Her Father's Daughter Part 28

Donald watched as she raised the pyramid higher and higher.

"Did you tell your father whom you were to go with?" she asked.

"Sure I did," said Donald. "Told the whole family at dinner last night.

Told 'em about all the things I was learning, from where to get soap off the bushes to the best spot for material for wooden legs or instantaneous relief for snake bite."

"What did they say?" Linda inquired laughingly.

"Unanimously in favour of continuing the course," he said. "I had already told Father about you when I asked him for books and any help that he could give me with Oka Sayye. Since I had mentioned you last night he told Mother and Louise about that, and they told me to bring you to the house some time. All of them are crazy to know you. Mother says she is just wild to know whether a girl who wears boots and breeches and who knows canyons and the desert and the mountains as you do can be a feminine and lovable person."

"If I told her how many friends I have, she could have speedily decided whether I am lovable or not," said Linda; "but I would make an effort to convince her that I am strictly feminine."

"You would convince her of that without making the slightest effort.

You're infinitely more feminine than any other girl I have ever known."

"How do you figure that?" asked Linda.

"Well," said Donald, "it's a queer thing about you, Linda. I take any liberty I pretty nearly please with most of the girls I have been a.s.sociated with. I tie their shoes and pull their hair--down if I want to--and hand them round 'most any way the notion takes me, and they just laugh and take the same liberties with me, which proves that I am pretty much a girl with them or they are pretty much boys with me. But it wouldn't occur to me to touch your hair or your shoe lace or the tips of your fingers; which proves that you're more feminine than any other girl I know, because if you were not I would be treating you more like another boy. I thought, the first day we were together, that you were like a boy, and I said so, and I thought it because you did not tease me and flirt with me, but since I have come to know you better, you're less like a boy than any other girl I ever have known."

"Don't get psychological, Donald," said Linda. "Go on with the j.a.p. I haven't got an answer yet to what I really want to know. Have you made the least progress this week? Can you beat him?"

Donald hesitated, studying over the answer.

"Beat him at that trig proposition the other day," he said. "Got an open commendation before the cla.s.s. There's not a professor in any of my cla.s.ses who isn't 'hep' to what I'm after by this time, and if I would cajole them a little they would naturally be on my side, especially if their attention were called to that incident of yesterday; but you said I have to beat him with my brains, by doing better work than he does; so about the biggest thing I can honestly tell you is that I have held my own. I have only been ahead of him once this week, but I haven't failed in anything that he has accomplished. I have been able to put some additional touches to some work that he has done for which he used to be marked A which means your One Hundred. Double A which means your plus I made in one instance. And you needn't think that Oka Sayye does not realize what I am up to as well as any of the rest of the cla.s.s, and you needn't think that he is not going to give me a run for my brain. All I've got will be needed before we finish this term."

"I see," said Linda, slowly nodding her head.

"I wish," said Donald, "that we had started this thing two years ago, or better still, four. But of course you were not in the high school four years ago and there wasn't a girl in my cla.s.s or among my friends who cared whether I beat the j.a.p or not. They greatly preferred that I take them motoring or to a dance or a picture show or a beach party. You're the only one except Mother and Louise who ever inspired me to get down to business."

Linda laid her palm on the top of the sand heap and pressed it flat. She looked at Donald with laughing eyes.

"Symbolical," she announced. "That sand was the j.a.p." She stretched her hand toward him. "That was you. Did you see yourself squash him?"

Donald's laugh was grim.

"Yes, I saw," he said. "I wish it were as easy as that."

"That was not easy," said Linda; "make a mental computation of all the seconds that it took me to erect that pyramid and all the millions of grains of sand I had to gather."

Donald was deeply thoughtful, yet a half smile was playing round his lips.

"Of all the queer girls I ever knew, you're the cap sheaf, Linda," he said.

Linda rose slowly, shook the sand from her breeches and stretched out her hand.

"Let's hotfoot it down to the African village and see what the movies are doing that is interesting today," she proposed.

CHAPTER XXI. Shifting the Responsibility

On her pillow that night before dropping to almost instantaneous sleep Linda reflected that if you could not ride the King's Highway, racing the sands of Santa Monica was a very excellent subst.i.tute. It had been a wonderful day after all. When she had left Donald at the Lilac Valley end of the car line he had held her hand tight an instant and looked into her face with the most engaging of clear, boyish smiles.

"Linda, isn't our friendship the nicest thing that ever happened to us?"

he demanded.

"Yes," answered Linda promptly, "quite the nicest. Make your plans for all day long next Sat.u.r.day."

"I'll be here before the birds are awake," promised Donald.

At the close of Monday's sessions, going down the broad walk from the high school, Donald overtook Linda and in a breathless whisper he said: "What do you think? I came near Oka Sayye again this morning in trig, and his hair was as black as jet, dyed to a midnight, charcoal finish, and I am not right sure that he had not borrowed some girl's lipstick and rouge pot for the benefit of his lips and cheeks. Positively he's hectically youthful today. What do you know about that?"

