“But you came with me!” she gasped triumphantly.
“I always thought you were tall,” he answered;
and there was afterward a time when he had to agree
that this was a somewhat vague reply.
JUNE
Judge Briscoe smiled grimly and leaned on his shot-gun
in the moonlight by the veranda. He and William
Todd had been trampling down the elder-bushes, and
returning to the house, found Minnie alone on the porch.
“Safe?” he said to his daughter, who turned
an anxious face upon him. “They’ll
be safe enough now, and in our garden.”
“Maybe I oughtn’t to have let them go,”
she returned, nervously.
“Pooh! They’re all right; that scalawag’s
half-way to Six-Cross-Roads by this time, isn’t
he, William?”
“He tuck up the fence like a scared rabbit,”
Mr. Todd responded, looking into his hat to avoid
meeting the eyes of the lady. “I didn’t
have no call to toller, and he knowed how to run,
I reckon. Time Mr. Harkless come out the yard
again, he was near out o’ sight, and we see him
take across the road to the wedge-woods, near half-a-mile
up. Somebody else with him then —looked
like a kid. Must ‘a’ cut acrost the
field to join him. They’re fur enough towards
home by this.”
“Did Miss Helen shake hands with you four or
five times?” asked Briscoe, chuckling.
“No. Why?”
“Because Harkless did. My hand aches, and
I guess William’s does, too; he nearly shook
our arms off when we told him he’d been a fool.
Seemed to do him good. I told him he ought to
hire somebody to take a shot at him every morning
before breakfast—not that it’s any
joking matter,” the old gentleman finished,
thoughtfully.
“I should say not,” said William, with
a deep frown and a jerk of his head toward the rear
of the house. “He jokes about it enough.
Wouldn’t even promise to carry a gun after this.
Said he wouldn’t know how to use it. Never
shot one off since he was a boy, on the Fourth of July.
This is the third time he’s be’n shot
at this year, but he says the others was at a—
a—what’d he call it?”
“‘A merely complimentary range,’”
Briscoe supplied. He handed William a cigar and
bit the end off another himself. “Minnie,
you better go in the house and read, I expect—unless
you want to go down the creek and join those folks.”
“Me!” she responded. “I
know when to stay away, I guess. Do go and put
that terrible gun up.”
“No,” said Briscoe, lighting his cigar,
deliberately. “It’s all safe; there’s
no question of that; but maybe William and I better
go out and take a smoke in the orchard as long as
they stay down at the creek.”
