The tinker caught the sigh and looked over at her with a puzzled frown. “Tired?” he asked, laconically.
“Aye, a bit heart-tired,” she agreed, “and I’m wishing Arden was still a good seven miles away.”
Whereupon the tinker turned his head and grinned sheepishly toward the south.
The far-away hills had gathered in the last of the sun unto themselves when the two turned down the main street of a village. It was unquestionably a self-respecting village. The well-tarred sidewalks, the freshly painted meeting-house neighboring the engine-house “No. 1,” the homes with their well-mowed lawns in front and the tidily kept yards behind—all spoke of a decency and lawfulness that might easily have set the hearts of the most righteous of vagabonds a-quaking.
Patsy looked it carefully over. “Sure, Arden’s no name for it at all. They’d better have called it Gospel Center—or New Canaan. ’Twould be a grand place, though, to shut in all the Wilfred Peterson-Joneses, to keep them off the county’s nerves—and the rich men’s sons, to keep them off the public sympathy. But ’tis no place for us, lad.”
The tinker shifted his kit from one shoulder to the other and held his tongue.
Their entrance was what Patsy might have termed “fit.” The dogs of the village were on hand; that self-appointed escort of all doubtful characters barked them down the street with a lusty chorus of growls and snarls and sharp, staccato yaps. There were the children, too, of course; the older ones followed hot-foot after the dogs; the smaller ones came, a stumbling vanguard, sucking speculative thumbs or forefingers, as the choice might be. The hurly-burly brought the grown-ups to windows and doors.
“‘Hark! hark! the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town,’” quoted Patsy, with a grim little smile, and glanced across at the tinker. He was blushing fiercely. “Never mind, lad. ’Tis better being barked into a town than bitten out of it.”
For answer the tinker stopped and folded his arms sullenly. “I’m not such a fool I can’t feel somethin’. Don’t you reckon I know the shame it is to be keepin’ a decent woman company with these rags—and no wits?”