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For all Tom thought of her, Nancy Bryerson was as safe in her retreat at Pine Knob as were the squirrels he was supposed to be hunting; and they came and frisked unharmed on the branches of the tree under which he sat and munched his bit of bread and meat when the sun was at the meridian. And he was not killing time.
"That's my spring, Nan Bryerson," he warned her dictatorially. The girl looked up and scoffed. Hers was a face made for scoffing: oval and finely lined, with a laughing mouth and dark eyes that had both the fear and the fierceness of wild things in them. "Shucks! it ain't your spring any more'n it's mine!" she retorted. "Hit's on Maje' Dabney's land."
Ardea he saw only now and then, as old Scipio drove her back and forth between the manor-house and the railway station, morning and evening. He had heard that she was going to school in the city, and as yet there were no stirrings of adolescence in him to make him wish to know more. As for Nan Bryerson, he saw her not at all.
"It was my fault that Nan stayed so long," he said bravely; and he was immensely relieved when Bryerson, making quite sure of his identity, became effusively hospitable. "Cap'n Gordon's boy 'f cou'se; didn't make out to know ye, 't firs'. Come awn in the house an' sit a spell; come in, I say!" Again, for Nan's sake, Tom could do no less. It was the final plunge.
"What's that for?" he asked suspiciously. "You eat it; it's the kind you like off 'm the tree right back of Jim Stone's barn lot," she answered. "You stole it, Nan Bryerson!" "Well, what if I did? You didn't." He bit into it, and she held him in talk till it was eaten to the core. "Have you heard tell anything more about the new railroad?" she asked. Thomas Jefferson shook his head.
One day, Tike Bryerson Nan's father and the man who had tried to kill his Uncle Silas in the revival meeting was beating his horses because they would not take the water at the lower ford. Tike had been stilling more pine-top whisky, and had been to town with some jugs hidden under the cornstalks in his wagon-bed.
"Yet, in spite of that, you have oh, it is perfectly unspeakable!" "I am taking your word for it," he rejoined gloomily. "You are denying me what the most wretched criminal is taught to believe is his right to know what he is accused of." "Have you forgotten that night last winter when you when I saw you at the gate with Nancy Bryerson?" "I'm not likely to forget it."
Then she spoke, and he saw that it was Nancy Bryerson a Nan sadly and terribly changed, but with much of the wild-creature beauty of face and form still remaining. "You done forgot me, Tom-Jeff?" she asked; and then, at his start of recognition: "I allow I have changed some." "Surely I haven't forgotten you, Nan. But you took me by surprise; and I can't see in the dark any better than most people.
Rumor in Gordonia had it that Tike Bryerson had been hunted out by the revenue officers; and, for reasons which he would have found it difficult to declare in words, Tom had been shy about making inquiries. For this cause an apparition could scarcely have startled him more than did the sight of Nan filling her bucket at the trickling barrel-spring under the cliff face of the great rock.
A man, red-faced and with the devil of the cup of trembling peering from under his shaggy eyebrows, rose unsteadily from his seat on the bench nearest the door. "'Sh! he's fotched Tike Bryerson!" flew the whisper from lip to ear; but the man with the trembling madness in his eyes was backing toward the door.
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