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That's what folks say; but I've got a reason to want to board with you, Pap, and I'll pay regular prices and take what you give me." Himes looked a little astonished; then an expression of distrust stole over his broad, flat face. "What's bringin' you here?" he asked bluntly. "Johnnie Consadine," returned Shade, without evasion or preamble.
That Johnnie Consadine should have fallen away all at once from that higher course she had so eagerly chosen and so resolutely maintained, had been to Gray a disappointment whose depth and bitterness somewhat surprised him.
"I come to you to know could I get board, not to ask advice. I aim to marry Johnnie Consadine, and I know my own business air you goin' to board me?" The old man turned this speech in his mind for some time. "Curious," he muttered to himself, "how these here young fellers will get petted on some special gal and break their necks to have her."
Then the ever thickening throng went wild; and as Gray was carried up the steps and disappeared through the office doors, it turned toward the automobile, surging about the car, a sea of friendly, admiring faces, most of them touched with the tenderness of tears, and cheered its very heart out for Johnnie Consadine.
Even Pap smiled, and Mandy herself, who had been looking a bit terrified after her bold speaking, was reassured. Buckheath had been a week at the Himes boarding-house, finding it not unpleasant to show Johnnie Consadine how many of the girls regarded him with favour, whether she did or not, when he came to supper one evening with a gleam in his eye that spoke evil for some one.
Getting no answer at the side door, she pushed it open and ventured through silent room after room until she came to the stairway, and so on up to Miss Sessions's bedroom door. She had been there before, and fearing to alarm by knocking, she finally called out in what she tried to make a normal, reassuring tone. "It's only me Johnnie Consadine Miss Lydia." The answer was a hasty, muffled outcry.
It made something down in the left side of poor Mandy's slovenly dress-bodice vibrate and tingle. "I'll thank you mightily," said Johnnie Consadine, "mightily." And knew not how true a word she spoke. "You see," counselled Mandy from the bed into which she had rolled with most of her clothes on, "you want to get in with Miss Lydia Sessions and the Uplift ladies, and them thar swell folks."
You ain't forgot, have you? Ever since that time I've intended to speak to you to tell you " "Well, you needn't do it," she interrupted him passionately. "I won't hear a word against Mr. Stoddard, if that's what you're aiming at." Buckheath fell back a pace and stared with angry eyes. "Stoddard Gray Stoddard?" he repeated. "What's a swell like that got to do with you and me, Johnnie Consadine?
How cruel humanity is when it beholds only the grotesque in the Mandys of this world. Her hair was pretty and Johnnie had the eyes of love to see it. He stared down the long, lighted room with unseeing gaze. Old Andrew MacPherson's counsel that he let Johnnie Consadine alone appealed to him at that moment as cruel good sense. He was recalled from his musings by Mandy's voice.
Johnnie, who knew that her uncle hoped to reach the Consadine cabin by noon, instantly understood that he considered the possibility of this boy being a sort of picket posted to interview passers-by; and that the intention was to misinform him, so that he should not carry news of their approach.
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