The Man Thou Gavest. Harriet T. Comstock

something that happened—long ago. You will not laugh if I tell you? You laugh right much.”

      “I? You think I laugh a good deal? Good Lord! Some folk think I don’t laugh enough.” He had his friends back home in mind, and somehow the memory steadied him for an instant.

      “P’r’aps they-all don’t know you as well as I do.” This with amusing conviction.

      “Perhaps they don’t.” Truedale was deadly solemn. “But go on, Nella-Rose. I promise not to laugh now.”

      “It was the beginning of—you!” The girl turned her eyes to the fire—she was quaintly demure. “At first when I saw you looking in that window, yonder, I was right scared.”

      Jim White’s statement that Nella-Rose wasn’t more than half real seemed, in the light of present happenings, little less than bald fact.

      “It was the way you looked—way back there when I was ten years old. I had run away—”

      “Are you always running away?” asked Truedale from the hollow depths of unreality.

      “I run away a smart lot. You have to if you want to—see things and be different.”

      “And you—you want to be different, Nella-Rose?”

      “I—why, can’t you see?—I am different.”

      “Of course. I only meant—do you like to be different.”

      “I have to like it. I was born with a cawl.”

      “In heaven’s name, what’s that?”

      “Something over your eyes, and when they take it off you see more, and farther, than any one else. You’re part ha’nt.”

      Truedale wiped his forehead—the room was getting hot, but the heat alone was not responsible for his emotions; he was being carried beyond his depth—beyond himself—by the wild fascination of the little creature before him. He would hardly have been surprised had a draught of air wafted her out of the window like a bit of mountain mist.

      “But you mustn’t interrupt so much!” She turned a stern face upon him. “I ran away that time to see a—railroad train! One of the niggers told me about it—he said it was the Bogy Man. I wanted to know, so I went to the station. It’s a right smart way down and I had to sleep one night under the trees. Don’t the stars look starry sometimes?”

      The interruption made Truedale jump.

      “They certainly do,” he said, looking at the soft, dark eyes with their long lashes.

      “I wasn’t afraid—and I didn’t hurry. It was evening, and the sun just a-going down, when I got to the station. There wasn’t any one about so I—I ran down the big road the train comes on—to meet it. And then” (here Nella-Rose clasped her hands excitedly and her breath came short), “and then I saw it a-coming and a-coming. The big fire-eye a-glaring and the mighty noise a-snorting and I reckoned it was old Master Satan and I just—couldn’t move!”

      “Go on! go on!” Truedale bent close to her—she had caught him in the mesh of her dramatic charm.

      “I saw it a-coming, and set on—on devouring o’ me, and still I couldn’t stir. Everything was growing black and black except a big square with that monster eye a-glaring into the soul o’ me!”

      The girl’s face was set—her eyes vacant and wild; suddenly they softened, and her little white teeth showed through the childish, parted lips.

      “Then the eye went away, there was a blackness in the square place, and then a face came—a kind face it was—all a-laughing and it—it kept going farther and farther off to one side and I kept a-following and a-following and then—the big noise went rushing by me, and there I was right safe and plump up against a tree!”

      “Good Lord!” Again Truedale wiped his brow.

      “Since then,” Nella-Rose relaxed, “I can shut my eyes and always there is the black square and sometimes—not always, but sometimes—things come!”

      “The face, Nella-Rose?”

      “No, I can’t make that come. But things I want to, do and have. I always think, when I see things, that I’m going to do a big, fine thing some day. I feel upperty and then—poof! off go the pictures and I am just—lil’ Nella-Rose again!”

      A comically heavy sigh brought Truedale back to earth.

      “But the face you saw long ago,” Truedale whispered, “was it my face, do you think?”

      Nella-Rose paused—then quietly:

      “I—reckon it was. Yes, I’m mighty sure it was your face. When I saw it at that window”—she pointed across the room—“I certainly thought my eyes were closed and that—it had come—the kind, good face that saved me!” A sweet, friendly smile wreathed the girl’s lips and she rose with rare dignity and held out her thin, delicate hand:

      “Mister Outlander, we’re going to be neighbours, aren’t we?”

      “Yes—neighbours!” Truedale took the hand with a distinct sense of suffocation, “but why do you call me an outlander?”

      “Because—you are! You’re not of our mountains.”

      “No, I wish I were!”

      “Wishing can’t make you. You are—or you aren’t.”

      Truedale noted the girl’s language. Distorted and crude as it often was, it was never positively illiterate. This surprised him.

      “You—oh! you’re not going yet!” He put his hand out, for the definite way in which Nella-Rose turned was ominous. Already she seemed to belong to the cabin room—to Truedale himself. Not a suggestion of strangeness clung to her. It was as if she had always been there but that his eyes had been holden.

      “I must go!”

      “Wait—oh! Nella-Rose. Let me walk part of the way with you. I—I have a thousand things to say.”

      But she was gone out of the door, down the path.

      Truedale stood and looked after her until the long shadows reached up to Lone Dome’s sharpest edge. White’s dogs began nosing about, suggesting attention to affairs nearer at hand. Then Truedale sighed as if waking from a dream. He performed the duties Jim had left to his tender mercy—the feeding of the animals, the piling up of wood. Then he forced himself to take a long walk. He ate his evening meal late, and finally sat down to his task of writing letters. He wrote six to Brace Kendall and tore them up; he wrote one to his uncle and put it aside for consideration when the effect of his day dreams left him sane enough to judge it. Finally he managed a note to Dr. McPherson and one to Lynda Kendall.

      “I think”—so the letter to Lynda ran—“that I will work regularly, now, on the play. With more blood in my own body I can hope to put more into that. I’m going to get it out to-morrow and begin the infusion. I wish you were here to-night—to see the wonderful effect of the moon on the mists—but there! if I said more you might guess where I am. When I come back I shall try to describe it and some day you must see it. Several times lately I have imagined an existence here with one’s work and enough to subsist on. No worry, no nerve-racking, and always the tremendous beauty to inspire one! Nothing seems wholly real here.”

      Then Truedale put down his pen. Nella-Rose crowded Lynda Kendall from the field of vision; later, he simply signed his name and let the note go with that.

      As for Nella-Rose, as soon as she left Truedale, her mind turned to sterner matters close at hand. She became aware before long of some one near by. The person, whoever it was, seemed determined to remain hidden but for that very reason it called out all the girl’s cunning and cleverness. It might be—Burke Lawson! With this thought Nella-Rose