She could see many windows, but not her mother's window. She had to imagine that. Lonesomeness and ennui, that had gone away for a bit in the interest of watching the ants, returned full force. She stood up and cast about for something to break the spell.
The apple turnovers wrapped in a turkey-red, fringed napkin, rested in a small willow basket upon the grass. Hagar was not hungry, but she considered that she might as well eat a turnover, and then that she might as well have a party and ask a dozen flower dolls. Her twelve years were as a moving plateau—one side a misty looming landscape of the mind, older and higher than her age would forecast; on the other, green, hollow, daisy-starred meadows of sheer childhood. Her attention passed from side to side, and now it settled in the meadows.
She considered the grass beneath the cucumber tree for a dining-room, and then she grew aware that she was thirsty, and so came to the conclusion that she would descend the back side of the ridge to the spring and have the party there. Crossing the hand's breadth of level ground she began to climb down the long shady slope toward a stream that trickled through a bit of wood and a thicket, and a small, ice-cold spring in a ferny hollow. The sun-bathed landscape, river and canal and fields and red-brick Gilead Balm with its cedars, and the garden and orchard, and the overseer's house sank from view. There was only the broad-leaved cucumber tree against the deep blue sky. The trunk of the cucumber tree disappeared, and then the greater branches, and then the lesser branches toward the top, and then the bushy green top itself. When Hagar and the other children played on the ridge, they followed her lead and called this side "the far country." To them—or perhaps only to Hagar—it had a clime, an atmosphere quite different from the homeward-facing side.
When she came to the spring at the foot of the ridge she was very thirsty. She knelt on a great sunken rock, and, taking off her sunbonnet, leaned forward between the fern and mint, made a cup of her hands and drank the sparkling water. When she had had all she wished, she settled back and regarded the green, flowering thicket. It came close to the spring, filling the space between the water and the wood, and it was a wild, luxuriant tangle. Hagar's fancy began to play with it. Now it was a fairy wood for Thumbelina—now Titania and Oberon danced there in the moonlight—now her mind gave it height and hugeness, and it was the wood around the Sleeping Beauty. The light-winged minutes went by and then she remembered the apple turnovers. … Here was the slab of rock for the table. She spread the turkey-red napkin for cloth, and she laid blackberry leaves for plates, and put the apple turnovers grandly in the middle. Then she moved about the hollow and gathered her guests. Wild rose, ox-eye daisy, Black-eyed Susan, elder, white clover, and columbine—quite a good party. … She set each with due ceremony on the flat rock, before a blackberry-leaf plate, and then she took her own place facing the thicket, and after a polite little pause, folded her hands and closed her eyes. "We will say," she said, "a silent Grace."
When she opened her eyes, she opened them full upon other eyes—haggard, wolfishly hungry eyes, looking at her from out the thicket, behind them a body striped like a wasp. …
"I didn't mean to scare you," said the boy, "but if you ever went most of two days and a night without anything to eat, you'd know how it felt."
"I never did," said Hagar. "But I can imagine it. I wish I had asked Mrs. Green for five apple turnovers." As she spoke, she pushed the red fringed napkin with the second turnover toward him. "Eat that one, too. I truly don't want any, and the flowers are never hungry."
He bit into the second turnover. "It seems mean to eat up your tea-party, but I'm 'most dead, and that's the truth—"
Hagar, sitting on the great stone with her hands folded in her lap and her sunbonnet back on her shoulders, watched her suddenly acquired guest. He would not come clear out of the thicket; the tangled growth held him all but head and shoulders. "I believe I've seen you before," she said at last. "About two weeks ago grandfather and Aunt Serena and I were on the packet-boat. Weren't you at the lock up the river? The boat went down and down until you were standing 'way up, just against the sky. I am almost sure it was you."
He reddened. "Yes, it was me." Then, dropping the arm that held the yet uneaten bit of turnover, he broke out. "I didn't run away while I was a trusty! I wouldn't have done it! One of the men lied about me and said dirty words about my people, and I jumped on him and knocked his head against a stone until he didn't come to for half an hour! Then they did things to me, and did what they called degrading me. 'No more trustying for you!' said the boss. So I run away—three days ago." He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "It seems more like three years. I reckon they've got the dogs out."
"What have they got the dogs out for?"
"Why, to hunt me. I—I—"
His voice sunk. Terror came back, and will-breaking fear, a chill nausea and swooning of the soul. He groaned and half rose from the thicket. "I was lying here till night, but I reckon I'd better be going—" His eyes fell upon his body and he sank back. "O God! I reckon in hell we'll wear these clothes."
Hagar stared at him, faint reflecting lines of anxiety and unhappiness on her brow, quiverings about her lips. "Ought you to have run away? Was it right to run away?" The colour flooded her face. It was always hard for her to tell of her errors, but she felt that she and the boy were in somewhat the same case, and that she ought to do it. "I did something my aunt had told me not to do. It was reading a book that she said was wicked. I can't see yet that it was wicked. It was very interesting. But the Bishop said that he didn't christen me for that, and that it was a sin. And now, for a whole week, grandmother says that I'm not to read any book at all—which is very hard. What I mean is," said Hagar, "though I don't feel yet that there was anything wicked in that book (I didn't read much of it), I feel perfectly certain that I ought to obey grandmother. The Bible tells you so, and I believe in the Bible." Her brow puckered again. "At least, I believe that I believe in the Bible. And if there wasn't anybody in the house, and the most interesting books were lying around, I wouldn't—at least I think I wouldn't—touch one till the week is over." She tried earnestly to explain her position. "I mean that if I really did wrong—and I reckon I'll have to say that I oughtn't to have disobeyed Aunt Serena, though the Bible doesn't say anything about aunts—I'll take the hard things that come after. Of course"—she ended politely—"your folks may have been mistaken, and you may not have done anything wrong at all—"
The boy bloomed at her. "I'll tell you what I did. I live 'way out in the mountains, the other end of nowhere. Well, Christmas there was a dance in the Cove, and I went, but Nancy Horn, that had promised to go with me, broke her word and went with Dave Windless. There was a lot of apple jack around, and I took more'n I usually take. And then, when we were dancing the reel, somebody—and I'll swear still it was Dave, though he swore in the court-room it wasn't—Dave Windless put out his foot and tripped me up! Well, Nancy, she laughed. … I don't remember anything clear after that, and I thought that the man who was shooting up the room was some other person, though I did think it was funny the pistol was in my hand. … Anyhow, Dave got a ball through his hip, and old Daddy Jake Willy, that I was awful fond of and wouldn't have hurt not for a still of my own and the best horse on the mountain, he got his bow arm broken, and one of the women was frightened into fits, and next week when her baby was born and had a harelip she said I'd done it. … Anyhow the sheriff came and took me—it was about dawn, 'way up on the mountain-side, and I still thought it was another man going away toward Catamount Gap and the next county where there wasn't any Nancy Horn—I thought so clear