Girl Alone Part 3

"My land! Scared of me?" Clem Carson chuckled. "You poor little chicken!

Don't mind me, Sally. I don't mean no harm, teasing you for a kiss. Land alive! I got a girl of my own, ain't I? Darned proud of her, too, and I'd cut the heart outa any man that tried to take advantage of her.

Ain't got no call to be scared of me, Sally."

She smiled waveringly, shyness making her lips stiff, but she relaxed a little, though she kept as far away from the man as ever. In spite of her dread of the future and her bitter disappointment over Miss Pond's disclosures as to her mother, she was finding the trip to the farm an adventure. In the twelve years of her life in the State Orphans' Asylum she had never before left the orphanage unaccompanied by droves of other sheep-like, timid little girls, and unchaperoned by sharp-voiced, eagle-eyed matrons.

She felt queer, detached, incomplete, like an arm or a leg dissevered from a giant body; she even had the panicky feeling that, like such a dismembered limb, she would wither and die away from that big body of which she had been a part for so long. But it was pleasant to b.u.mp swiftly along the hot, dusty white road, fringed with odorous, flowering weeds. Houses became less and less frequent; few children ran barefoot along the road, scurrying out of the path of the automobile.

Occasionally a woman, with a baby sprawling on her hip, appeared in the doorway of a roadside shack and shaded her eyes with her hand as she squinted at the car.

As the miles sped away Carson seemed to feel the need of impressing upon her the fact that her summer was not to be one of unalloyed pleasure. He sketched the life of the farm, her own work upon it, as if to prepare her for the worst. "My wife's got the reputation of being a hard woman,"

he told her confidentially. "But she's a good woman, good clean through.

She works her fingers to the bone, and she can't abide a lazy, trifling girl around the place. You work hard, Sally, and speak nice and respectful-like, and you two'll get on, I warrant."

"Yes, sir," Sally stammered.

"Well, Sally," he told her at last, "here's your new home. This lane leads past the orchards-I got ten acres in fruit trees, all of 'em bearing-and the gardens, then right up to the house. Pretty fine place, if I do say so myself. I got two hundred acres in all, quite a sizeable farm for the middle west. Don't them orchards look pretty?"

Sally came out of her frightened reverie, forced her eyes to focus on the beautiful picture spread out on a giant canvas before her. Then she gave an involuntary exclamation of pleasure. Row after row of fruit trees, evenly s.p.a.ced and trimmed to perfection, stretched before her on the right. The child in her wanted to spring from the seat of the car, run ecstatically from tree to tree, to s.n.a.t.c.h sun-ripened fruit.

"You have a good fruit crop," she said primly.

"There's the house." The farmer pointed to the left. "Six rooms and a garret. My daughter, Pearl, dogged the life out of me until I had electric lights put in, and a fancy bathtub. She even made me get a radio, but it comes in right handy in the evenings, specially in winter.

My daughter, Pearl, can think of more ways for me to spend money than I can to earn it," he added with a chuckle, so that Sally knew he was proud of Pearl, proud of her urban tastes.

The car swept up to the front of the house; Clem Carson's hand on the horn summoned his women folks.

The house, which seemed small to Sally, accustomed to the big buildings of the orphanage, was further dwarfed by the huge red barns that towered at the rear. The house itself was white, not so recently painted as the lordly barns, but it was pleasant and homelike, the sort of house which Sally's chums at the orphanage had pictured as an ideal home, when they had let their imaginations run away with them.

Sally herself, born with a different picture of home in her mind, had romanced about a house which would have made this one look like servants' quarters, but now that it was before her she felt a thrill of pleasure. At least it was a home, not an inst.i.tution.

A woman, big, heavy-bosomed, sternly corseted beneath her snugly fitting, starched blue chambray house dress, appeared upon the front porch and stood shading her eyes against the western sun, which revealed the thinness of her iron-gray hair and the deep wrinkles in her tanned face.

"Why didn't you drive around to the back?" she called harshly. "This young-up ain't company, to be traipsin' through my front room. Did you bring them rubber rings for my fruit jars?"

"You betcha!" Clem Carson refused to be daunted in Sally's presence.

"How's Pearl, Ma? Cold any better? I brought her some salve for her throat and some candy."

"She's all right," Mrs. Carson shouted, as if the car were a hundred yards away. "And why you want to be throwin' your money away on patent medicine salves is more'n I can see! I can make a better salve any day outa kerosene and lard and turpentine. Reckon you didn't get any car'mels for me! Pearl's all you think of."

"Got you half a pound of car'mels," Carson shouted, laughing. "I'll drive the new girl around back.

"Ma's got a sharp tongue, but she don't mean no harm," Carson chuckled, as he swung the car around the house.

When it shivered to a stop between the barns and the house, the farmer lifted out a few bundles which had crowded Sally's feet, then threw up the cover of the hatch in the rear of the car, revealing more bundles.

Carson was loading her arms with parcels when he saw a miracle wrought on her pale, timid face.

"Lord! You look pretty enough to eat!" Clem Carson e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, but he saw then that she was not even aware that he was speaking to her.

In one of the few books allowed for Sunday reading in the orphanage-a beautiful, thick book with color-plate ill.u.s.trations, its name, "Stories from the Bible," lettered in glittering gold on a back of heavenly blue-Sally had found and secretly worshiped the portrait of her ideal hero. It was a vividly colored picture of David, forever fixed in strong, beautiful grace, as he was about to hurl the stone from his slingshot to slay the giant, Goliath. She had dreamed away many hours of her adolescence and early young girlhood, the big book open on her knee at the portrait of the Biblical hero, and it had not seemed like sacrilege to adopt that sun-drenched, strong-limbed but slender boy as the personification of her hopes for romance.

