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[Illustration: He drank deeply, then struggled to a sitting posture,
his face whitening beneath its tan.]
ANYTHING ONCE
BY DOUGLAS GRANT
AUTHOR OF "THE SINGLE TRACK," "BOOTY," "THE FIFTH ACE," ETC.
Frontispiece by PAUL STAHR
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A Roadside Meeting 1
II. Partners 17
III. The Vendor Of Everything 41
IV. Under The Big Top 55
V. Concerning An Omelet 69
VI. The Red Note-Book 83
VII. Revelations 99
VIII. Journey's End 118
IX. The Long, Long Trail 138
ANYTHING ONCE
CHAPTER I
A Roadside Meeting
The white dust, which lay thick upon the wide road between rolling
fields of ripened grain, rose in little spirals from beneath the heavy
feet of the plodding farm-horses drawing the empty hay-wagon, and had
scarcely settled again upon the browning goldenrod and fuzzy milkweed
which bordered the rail fences on either side when Ebb Fischel's
itinerant butcher-jitney rattled past. Ebb Fischel's eyes were usually
as sharp as the bargains he drove, but the dust must have obscured his
vision. Otherwise he would have seen the man lying motionless beside the
road, with his cap in the ditch and the pitiless sun of harvest-time
caking the blood which had streamed from an ugly cut upon his temple.
But the meat-cart jolted on and out of sight, and for a long time
nothing disturbed the stillness except the distant whirring of a reaper
and nearer buzzing of a fat, inquisitive bluebottle fly, which paused to
see what this strange thing might be, and then zoomed off excitedly to
tell his associates.
At length there came a dry rustling in the tall standing wheat in the
field on the opposite side of the road, and a head and shoulders
appeared above the topmost fence-rail. It was a small head covered with
tow-colored hair, which had been slicked back and braided so tightly
that the short, meager cue curled outward and up in a crescent, as
though it were wired, and the shoulders beneath the coarse
blue-and-white striped cotton gown were thin and peaked.
The girl darted a swift, furtive glance up and down the road, and
suddenly thrust a bundle tied in a greasy apron between the rails,
letting it fall in the high, dusty weeds by the roadside. Next she
climbed to the top of the fence, and for a moment perched there,
displaying a slim length of coarse black stocking above clumping,
square-toed shoes at least two sizes too large for her.
She looked like a very forlorn, feminine _Monte Cristo_ indeed, as
she scanned the world from her vantage-point, and yet there was a look
of quiet satisfaction and achievement in her incongruously dark eyes
which told of a momentous object accomplished.
Then all at once they stared and softened as she caught sight of that
still figure lying across the road, and in two bounds she was beside him
and lifted his head against her sharp knees. She noted only casually
that he was a clean-shaven, tanned young man with brown hair bleached by
the sun to a warm gold, and that he wore shabby, weather-beaten clothes.
Had she realized that those same worn, faded garments bore the stamp of
one of New York's most exclusive tailors! that the boots were
London-made, and the golf-stockings which met the corduroy
knickerbockers came from one of Scotland's famous mills, it would have
meant just exactly nothing in her young life.
Her immediate attention was concentrated upon the jagged gash which ran
unpleasantly close to his temple, and which had begun to bleed afresh as
she raised his head.
The girl looked about her again and saw that a short distance ahead the
road was bisected by a bridge of planks with willows bordering it at
either side. She pulled at the strings which held a blue sunbonnet
dangling between her narrow shoulder-blades, regarded the sleazy
headgear ruefully, and then spying the cap in the ditch, she deposited
her burden gently upon the grass once more and scrambled over to
investigate her find.
The cap had an inner lining of something which seemed to be like rubber,
and the girl flew off down the road to return with her improvised bowl
filled with clear, cold spring water. Dropping on her knees beside the
unconscious figure, she poured the contents of the cap over his face and
head.
The young man sputtered, gasped, moaned a little, and opened astonished
brown eyes upon her.
"How--how the devil did you come here?" he asked ungallantly.
"Over the fence." Her reply was laconic, but it bore an unmistakable
hint that further query along that line would be highly unwelcome. "Just
you lay still while I git some more water, an' I'll tie up that head of
yourn."
The young man's hand went unsteadily to his aching brow and came away
brightly pink, so he decided to take this uncomely vision's advice, and
remained quiescent, wondering how he himself had come to be there, and
what had happened to him.
