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With a really desperate effort he struggled almost to his feet, tottered for an instant, and then came sagging down to the soft earth again a great, sprawling, spineless heap, at little Eve Edgarton's feet. Unflinchingly, as if her wrists were built of steel wires, the girl jumped up and pulled and tugged and yanked his almost dead weight into a sitting posture again. "My!
"It would take a good deal older head than yours to discover what that Miss Edgarton's beauty is!" "Or a good deal younger one, perhaps," suggested the Older Man judicially. "But but speaking of Miss Edgarton " he began all over again. "Oh drat Miss Edgarton!" snarled the Younger Man viciously. "You've got Miss Edgarton on the brain! Miss Edgarton this! Miss Edgarton that! Miss Edgarton!
Jim Barton, I assure you," she said, "there's nothing brutal at all in my liking for you." With a gasp of despair Barton stumbled across the rug to the bed, and with a shaky hand thrust under Eve Edgarton's chin, turned her little face bluntly up to him to tell her how proud he felt, but to tell her how sorry he was, but
But to little Eve Edgarton's cosmopolitan ears each familiar gipsyish word thus strangely transplanted into that alien room was like a call to the wild from the wild. So as to all repressed natures the moment of full self-expression comes once, without warning, without preparation, without even conscious acquiescence sometimes the moment came to little Eve Edgarton.
From the farther side of the room the sound of a creaking board smote almost instantly upon their ears. "Any time that you people want me," suggested Edgarton's icy voice, "I am standing here in about the middle of the floor!" With a jerk of dismay Barton wheeled around to face him. But it was little Eve Edgarton herself who found her tongue first.
In astonishingly slow response to as violent a knock as they thought they gave, Eve Edgarton's father came shuffling at last to the door to greet them. Like one half paralyzed with sleep and perplexity, he stood staring blankly at them as they filed into his rooms with their burden. "Your daughter seems to have bumped her head!" the hotel proprietor began with professional tact.
And then at last, blinded with sweat, dizzy with weakness, as breathless as herself, as wrenched, as triumphant, he found himself clinging fast to a worn suede pommel, jogging jerkily down the mountainside with Eve Edgarton's doll-sized hand dragging hard on the big gray's curb and her whole tiny weight shoved back aslant and astrain against the big gray's too eager shoulder little droll, colorless, "meek" Eve Edgarton, after her night of stress and terror, with her precious scrap-book still hugged tight under one arm striding stanchly home through the rough-footed, woodsy night to "make four hundred muffins for breakfast!"
Edgarton and his daughter. Meeting them abruptly at last in the full glare of the office, he clutched fatuously at Mr. Edgarton's reluctant attention with some quick question about the extraordinary moonlight, and stood by, grinning like any bashful schoolboy, while Mr.
"Oh, we can, can we?" snapped Barton. His nerves were strangely raw. He struggled to his knees, and tottered there watching the cheeky little moonbeams lap up the mystery of the cave, and scare the yellow lantern-flame into a mere sallow glow. Poignantly from the forest he heard Eve Edgarton's voice calling out into the night. "Come Mother's horse! Come Mother's horse H o o, hoo! Come come come!"
Unrelentingly little Eve Edgarton's horse kept right on forcing him back back back. "But if you're not one of Father's clever friends who are you?" she demanded perplexedly. "And why did you insist so on riding with me this afternoon?" she cried accusingly. "I didn't exactly insist," grinned Barton with a flush of guilt.
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