The Innocent Adventuress Part 26

Johnny was not critical of tones. "Oh, never mind the d.a.m.ned details,"

he said bitterly. "Gawd, I could eat a raw cow. . . . Say, you haven't seen any one pa.s.s here lately, have you? I mean has any one been by at all?"

"I haven't seen any one pa.s.s here at all," said Barry Elder.

"Sure? But have you been looking out? Say, what other way is there--Oh, my Lord, is that coffee? Or do I only dream I smell it? I haven't had a bite since the middle of yesterday. Let me get to it."

But Barry Elder did not spring to the duties of his hostship. He did not even move aside to permit Johnny Byrd to spring to his own a.s.sistance--which Johnny showed every symptom of doing. He continued to stand obstructingly in the middle of his log doorstep, one hand on the k.n.o.b of the half closed door behind him, his eyes fixed very curiously on Johnny's flushed disorder.

"What kind of an 'any one' are you looking for?" said Barry slowly.

"Oh--a--well, I guess you've got to help me out on this. You know the country. There's no use stalling. It's a girl--a foreign-looking girl."

"And what are you doing at six in the morning looking for a foreign-looking girl?"

"It's the darndest luck," Johnny broke out explosively. "We--we got lost last night going to a picnic on Old Baldy--and then we got separated----"

"How?"

"How?" Johnny stared back at Barry Elder and found something oddly fixed and challenging in that young man's eyes.

"Why how--how does any one get separated?" he threw back querulously.

"I can't imagine--especially when one is responsible for a girl."

"Gosh, Barry, you're talking like a grandmother. Aren't you going to give me anything to eat? What's the matter with you, anyway? You act devilish queer----"

Again he confronted the coldness of Barry's gaze and his own face changed suddenly, with swift surmise.

"Say, has she been here?" he broke out. "You've seen her, haven't you? I was sure I saw tracks. . . . Has she--has she told you anything?"

Barry leaned a little nearer the door-frame, drawing the door closer behind him. Through the crack Sandy's pointed noise and exploring eyes were fixed inquiringly upon the visitor and he whined eagerly as, scenting disapprobation in the air, he yearned to meet this trouble halfway.

"I think you had better," Barry told him.

"Better? Better what?"

"Better tell me--everything."

"Oh, all right, all right! _I've_ nothing to conceal. I didn't go off my chump and behave like a darn lunatic in grand opera!"

Then very quickly Johnny veered from anger into confidence.

"Here's the whole story--and there's nothing to it. She's crazy--crazy with her foreign notions, I tell you. At first I thought she was trying to put something over on me, but I guess she's just genuinely crazy.

It's the way she was brought up. They go mad over there and bite if you're left alone in a room with a girl."

Definitely Barry waited.

"We were up there on the mountain," said Johnny more lucidly. "We'd lost the others--no fault of ours, Barry--you needn't look like a movie censor--and we found we'd got to make a night of it. We were just worn out and going in circles. And she--I give you my word I didn't do one gosh-darned thing, but that girl just naturally took on and raved about wanting me to marry her and blew me up when I said I hadn't asked her and then--then--when I tried to get shelter in a little old shack we'd stumbled on she just up and bolted. She----"

His words died away. His eyes dropped before the blaze that met them.

Very slowly Barry formulated his feelings.

"You--infernal----"

"Hold on there, I'm not any such thing."

Through the bl.u.s.ter of Johnny's rally a really injured innocence made its outcry. "She had no more reason to bolt than a--a grandmother."

Grandmothers appeared to be Johnny's sole figure of comparison. "You're getting this dead wrong, Barry. . . . Look here, what do you take me for?"

"That's a large question," said Barry slowly. But his tone was milder though far from rea.s.suring. "But do you tell me that she asked you to marry her?"

"I do. She did. Just like that--out of a clear sky."

"But what was the reason----"

"There wasn't a reason, I give you my word, Barry."

"You hadn't been saying anything to her--to suggest it?"

Johnny Byrd's face changed unhappily. His sunburned warmth deepened to a brick red.

"Why, no--not about marrying. Oh, hang it all, Barry, don't act as if you never kissed a pretty girl! Oh, she pretended she thought _that_ was proposing to her--just as if a few friendly words and a half kiss meant anything like that. . . . I'll own I was gone on her," Johnny found himself suddenly announcing, "but when she was taking marriage for granted right off it sounded too much like a hold-up and I flared all over."

"A hold-up?"

"Oh, thumb screws, you know--the same old quick-step to the altar. I hadn't done a thing, I tell you, but it looked as if she thought that our being there was something she could stage a scene on and so I thought--you don't know what things have been tried on me before," he broke off to protest at Barry's expression.

Mutteringly he offered, "You other fellows may think you know a little bit about side-stepping girls but when it comes to any kind of a bank roll--they're like starving Armenians at sight of food. I'd had 'em try all sorts of things. . . . But I own, now, she was just going according to her foreign ways. She must have been half scared to death. And she--she is pretty crazy about me----"

"I am not pretty crazy about you, Johnny Byrd!"

The door behind Barry was wrenched from his holding and flung violently open and Maria Angelina appeared upon the threshold, a defiant little image of war. Deadly pale, except for that scarlet stain across her cheek, her eyes blazing, there was something so mortally honest in the indignant anger that possessed her that Johnny Byrd unconsciously fell back a step, and Barry Elder stood aside, his own gaze lit with concern and wonder.

"I am despising you for a coward and a flirter," said Maria Angelina in a low but exceedingly penetrative voice, and so intense was her command of the situation that neither man found humor, then, in the misused word.

"You make love to girls when you mean nothing by it--you get them lost in the woods and then refuse the marriage that any gentleman, even an indifferent gentleman, would offer! And then you behave like a savage.

You bully and try to force your way into the actual room of shelter with me!"

"You see!" Johnny waved his hand helplessly at her and looked appealingly at Barry for a gleam of masculine right-mindedness.

"She--she wanted me to stay out in the rain, Barry."

"But as it was, _she_ stayed out in the rain and you slept in the shelter."

"She ran, I'm telling you. I couldn't chase her forever, could I? I tried to track her as soon as it got a little light and I could see where she'd been sliding and slipping along, and honestly, I've been nearly bats with worry till I got a trace of her again back in the woods."

Barry Elder turned towards the girl.