According to the map, he had surely been on the right road, yet it had
as assuredly not looked like this one; the other had been a broad, State
highway, while this----
He closed his burning eyes to shield them from the glare of the sun, and
a confused memory returned to him of that invitingly green, shady
pasture which had tempted him as a short cut toward the next village,
and of something which thundered down upon him from behind and lifted
him into chaos. Good Lord, and he had only six days left!
"You'd better take a drink of this first an' I kin use the rest on your
head." A composed, practical voice advised by his side, and he looked up
gratefully into the snub-nosed, freckled face of his benefactress as she
held the brimming cap to his lips.
He drank deeply, then struggled to a sitting posture, his face whitening
beneath its tan at the sudden wrench of pain which twisted the muscles
of his back.
"Kin you hold the cap steady?" The girl thrust it into his hands without
waiting for a reply, and, sitting down with her back to him, calmly
turned back the hem of her gown and tore a wide strip from the coarse
but immaculately white cambric petticoat beneath.
Dipping it into the water, she bandaged his head not unskilfully, and
then rose.
"There! I gotta git you over to the shade of them trees, or you'll have
sunstroke. Wait till I fetch somethin'."
She ran across the road and returned with her greasy bundle under one
arm, offering the other to him with a gesture as frank as it was
impersonal.
"Lean on me, an' try to git along--and please kinder hurry!"
She added the last with a note of sudden urgency in her tones and the
same furtively darting glance with which she had swept the road from the
fence-top, but the young man was too deeply engrossed with his painful
effort to rise to observe the look, although her change of tone aroused
his curiosity. Was this scrawny but good-natured kid afraid some of her
people would catch her talking to a stranger by the roadside?
Somehow he managed to hobble, with her aid, across the little bridge and
down the bank of the swiftly racing brook at its farther side to a nest
in the dense thicket of willow-shoots which completely screened them
from the road.
The girl eased him down then upon the sward, and, seating herself beside
him, unrolled the apron she had carried.
"It's the ham that's greased it all up like that," she remarked. "I'd
have brought a pail, only I didn't want to take any more 'n I had to."
The young man gasped with astonishment as the contents of the
apron-bundle were exposed: a whole ham glistening with the brown sugar
in which it had been baked, a long knife, a huge loaf of bread, and,
wrapped separately in a piece of newspaper, a bar of soap, a box of
matches, and a bit of broken comb.
"When there's lots of them, ham sandwiches, together with spring water,
ain't so bad, an' it's near noon," the girl observed, beginning to cut
the loaf into meager slices with a practised hand. "I should've made
them thicker, but I forgot."
A starving gleam had come into the young man's eyes at the sight of
food, but he paused with the sandwich half-way to his lips to glance
keenly at his companion.
"You've enough here for an army," he declared. "Were you taking it to
men working in the fields somewhere?"
"No," she replied without hesitation, but with the same air of finality
with which she had responded to his first question. "You can rest easy
here till sundown, when the men begin to come in from the harvestin',
an' then if you holler real loud some of them will maybe stop an' give
you a lift on your way. There's a railroad about four miles from here,
an' the slow freight goes by along about ten."
The slow freight! So the girl thought he was a tramp! The young man
smiled, and glanced down ruefully at his shabby attire. Well, so had
others thought, whom he had encountered in his journey.
But who and what was the girl herself? She had asked no questions as to
how he had come to the condition in which she found him, but had nursed
his hurt, brought him to this cool resting-place; and was sharing her
food with him as unconcernedly as though she had known him all her life.
That quantity of provisions, the package of humble toilet articles, and
her furtiveness and haste to get away from the open road all pointed to
one fact--the girl was running away. But from whom or what? She had
taken him at his face value, and he had no right in the world to
question her, at least without giving some sort of account of himself.
"I have no intention of traveling by rail," he assured her. "A little
while before you found me--I don't quite know how long--I was crossing
that pasture which adjoins the wheat-field, thinking that this road
might be a short cut to Hudsondale, when something came after me from
behind and butted me over the fence. I think my head must have been cut
open by striking against a stone, for I don't remember anything more
until you poured that water over my face."
The girl nodded.
"I seen the stone with blood on it right near you; you must have bumped
off it an' turned over," she averred. "Anybody who goes traipsin'
through old Terwilliger's pasture is apt to meet up with that bull of
his."
So she had reasoned his predicament out without asking any of the
questions that another girl would have heaped upon him.
He turned to her suddenly with a fresh spark of interest in his eyes.
"How did you know that I didn't belong here?" he demanded.
