the road, crossed the bridge to the further end, seated herself on the limestone parapet, and, swinging her pole with both hands, cast line and hook and minnow far out into the pond. It was a business she did not care for – this extinguishing of the life-spark in anything. But, like her mill work, it appeared to be a necessary business, and, so regarding it, she went about it.
The pond above the half-ruined dam lay very still; her captive minnow swam about with apparently no discomfort, trailing on the surface of the pond above him the cork which buoyed the hook.
Rue, her pole clasped in both hands between her knees, gazed with preoccupied eyes out across the water. On the sandy shore, a pair of speckled tip-ups ran busily about, dipping and bobbing, or spread their white, striped wings to sheer the still surface of the pond, swing shoreward with bowed wings again, and resume their formal, quaint, and busy manners.
From the interstices of the limestone parapet grew a white bluebell – the only one Rue had ever seen. As long as she could remember it had come up there every year and bloomed, snow-white amid a world of its blue comrades in the grass below. She looked for it now, saw it in bud – three sturdy stalks sprouting at right angles from the wall and curving up parallel to it. Somehow or other she had come to associate this white freak of nature with herself – she scarcely knew why. It comforted her, oddly, to see it again, still surviving, still delicately vigorous, though where among those stone slabs it found its nourishment she never could imagine.
The intense blue of the sky had altered since noon; the west became gradually duller and the air stiller; and now, over the Gayfield hills, a tall cloud thrust up silvery-edged convolutions toward a zenith still royally and magnificently blue.
She had been sitting there watching her swimming cork for over an hour when the first light western breeze arrived, spreading a dainty ripple across the pond. Her cork danced, drifted; beneath it she caught the momentary glimmer of the minnow; then the cork was jerked under; she clasped the pole with all her strength, struck upward; and a heavy pickerel, all gold and green, sprang furiously from the water and fell back with a sharp splash.
Under the sudden strain of the fish she nearly lost her balance, scrambled hastily down from the parapet, propping the pole desperately against her body, and stood so, unbending, unyielding, her eyes fixed on the water where the taut line cut it at forty-five degrees.
At the same time two men in a red runabout speeding westward caught sight of the sharp turn by the bridge which the ruins of the paper mill had hidden. The man driving the car might have made it even then had he not seen Ruhannah in the centre of the bridge. It was instantly all off; so were both mud-guards and one wheel. So were driver and passenger, floundering on their backs among the rank grass and wild flowers. Ruhannah, petrified, still fast to her fish, gazed at the catastrophe over her right shoulder.
A broad, short, squarely built man of forty emerged from the weeds, went hastily to the car and did something to it. Noise ceased; clouds of steam continued to ascend from the crumpled hood.
The other man, even shorter, but slimmer, sauntered out of a bed of milkweed whither he had been catapulted. He dusted with his elbow a grey felt hat as he stood looking at the wrecked runabout; his comrade, still clutching a cigar between his teeth, continued to examine the car.
“Hell!” remarked the short, thickset man.
“It’s going to rain like it, too,” added the other. The thunder boomed again beyond Gayfield hills.
“What do you know about this!” growled the thickset man, in utter disgust. “Do we hunt for a garage, or what?”
“It’s up to you, Eddie. And say! What was the matter with you? Don’t you know a bridge when you see one?”
“That damn girl–” He turned and looked at Ruhannah, who was dragging the big flapping pickerel over the parapet by main strength.
The men scowled at her in silence, then the one addressed as Eddie rolled his cigar grimly into the left corner of his jaw.
“Damn little skirt,” he observed briefly. “It seems to worry her a lot what she’s done to us.”
“I wonder does she know she wrecked us,” suggested the other. He was a stunted, wiry little man of thirty-five. His head seemed slightly too large; he had a pasty face with the sloe-black eyes, button nose, and the widely chiselled mouth of a circus clown.
The eyes of the short, thickset man were narrow and greyish green in a round, smoothly shaven face. They narrowed still more as the thunder broke louder from the west.
Ruhannah, dragging her fish over the grass, was coming toward them; and the man called Eddie stepped forward to bar her progress.
“Say, girlie,” he began, the cigar still tightly screwed into his cheek, “is there a juice mill anywhere near us, d’y’know?”
“What?” said Rue.
“A garage.”
“Yes; there is one at Gayfield.”
“How far, girlie?”
Rue flushed, but answered:
“It is half a mile to Gayfield.”
The other man, noticing the colour in Ruhannah’s face, took off his pearl-grey hat. His language was less grammatical than his friend’s, but his instincts were better.
“Thank you,” he said – his companion staring all the while at the girl without the slightest expression. “Is there a telephone in any of them houses, miss?” – glancing around behind him at the three edifices which composed the crossroads called Brookhollow.
“No,” said Rue.
It thundered again; the world around had become very dusky and silent and the flash veined a rapidly blackening west.
“It’s going to rain buckets,” said the man called Eddie. “If you live around here, can you let us come into your house till it’s over, gir – er – miss?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Mr. Brandes – Ed Brandes of New York–” speaking through cigar-clutching teeth. “This is Mr. Ben Stull, of the same… It’s raining already. Is that your house?”
“I live there,” said Rue, nodding across the bridge. “You may go in.”
She walked ahead, dragging the fish; Stull went to the car, took two suitcases from the boot; Brandes threw both overcoats over his arm, and followed in the wake of Ruhannah and her fish.
“No Saratoga and no races today, Eddie,” remarked Stull. But Brandes’ narrow, grey-green eyes were following Ruhannah.
“It’s a pity,” continued Stull, “somebody didn’t learn you to drive a car before you ask your friends joy-riding.”
“Aw – shut up,” returned Brandes slowly, between his teeth.
They climbed the flight of steps to the verandah, through a rapidly thickening gloom which was ripped wide open at intervals by lightning.
So Brandes and his shadow, Bennie Stull, came into the home of Ruhannah Carew.
Her mother, who had observed their approach from the window, opened the door.
“Mother,” said Ruhannah, “here is the fish I caught – and two gentlemen.”
With which dubious but innocent explanation she continued on toward the kitchen, carrying her fish.
Stull offered a brief explanation to account for their plight and presence; Brandes, listening and watching the mother out of greenish, sleepy eyes, made up his mind concerning her.
While the spare room was being prepared by mother and daughter, he and Stull, seated in the sitting-room, their hats upon their knees, exchanged solemn commonplaces with the Reverend Mr. Carew.
Brandes, always the gambler, always wary and reticent by nature, did all the listening before he came to conclusions that relaxed the stiffness of his attitude and the immobility of his large, round face.
Then, at ease under circumstances and conditions which