“She’ll come out all right, all right,” said Father Kelly, with the hammer-like gesture of his right fist which his congregation knew well for a storm signal. “She’s a good girl. This is no fault of hers, this foolish contraption to make money; I’m one with Conner, there; but the girls aren’t to blame. Freda’s a good girl, too. That’s she coming.”
The German heroine of this miniature Nibelungenlied was tall and slender, fair haired and fair faced. Her face wore a placid air; she looked perfectly serene and had assumed unconsciousness as a garment; she did not talk, only faintly smiled in return to the greetings that met her on every side. To right and left, before and behind her, walked her two aunts and her two neighbors, women of substance and dignity. They walled her about as might a body-guard, sending eye-blinks of defiance at the hilarious young Irishmen. Mrs. Orendorf, of the guard, went the length of twisting her head for a final glare of disapproval at Norah, in passing. Norah laughed. “I used to know Freda Burglund last week,” said she, “but I guess she has forgotten me.”
“She’s too busy with the blackboard, doing arithmetic,” joked one of the young men.
“You ought to see old Fritz!” cried another; “he’s clean off his base. He’s mortgaged his farm to Nichols. Nichols didn’t want to lend, but he would have the money.”
“Well, I guess we’ll give him a run for his pile.”
“He’s mortgaged his farm!” said a third young man; when his voiced sounded, the very slightest of movements of Norah’s head betrayed that she listened.
“I’d mortgage two farms if I had them,” was the gallant comment from the first man, “if Miss Norah needed votes.”
The third man felt the rustle of every dollar he had, drawn out of the bank that morning, and now bulging his waistcoat-pocket in company with a bit of ribbon that had dropped from Norah’s hair; but it was easier for him to make money than talk; he was ready to push the last of it over the voting-table for Norah, but he wasn’t ready of tongue; he put his big honest hands in his pocket, and lest he should glower too openly at the fluent blade, sent his eyes after Freda Berglund’s yellow head and fine shoulders. Norah could see him. She stiffened.
“I don’t think it very nice of her to let her father mortgage his farm,” said a fourth partisan of Norah’s; “he’d better buy her a watch out and out; you can get a good one for ten dollars. She’d ought to stop the old man. Her mother would if she were alive.”
“Fritz ain’t so easy headed off,” said the third man. “Miss Freda is a very nice young lady; I don’t believe she knows about it.”