The Red Axe

by S. R. Crockett

"You do not—you cannot!" she interrupted, "or you would not go out with Michael Texel all night to drinking-places, and worse, keeping your father and those that do love awake, hurting their hearts here" (she put her hand on her side), "and all for what—that you may drink and revel and run into danger with your true friends?"

"Sweetheart," I began—penitently.

The Little Playmate made a gesture of infinite impatience.

"Do not call me that," she said; "you have no right. I am not your sweetheart. You have no heart at all to love any one with, or you would not behave as you have done lately. You are naught but a silly, selfish boy, that cares for nothing but his own applause and thinks that he has nothing to do but to come home when his high mightiness is ready and find us all on our knees before him, saying: 'Put your foot, great sir, on our necks—so shall we be happy and honored.'"

Now this was so perilously near the truth that I was mightily incensed, and I felt that I did well to be angry.

"Girl," I said, grandly, "you do not know what you say. I have been abroad all night on the service of the State, and I have discovered a most dangerous conspiracy at the peril of my life!"

For I thought it was as well to put the best face on the matter; and, besides, I have never been able, all the days of me, to hide my light under a bushel, as the clerks prate about.

But I was not yet done with my adventuring of this eventful day. And in spite of my father setting me, like a misbehaving bairn, to the drudgery of the water-carrying, there was more in life for me that day than merely hauling upon a handle. For that is a thing which galls an aspiring youth worse than any other labor, being so terribly monotonous.

As for me, I did not take kindly to it at all—not even though I could see mine own image deep in the pails of water as they came up brimming and cool out of the fern-grown dripping darkness of the well. Aye, and though the image given back to me was (I say it only of that time) a likely enough picture of a lad with short, crisped locks that curled whenever they were wet, cheeks like apples, and skin that hath always been a trouble to me. For I thought it unmanly and like a girl's. And that same skin of mine is, perhaps, the reason why all my days I never could abide your buttermilk-and-roses girls, having a supply about me enough to serve a dozen, and therefore thinking but little of their stock-in-trade.

Now in the Wolfmark this is the common kind of beauty—not that beauty of any kind is over-common. For our maids—especially those of the country—look too much as if they had been made out of wooden pillows such as laborers use to lay their heads on of nights—one large bolster set on the top of two other little ones, and all three well wadded with ticking and feathers. But I hope no one will go back to the Wolfmark and tell the maids that Hugo Gottfried said this of them, or of a surety my left ear will tingle with the running of their tongues if there be any truth in the old saw.