CHAPTER VI.

A NIGHT AT PETE JONES’S.

When Ralph got to Pete Jones’s he found that sinister-looking individual in the act of kicking one of his many dogs out of the house.

“Come in, stranger, come in.  You’ll find this ’ere house full of brats, but I guess you kin kick your way around among ’em.  Take a cheer.  Here, git out! go to thunder with you!” And with these mild imperatives he boxed one of his boys over in one direction and one of his girls over in the other.  “I believe in trainin’ up children to mind when they’re spoke to,” he said to Ralph apologetically.  But it seemed to the teacher that he wanted them to mind just a little before they were spoken to.

“P’raps you’d like a bed.  Well, jest climb up the ladder on the outside of the house.  Takes up a thunderin’ sight of room to have a stairs inside, and we ha’n’t got no room to spare.  You’ll find a bed in the furdest corner.  My Pete’s already got half of it, and you can take t’other half.  Ef Pete goes to takin’ his half in the middle, and tryin’ to make you take yourn on both sides, jest kick him.”

In this comfortless bed “in the furdest corner,” Ralph found sleep out of the question.  Pete took three-fourths of the bed, and Hannah took all of his thoughts.  So he lay, and looked out through the cracks in the “clapboards” (as they call rough shingles in the old West) at the stars.  For the clouds had now broken away.  And he lay thus recounting to himself, as a miser counts the pieces that compose his hoard, every step of that road from the time he had overtaken Hannah in the hollow to the fence.  Then he imagined again the pleasure of helping her over, and then he retraced the ground to the box-elder tree at the spring, and repeated to himself the conversation until he came to the part in which she said that only time and God could help her.  What did she mean?  What was the hidden part of her life?  What was the connection between her and Shocky?

Hours wore on, and still the mind of Ralph Hartsook went back and traveled the same road, over the fence, past the box-elder, up to the inexplicable part of the conversation, and stood bewildered with the same puzzling questions about the bound girl’s life.

At last he got up, drew on his clothes, and sat down on the top of the ladder, looking down over the blue-grass pasture which lay on the border between the land of Jones and the land of Means.  The earth was white with moonlight.  He could not sleep.  Why not walk?  It might enable him to sleep.  And once determined on walking, he did not hesitate a moment as to the direction in which he should walk.  The blue-grass pasture (was it not like unto the garden of Eden?) lay right before him.  That box-elder stood just in sight.  To spring over the fence and take the path down the hill and over the brook was as quickly done as decided upon.  To stand again under the box-elder, to climb again over the