The corners of her lips curled upward in a comical little grimace of
amusement, and he realized that before they had been set in a straight
line far too mature for her evident youth.
"No grown men 'round these parts wears short pants, an', anyhow, I knew
you were different from the way you talk; somethin' like the welfare
workers, with the hell an' brimstone left out," the girl replied
soberly. "I'm goin' to talk like you some day."
It was the first remark she had made voluntarily concerning herself, and
he was quick to seize his advantage.
"Who are you, young lady? You've been awfully kind to me, and I don't
know to whom my gratitude is due."
"Not to anybody." She turned her head away slightly, but not before he
saw a flush mount beneath the superficial coating of freckles, and
marveled at the whiteness of her skin. Hers was not the leathery tan of
the typical farmer's daughter, inured to all weathers, yet her hands,
although small, were toil-worn, and there was an odd incongruity between
her dark eyes and the pale, flaxen hue of that ridiculous wisp of a
braid.
"I didn't do any more for you than I'd do for a dog if I found him lyin'
there."
Her naive sincerity robbed the statement of its uncomplimentary
suggestion, and the young man chuckled, but persisted.
"What is your name? Mine is James--er--Botts."
"Lou Lacey. It was 'L' day, you know, an' there was a teeny bit of lace
on my dress. I ain't ever had any since."
She added the last with unconscious pathos in her tones, but in his
increasing interest and mystification the man who called himself "Botts"
was unaware of it. What on earth could she mean about L day, and if she
were running away why did she appear so serenely unconcerned about the
future as her manner indicated?
He felt that he must draw her out, and he seemed to have hit upon the
right method by giving confidence for confidence; but just how much
could he tell her about himself? James Botts's own face reddened.
"I'm walking to my home in New York," he explained. "But I'm late; I
ought to make it by a certain date, and I don't think I'll be able to,
since my encounter with Terwilliger's bull. Where do you live? I mean,
where are you going? Where is your home?"
"Nowheres," Lou Lacey replied offhandedly, following with her eyes the
graceful swoop of a dragonfly over the tumbling waters of the little
stream.
"Great Scott!" The astounded young man sat up suddenly, with his hand to
his head. "Why, everybody has a home, you know!"
"Not everybody," the girl dissented quietly.
"But--but surely you haven't been walking the roads?"
There was genuine horror in his tones. "Where did you come from this
morning when you found me?"
"From Hess's farm, back up the road a piece," she replied with her usual
unemotional literalness. "I been there a week, but I didn't like it, so
I came away. The welfare workers got me that place when my time was up."
Her time! Good Heavens, could this little country girl with her artless
manner and candid eyes be an ex-convict? Surely she was too young, too
simple. Yet the gates of hideous reformatories had clanged shut behind
younger and more innocent-appearing delinquents than she.
His eyes wandered over her thin, childish figure as she sat there beside
him, still intent upon the movements of the glittering dragonfly, and he
shuddered. Those horrible, shapeless shoes might very well have been
prison-made, and the striped dress was exactly like those he had seen in
some pictures of female convicts. Her freckles, too, might have been the
result of only a few days' exposure to the sun, and he had already
observed the whiteness of the skin beneath; that whiteness which
resembled the prison pallor.
Could it be that her very gawkiness and frank simplicity were the result
not of bucolic nature, but of dissimulation? Every instinct within the
man cried out against the thought, but a devil of doubt and uncertainty
drove him on.
"I thought that didn't look like the dress of a farmer's daughter!" He
essayed to laugh, but it seemed to him that there was a grating falsetto
in his tones. "You haven't worked in the garden much, either, have you?"
"Garden!" Lou sniffed. "They promised the welfare workers that they'd
give me outdoor chores to build me up, but when I got there I found I
had to cook for eighteen farm-hands, as well as the family, an' wait on
them, an' clean up an' all. Said they'd pay me twelve dollars a month,
an' I could take the first month's money out by the week in clothes, an'
for the first week all they gave me was this sunbonnet an' apron. I left
them the other dress an' things I had, an' I figgered the rest of the
money they owed me would just about pay for this ham an' bread an' the
knife an' soap. The comb was mine."
She added the last in a tone of proud possession, and James Botts asked
very soberly:
"The welfare workers found this position for you, Lou Lacey? But where
did they find you?"
"Why, at the institootion," she responded, as though surprised that he
had not already guessed. "I ain't ever been anywhere else; I've always
been a orphin."