Dave strode around the wood-pile and drew forth a shrinking figure, so white-faced and at the same time so grotesque that we scarcely knew whether to laugh or to cry at sight of it.
Rob had thrown over his flannel dressing-gown the silk crazy-quilt, Marcella’s pride, from his bed. It was drawn partly over his head and the gay colors made his pallor ghastly.
Dave tore off the quilt and tossed it up on the wood-pile, and in a moment had thrust his own rough jacket upon Rob. It was scarcely less grotesque a garment for him than the quilt, it was so much too large, but was certainly warmer—and the wind from the river was cool although the sun was warm. Dave took off his own cap, also, and put it upon Rob’s head and we all laughed a little in spite of our fright, when it came down nearly to his ears.
“I came to find Bathsheba,” he said as Dave scolded him, as gently as his mother might have done. “She—she knows, Dave!” His voice was a husky whisper and he trembled in every limb. “I didn’t think how dangerous it was, at first. She’ll think it her duty to tell, girls always think it’s their duty to do disagreeable things! And if father should find out——! You make her promise not to tell a soul, Dave!”
Dave had drawn him down into a sheltered nook in the great pile of boards and spread the quilt over him. He supplemented it by a sheltering arm, regardless of his coatless and hatless condition.
“You must rest a little while and then we’ll get you home,” he said anxiously. “Never mind Bathsheba! I’ll fix Bathsheba!” he added lightly.
But the boy was too thoroughly alarmed to be put off in that way.
“Make her promise solemnly!—you know I couldn’t stand father. It would kill me! And they’ll be after me in just a minute. I got away while the nurse was at dinner. I climbed down the woodbine trellis. It didn’t make me breathe half so badly as she did”—indicating me by a resentful little jerk of the head. “She came and talked and talked. I thought at first that she was only bothering, like a girl; then I thought she was trying to find out things; at last she let out that she knew!”
Dave looked at me steadily. I had not known until that moment how hurt he had been.
“At first I thought only of the horse,” Rob continued in his weak, querulous voice. “You haven’t done as you ought about old Lucifer, Dave!”