After a moment, thinking he might be counting to himself, they started to straggle away. Kitty did not watch where the others went to. Seconds mattered at a time like this. She slipped behind a row of tar barrels at the corner of the counting house and stood there, listening to the water as it sucked at the piles underneath, to the sound of singing and fiddle music where the sailors were making merry on the deck of a ship moored a hundred yards off shore.
Suddenly the voice of the young logger from up the Merrimack whipped out like the command of the captain to the volunteers who drilled on Frog Pond green come muster day.
“Ten—ten—double ten—forty-five—fifteen!”
He reached his hundred all at once, leaped from the keg, and ran straight toward her, toward her, Kitty Greenleaf, of the High Street in Newburyport, who had never seen him before tonight. He ran to her, around the tar barrels, around the corner of the counting house. In a moment he had put his arms about her and kissed her on the mouth, kissed her hard.
Not used to such sudden attack, not used to kissing any lad at all, except in kissing games where everybody looked on and laughed, or when Dick bade her a shy good night sometimes by the garden wall, she struggled, and sputtered, and pulled away.
She wiped her mouth and looked up. “What—what did you do that for?” she gasped.
The gray eyes were smiling down at her, there in the chilly spring dark, the thin mouth crooked upward in a smile.
“Like I said, a lad’s lonely in a strange town at night.”
Before she could answer, she heard a soft little laugh beside them. She turned about. There stood Sally Rose. Sally Rose flickered her long lashes and opened her hazel eyes very wide.
“There’s no need for you to be lonely,” she trilled. “My, but you’re a handsome lad! We’ve none such handsome lads in Charlestown.”