Then he hurried on to overtake the crowd of boys he had left, Linda's heart was racing in her breast.

Turning, she re-entered the school building, and taking a telephone directory she hunted an address, and then, instead of going to the car line that took her to Lilac Valley she went to the address she had looked up. With a pencil she wrote a few lines on a bit of scratch paper in one of her books. That note opened a door and admitted her to the presence of a tall, lean, gray-haired man with quick, blue-gray eyes and lips that seemed capable of being either grave or gay on short notice.

With that perfect ease which Linda had acquired through the young days of her life in meeting friends of her father, she went to the table beside which this man was standing and stretched out her hand.

"Judge Whiting?" she asked.

"Yes," said the Judge.

"I am Linda Strong, the younger daughter of Alexander Strong. I think you knew my father."

"Yes," said the Judge, "I knew him very well indeed, and I have some small acquaintance with his daughter through very interesting reports that my son brings home."

"Yes, it is about Donald that I came to see you," said Linda.

If she had been watching as her father would have watched, Linda would have seen the slight uplift of the Judge's figure, the tensing of his muscles, the narrowing of his eyes in the swift, speculative look he pa.s.sed over her from the crown of her bare, roughened black head down the gold-brown of her dress to her slender, well-shod feet. The last part of that glance Linda caught. She slightly lifted one of the feet under inspection, thrust it forward and looked at the Judge with a gay challenge in her dark eyes.

"Are you interested in them too?" she asked.

The Judge was embarra.s.sed. A flush crept into his cheeks. He was supposed to be master of any emergency that might arise, but one had arisen in connection with a slip of a schoolgirl that left him wordless.

"It is very probable," said Linda, "that if my shoes had been like most other girls' shoes I wouldn't be here today. I was in the same schoolroom with your son for three years, and he never saw me or spoke to me until one day he stopped me to inquire why I wore the kind of shoes I did. He said he had a battle to wage with me because I tried to be a law to myself, and he wanted to know why I wasn't like other girls.

And I told him I had a crow to pick with HIM because he had the kind of brain that would be content to let a j.a.p beat him in his own school, in his own language and in his own country; so we made an engagement to fight to a finish, and it ended by his becoming the only boy friend I have and the nicest boy friend a girl ever had, I am very sure. That's why I'm here."

Linda lifted her eyes and Judge Whiting looked into them till he saw the same gold lights in their depths that Peter Morrison had seen. He came around the table and placed a big leather chair for Linda. Then he went back and resumed his own.

"Of course," said the Judge in his most engaging manner. "I gather from what Donald has told me that you have a reason for being here, and I want you to understand that I am intensely interested in anything you have to say to me. Now tell me why you came."

"I came," said Linda, "because I started something and am afraid of the possible result. I think very likely if, in retaliation for what Donald said to me about my hair and my shoes, I had not twitted him about the use he was making of his brain and done everything in my power to drive him into compet.i.tion with Oka Sayye in the hope that a white man would graduate with the highest honors, he would not have gone into this compet.i.tion, which I am now certain has antagonized Oka Sayye."

Linda folded her slim hands on the table and leaned forward.

"Judge Whiting," she said earnestly, "I know very little about men. The most I know was what I learned about my father and the men with whom he occasionally hunted and fished. They were all such fine men that I must have grown up thinking that every man was very like them, but one day I came in direct contact with the j.a.p that Donald is trying to beat, and the thing I saw in his face put fear into my heart and it has been there ever since. I have almost an unreasoning fear of that j.a.p, not because he has said anything or done anything. It's just instinctive. I may be wholly wrong in having come to you and in taking up your time, but there are two things I wanted to tell you. I could have told Donald, but if I did and his mind went off at a tangent thinking of these things he wouldn't be nearly so likely to be in condition to give his best thought to his studies. If I really made him see what I think I have seen, and fear what I know I fear, he might fail where I would give almost anything to see him succeed; so I thought I would come to you and tell you about it and ask you please to think it over, and to take extra care of him, because I really believe that he may be in danger; and if he is I never shall be able to rid myself of a sense of responsibility."

"I see," said Judge Whiting. "Now tell me, just as explicitly as you have told me this, exactly what it is that you fear."

"Last Sat.u.r.day," said Linda, "Donald told me that while standing at the board beside Oka Sayye, demonstrating a theorem, he noticed that there were gray hairs above the j.a.p's ears, and he bluntly asked him, before the professor and the cla.s.s, how old he was. In telling me, he said he had the feeling that if the j.a.p could have done so in that instant, he would have killed him. He said he was nineteen, but Donald says from the matured lines of his body, from his hands and his face and his hair, he is certain that he is thirty or more, and he thinks it very probable that he may have graduated at home before he came here to get his English for nothing from our public schools. I never before had the fact called to my attention that this was being done, but Donald told me that he had been in cla.s.ses with matured men when he was less than ten years of age. That is not fair, Judge Whiting; it is not right. There should be an age specified above which people may not be allowed to attend public school."