and cheer the wayfarer in the countryside seemed only to mock her with their myriad care-free songs. And to make matters worse there suddenly rang in her ears from far over to the west the loud clatter of those loose planks on the old bridge along the highway, as a car sped over it:
“You have to go back,
You have to go back.”
Then the noise ceased suddenly, and there was no sound but the calling of a screech-owl somewhere in the intervening woods.