She interrupted me, and something of her splendid poise was gone. “Please don’t go back,” she said. “I am afraid it would be of no use. And I don’t want to be left alone.”
Heaven knows I did not want her to be alone. I was more than content to walk along beside her aimlessly, for any length of time. Gradually, as she lost the exaltation of the moment, I was gaining my normal condition of mind. I was beginning to realize that I had lacked the morning grace of a shave, that I looked like some lost hope of yesterday, and that my left shoe pinched outrageously. A man does not rise triumphant above such handicaps. The girl, for all her disordered hair and the crumpled linen of her waist, in spite of her missing hat and the small gold bag that hung forlornly from a broken chain, looked exceedingly lovely.
“Then I won’t leave you alone,” I said manfully, and we stumbled on together. Thus far we had seen nobody from the wreck, but well up the lane we came across the tall dark woman who had occupied lower eleven. She was half crouching beside the road, her black hair about her shoulders, and an ugly bruise over her eye. She did not seem to know us, and refused to accompany us. We left her there at last, babbling incoherently and rolling in her hands a dozen pebbles she had gathered in the road.
The girl shuddered as we went on. Once she turned and glanced at my bandage. “Does it hurt very much?” she asked.
“It’s growing rather numb. But it might be worse,” I answered mendaciously. If anything in this world could be worse, I had never experienced it.
And so we trudged on bareheaded under the summer sun, growing parched and dusty and weary, doggedly leaving behind us the pillar of smoke. I thought I knew of a trolley line somewhere in the direction we were going, or perhaps we could find a horse and trap to take us into Baltimore. The girl smiled when I suggested it.
“We will create a sensation, won’t we?” she asked. “Isn’t it queer - or perhaps it’s my state of mind - but I keep wishing for a pair of gloves, when I haven’t even a hat!”
When we reached the main road we sat down for a moment, and her hair, which had been coming loose for some time, fell over her shoulders in little waves that were most alluring. It seemed a pity to twist it up again, but when I suggested this, cautiously, she said it was troublesome and got in her eyes when it was loose. So she gathered it up, while I held a row of little shell combs and pins, and when it was done it was vastly becoming, too. Funny about hair: a man never knows he has it until he begins to lose it, but it’s different with a girl. Something of the unconventional situation began to dawn on her as she put in the last hairpin and patted some stray locks to place.
“I have not told you my name,” she said abruptly. “I forgot that because I know who you are, you know nothing about me. I am Alison West, and my home is in Richmond.”
So that was it! This was the girl of the photograph on John Gilmore’s bedside table. The girl McKnight expected to see in Richmond the next day, Sunday! She was on her way back to meet him! Well, what difference did it make, anyhow? We had been thrown together by the merest chance. In an hour or two at the most we would be back in civilization and she would recall me, if she remembered me at all, as an unshaven creature in a red cravat and tan shoes, with a soiled Pullman sheet tied around my neck. I drew a deep breath.
“Just a twinge,” I said, when she glanced up quickly. “It’s very good of you to let me know, Miss West. I have been hearing delightful things about you for three months.”
“From Richey McKnight?” She was frankly curious.
“Yes. From Richey McKnight,” I assented. Was it any wonder McKnight was crazy about her? I dug my heels into the dust.
“I have been visiting near Cresson, in the mountains,” Miss West was saying. “The person you mentioned, Mrs. Curtis, was my hostess. We - we were on our way to Washington together.” She spoke slowly, as if she wished to give the minimum of explanation. Across her face had come again the baffling expression of perplexity and trouble I had seen before.
“You were on your way home, I suppose? Richey spoke about seeing you,” I floundered, finding it necessary to say something. She looked at me with level, direct eyes.
“No,” she returned quietly. “I did not intend to go home. I - well, it doesn’t matter; I am going home now.”
A woman in a calico dress, with two children, each an exact duplicate of the other, had come quickly down the road. She took in the situation at a glance, and was explosively hospitable.
“You poor things,” she said. “If you’ll take the first road to the left over there, and turn in at the second pigsty, you will find breakfast on the table and a coffee-pot on the stove. And there’s plenty of soap and water, too. Don’t say one word. There isn’t a soul there to see you.”
We accepted the invitation and she hurried on toward the excitement and the railroad. I got up carefully and helped Miss West to her feet.
“At the second pigsty to the left,” I repeated, “we will find the breakfast I promised you seven eternities ago. Forward to the pigsty!”
We said very little for the remainder of that walk. I had almost reached the limit of endurance: with every step the broken ends of the bone grated together. We found the farmhouse without difficulty, and I remember wondering if I could hold out to the end of the old stone walk that led between hedges to the door.
“Allah be praised,” I said with all the voice I could muster. “Behold the coffee-pot!” And then I put down the grip and folded up like a jack-knife on the porch floor.
When I came around something hot was trickling down my neck, and a despairing voice was saying, “Oh, I don’t seem to be able to pour it into your mouth. Please open your eyes.”
“But I don’t want it in my eyes,” I replied dreamily. “I haven’t any idea what came over me. It was the shoes, I think: the left one is a red-hot torture.” I was sitting by that time and looking across into her face.
Never before or since have I fainted, but I would do it joyfully, a dozen times a day, if I could waken again to the blissful touch of soft fingers on my face, the hot ecstasy of coffee spilled by those fingers down my neck. There was a thrill in every tone of her voice that morning. Before long my loyalty to McKnight would step between me and the girl he loved: life would develop new complexities. In those early hours after the wreck, full of pain as they were, there was nothing of the suspicion and distrust that came later. Shorn of our gauds and baubles, we were primitive man and woman, together: our world for the hour was the deserted farmhouse, the slope of wheat-field that led to the road, the woodland lot, the pasture.
