Penny of Top Hill Trail Part 3

His eyes remained rigid and relentless, but there was a slight twitching of his strongest feature, the wide, mobile mouth.

He looked at his watch.

"We can wait for a few minutes," he said in a matter of fact voice.

"Please, may I get out and stretch?" she asked pleadingly.

Taking silence for consent, she climbed out of the car.

"Do you want a drink?" he asked, as he poured some water from an improvised Thermos bottle into a traveling cup.

"Thanks for those first kind words," she exclaimed, taking the cup from him and drinking eagerly.

"Why didn't you say you were thirsty?" he asked in a resentful tone, without looking at her. He had, in fact, studiously refrained from looking at her throughout the journey.

"I'm not used to asking for anything," she answered with a chuckle. "I take what comes my way. 'Taking' is your job, too, isn't it?"

"To h.e.l.l with my job!" he broke out fiercely. "I'd never have taken it if I knew it meant this."

"It's your own fault," she retorted. "It wouldn't have been 'this' if you hadn't been so grouchy. We could have had a chummy little gabfest, if you hadn't been bunging holes in the landscape with your lamps all the way."

He made no response but began to examine the workings of his car.

"Does the county furnish it to you?" she asked. "It doesn't seem as if you'd pick out anything like this. Was it 'Made in America?' Funny outfit for a cowboy country, anyway."

"Get in," he commanded curtly. "We must be away."

"Oh, please, not yet," she implored. "It's so awful hot, and I won't have all this outdoors for a long time, I suppose. I see there's a tidy little bit of shade yonder. Let's go there and rest awhile. I'll be good; honest, I will, and when I get rested, you can hit a faster gait to even up. I get tired just the same as honest folks do. Come, now, won't you?"

In a flash she had taken advantage of this oasis of shade that beckoned enticingly to the pa.s.ser-by.

He followed reluctantly.

"This is Heaven let loose," she said, lolling luxuriously against the trunk of a tree. "You're the only nice sheriff man that ever run me in."

He sat down near her and looked gloomily ahead.

"Cheer up!" she urged, after a short silence. "It may not be so bad. Any one would think you were the prisoner instead of poor little me."

"I wish I were," he said shortly.

She looked at him curiously.

"Say, what's eating you, anyway? If you hate your job so, what did you take it for?"

"It was forced on me. I'm only sworn in as acting sheriff for the county until the sheriff returns."

"How long you been 'it'?"

"Two weeks. You're my second--arrest."

"Who was the first?"

"So Long Sam."

She sat upright.

"Are you the man who caught So Long Sam? Every one has been afraid to tackle him. I'd never have thought it of you!"

"Why?" he asked curiously, not proof against the masculine enjoyment of hearing himself a.n.a.lyzed in spite of his reluctance to talk to her. "Do I seem such a weakling I couldn't take one man?"

"No; you look like you'd take a red-hot stove if you wanted to; but they said--Say; is your maiden name 'Kurt?' No! It can't be."

"Why not?"

"Because they called the man who took So Long Sam, 'Kind Kurt.' You haven't been over-kind to me till just lately. Whirling me over sands in that awful fore-shortened car."

"It must be better," he said dryly, "than the kind you've been used to."

"You mean the jail jitney. Do you know, they never yet put me in one.

Always conveyed me other ways. Weren't so bad to me either. I guess maybe your heart is in the right place or you wouldn't have let me rest and given me the drink, even if you did wait till the eleventh hour. Can't you look pleasant like you were going to sit for a picture to give to your best girl instead of posing for 'Just before the battle, Mother'? You look so sorry you came."

"I am," he said angrily. "I guess 'Kind Kurt' is a blankety blank fool, as some people say. I've been a lot kinder to you than you know. When I heard of your case and Bender pointed you out to me and said he'd got you locked up, I thought you were one of the many young city girls who go wrong because they have no chance to know better. The kind bred in slums, ignorant, ill-fed--the kind who never had a fair show. So I resolved that you should have one. Bender wanted you out of town with the surety that you would never come back.

"I felt sorry for you. I offered to take you off his hands and bring you out here among the hills, where the best woman in the world would teach you to _want_ to be honest. Do you suppose I'd have done it if I'd known the kind you are--a bright, smart brat who is bad because she wants to be, and boasts of it? There is no hope for your kind."

It was the longest speech the acting sheriff had ever made. He had been scarcely conscious that he was talking, but was simply voicing what had been in his thoughts for the last half hour.

"How old is this 'best woman in the world'?" asked the girl, seemingly unconcerned in his summing up of her case. "Is she your sweetheart or your wife? If she is either one, you'd better take me back to Bender, or spill me out on the plains here. She won't be real glad to try to reform a young, good-looking girl like me. I _am_ good-looking, honest, if I was slicked up a little."

He looked away, an angry frown on his lean, strong face. She gazed at him curiously for a moment and then laid a slim, brown hand on his arm.

"Listen here, Kurt," she said. "You were right in what you thought about me never having had a fair show. Everything, everyone, including myself, seems to have been against me. I was born with 'taking ways.' I couldn't seem to live them down. Lately things have been going wrong awfully fast.

I've been sick and no one acted as if I were human up to a short time ago.

I didn't know that was why you took me from Bender's jail. Honest, I'm not so bad as I talk."

He looked at her sceptically. Her eyes, now turned from him, were soft, feminine and without guile. He wouldn't let himself be hoodwinked.

"No; there's no excuse for you," he declared emphatically. "You are educated. You could have earned an honest living. You didn't have to steal."

"No;" she said slowly and thoughtfully. "I didn't have to."

"Then why do you? Bender told me you had a lifelong record of pilfering."

"Lifelong! Kind Kurt, I am young--only twenty."

"He said you'd been given a chance over and over again, but that you were hopeless. I--think you are."

"I think so, too," she acknowledged, with a little giggle that brought back his scowl. "You've got a white elephant on your hands, Kurt. What are you going to do with me?"