“Come on, then,” said Patsy; “we ought to be there by sundown.” She stopped and looked him over for the space of a second. “Ye are improving wonderfully. Mind! ye mustn’t be getting too keen-witted or we’ll have to be parting company.”
“Why?”
“That’s the why!” And with this satisfactory explanation she led the way down the road the tinker had pointed.
VI
AT DAY’S END
Their road went the way of the setting sun, and Patsy and the tinker traveled it leisurely—after the fashion of those born to the road, who find their joy in the wandering, not in the making of a distance or the reaching of a destination. Since they had left the cross-roads church behind Patsy had marked the tinker casting furtive glances along the way they had come; and each time she marked, as well, the flash of a smile that lightened his face for an instant when he saw that the road still remained empty of aught but themselves.
“It’s odd,” she mused; “he hasn’t the look of a knave who might fear a trailing of constables at his heels; and yet—and yet his wits have him pestered about something that lies back of him.”
Once it was otherwise. There was a rising of dust showing on one of the hills they had climbed a good half-hour before. When the tinker saw it he reached of a sudden for Patsy’s hand while he pointed excitedly beyond pasture bars ahead to a brownish field that lay some distance from the road.