And now he was striding toward her-the very David of "Stories from the Bible." True, the sheepskin raiment of the picture was exchanged for a blue shirt, open at the throat, and for a pair of cheap, earth-soiled "jeans" trousers; but the boy-man was the same, the same! As he strode lightly, with the ease of an athlete or the light-footedness of a G.o.d, the sun flamed in his curling, golden-brown hair. He was tall, but not so tall as Clem Carson, and there were power and ease and youth in every motion of his beautiful body.

"Did you get the plowshare sharpened, Mr. Carson? I've been waiting for it, but in the meantime I've been tinkering with that little hand cider press. We ought to do a good business with it if we set up a cider stand on the state road, at the foot of the lane."

Joy deepened the sapphire of Sally's eyes, quivered along the curves of her soft little mouth. For his voice was as she had dreamed it would be-vibrant, clear, strong, with a thrill of music in it.

"Sure I got it sharpened, Dave," Carson answered curtly. "You oughta get in another good hour with the cultivator before dark. You run along in the back door there, Sally. Mrs. Carson will be needing you to help her with supper."

The change in Carson's voice startled her, made her wince. Why was he angry with her-and with David, whose gold-flecked hazel eyes were smiling at her, shyly, as if he were a little ashamed of Carson for not having introduced them? But, oh, his name was David! David! It had had to be David.

In the big kitchen, dominated by an immense coal-and-wood cook stove, Sally found Mrs. Carson busy with supper preparations. Her daughter, Pearl, drifted about the kitchen, coughing at intervals to remind her mother that she was ill.

Pearl Carson, in that first moment after Sally had b.u.mped into her at the door, had seemed to the orphaned girl to be much older than she, for her plump body was voluptuously developed and overdecked with finery.

The farmer's daughter wore her light red hair deeply marcelled. The natural color in her broad, plump cheeks was heightened by rouge, applied lavishly over a heavy coating of white powder.

Her lavender silk crepe dress was made very full and short of skirt, so that her thick-ankled legs were displayed almost to the knee. It was before the day of knee dresses for women and Sally, standing there awkwardly with her own bundle and the parcels which Carson had thrust into her arms, blushed for the extravagant display of unlovely flesh.

But Pearl Carson, if not exactly pretty, was not homely, Sally was forced to admit to herself. She looked more like one of her father's healthy, sorrel-colored heifers than anything else, except that the heifer's eyes would have been mild and kind and slightly melancholy, while Pearl Carson's china-blue eyes were wide and cold, in an insolent, contemptuous stare.

"I suppose you're the new girl from the Orphans' Home," she said at last. "What's your name?"

"Sa-Sally Ford," Sally stammered, inst.i.tutional shyness blotting out her radiance, leaving her pale and meek.

"Pearl, you take Sally up to her room and show her where to put her things. Did you bring a work dress?" Mrs. Carson turned from inspecting a great iron kettle of cooking food on the stove.

"Yes'm," Sally gulped. "But I only brought two dresses-my every-day dress and this one. Mrs. Stone said you'd-you'd give me some of P-Pearl's."

She flushed painfully, in humiliation at having to accept charity and in doubt as to whether she was to address the daughter of the house by her Christian name, without a "handle."

Pearl, switching her short, lavender silk skirts insolently, led the way up a steep flight of narrow stairs leading directly off the kitchen to the garret. The roof, shaped to fit the gables of the house, was so low that Sally's head b.u.mped itself twice on their pa.s.sage of the dusty, dark corridor to the room she was to be allowed to call her own.

"No, not that door!" Pearl halted her sharply. "That's where David Nash, one of the hired men, sleeps."

Sally wanted to stop and lay her hand softly against the door which his hand had touched, but she did not dare. "I-I saw him," she faltered.

"Oh, you did, did you?" Pearl demanded sharply. "Well, let me tell you, young lady, you let David Nash alone. He's mine-see? He's not just an ordinary hired hand. He's working his way through State A. & M. He's a star, on the football team and everything. But don't you go trying any funny business on David, or I'll make you wish you hadn't!"

"I-I didn't even speak to him," Sally hastened to rea.s.sure Pearl, then hated herself for her humbleness.

"Here's your room. It's small, and it gets pretty hot in here in the summer, but I guess it's better'n you're used to, at that," Pearl Carson, a little mollified, swung open a flimsy pine door.

Sally looked about her timidly, her eyes taking in the low, sagging cot bed, the upturned pine box that served as washstand, the broken rocking chair, the rusty nails intended to take the place of a clothes closet; the faded, dirty rag rug on the warped boards of the floor; the tiny window, whose single sash swung inward and was fastened by a hook on the wall.

"I'll bring you some of my old dresses," Pearl told her. "But you'd better hurry and change into your orphanage dress, so's you can help Mama with the supper. She's been putting up raspberries all day and she's dead tired. I guess Papa told you you'd have to hustle this summer. This ain't a summer vacation-for you. It is for me. I go to school in the city in the winter. I'm second year high, and I'm only sixteen," she added proudly. "What are you?"

Sally, who had been nervously untying her brown paper parcel, bent her head lower so that she should not see the flare of hate in those pale blue eyes which she knew would follow upon her own answer. "I'm-I'm third year high." She did not have the courage to explain that she had just finished her third year, that she would graduate from the orphanage's high school next year.

"Third year?" Pearl was incredulous. "Oh, of course, the orphanage school! _My_ school is at least two years higher than yours. We prepare for college."

Sally nodded; what use to say that the orphanage school was a regular public school, too, that it also prepared for college? And that Sally herself had dreamed of working her way through college, even as David Nash was doing?