She stepped to his side and deliberately slipped her hand under his arm—that right arm that ended in an empty sleeve.
“You are coming,” she said firmly. “I won't have it.”
Freckles could not have told how he felt, neither could anyone else. His blood rioted and his head swam, but he kept his wits. He bent over her.
“Please don't, Angel,” he said softly. “You don't understand.”
How Freckles came to understand was a problem.
“It's this,” he persisted. “If your father met me on the street, in my station and dress, with you on me arm, he'd have every right to be caning me before the people, and not a finger would I lift to stay him.”
The Angel's eyes snapped. “If you think my father cares about my doing anything that is right and kind, and that makes me happy to do—why, then you completely failed in reading my father, and I'll ask him and just show you.”
She dropped Freckles' arm and turned toward the entrance to the building. “Why, look there!” she exclaimed.
Her father stood in a big window fronting the street, a bundle of papers in his hand, interestedly watching the little scene, with eyes that comprehended quite as thoroughly as if he had heard every word. The Angel caught his glance and made a despairing little gesture toward Freckles. The Man of Affairs answered her with a look of infinite tenderness. He nodded his head and waved the papers in the direction she had indicated, and the veriest dolt could have read the words his lips formed: “Take him along!”
A sudden trembling seized Freckles. At sight of the Angel's father he had stepped back as far from her as he could, leaned the wheel against him, and snatched off his hat.
The Angel turned on him with triumphing eyes.
She was highly strung and not accustomed to being thwarted. “Did You see that?” she demanded. “Now are you satisfied? Will you come, or must I call a policeman to bring you?”
Freckles went. There was nothing else to do. Guiding his wheel, he walked down the street beside her. On every hand she was kept busy giving and receiving the cheeriest greetings. She walked into the parlors exactly as if she owned them. A clerk came hurrying to meet her.
“There's a table vacant beside a window where it is cool. I'll save it for you,” and he started back.
“Please not,” said the Angel. “I've taken this man unawares, when he's in a rush. I'm afraid if we sit down we'll take too much time and afterward he will blame me.”
She walked to the fountain, and a long row of people stared with all the varying degrees of insolence and curiosity that Freckles had felt they would. He glanced at the Angel. NOW would she see?
“On my soul!” he muttered under his breath. “They don't aven touch her!”
She laid down her sunshade and gloves. She walked to the end of the counter and turned the full battery of her eyes on the attendant.
“Please,” she said.
The white-aproned individual stepped back and gave delighted assent. The Angel stepped beside him, and selecting a tall, flaring glass, of almost paper thinness, she stooped and rolled it in a tray of cracked ice.
“I want to mix a drink for my friend,” she said. “He has a long, hot ride before him, and I don't want him started off with one of those old palate-teasing sweetnesses that you mix just on purpose to drive a man back in ten minutes.” There was an appreciative laugh from the line at the counter.
“I want a clear, cool, sparkling drink that has a tang of acid in it. Where's the cherry phosphate? That, not at all sweet, would be good; don't you think?”
The attendant did think. He pointed out the different taps, and the Angel compounded the drink, while Freckles, standing so erect he almost leaned backward, gazed at her and paid no attention to anyone else. When she had the glass brimming, she tilted a little of its contents into a second glass and tasted it.
“That's entirely too sweet for a thirsty man,” she said.
She poured out half the mixture, and refilling the glass, tasted it a second time. She submitted that result to the attendant. “Isn't that about the thing?” she asked.
He replied enthusiastically. “I'd get my wages raised ten a month if I could learn that trick.”
The Angel carried the brimming, frosty glass to Freckles. He removed his hat, and lifting the icy liquid even with her eyes and looking straight into them, he said in the mellowest of all the mellow tones of his voice: “I'll be drinking it to the Swamp Angel.”
As he had said to her that first day, she now cautioned him: “Be drinking slowly.”
When the screen-door swung behind them, one of the men at the counter asked of the attendant: “Now, what did that mean?”
“Exactly what you saw,” replied he, rather curtly. “We're accustomed to it here. Hardly a day passes, this hot weather, but she's picking up some poor, god-forsaken mortal and bringing him in. Then she comes behind the counter herself and fixes up a drink to suit the occasion. She's all sorts of fancies about what's what for all kinds of times and conditions, and you bet she can just hit the spot! Ain't a clerk here can put up a drink to touch her. She's a sort of knack at it. Every once in a while, when the Boss sees her, he calls out to her to mix him a drink.”
“And does she?” asked the man with an interested grin.
“Well, I guess! But first she goes back and sees how long it is since he's had a drink. What he drank last. How warm he is. When he ate last. Then she comes here and mixes a glass of fizz with a little touch of acid, and a bit of cherry, lemon, grape, pineapple, or something sour and cooling, and it hits the spot just as no spot was ever hit before. I honestly believe that the INTEREST she takes in it is half the trick, for I watch her closely and I can't come within gunshot of her concoctions. She has a running bill here. Her father settles once a month. She gives nine-tenths of it away. Hardly ever touches it herself, but when she does she makes me mix it. She's just old persimmons. Even the scrub-boy of this establishment would fight for her. It lasts the year round, for in winter it's some poor, frozen cuss that she's warming up on hot coffee or chocolate.”
“Mighty queer specimen she had this time,” volunteered another. “Irish, hand off, straight as a ramrod, and something worth while in his face. Notice that hat peel off, and the eyes of him? There's a case of 'fight for her!' Wonder who he is?”
“I think,” said a third, “that he's McLean's Limberlost guard, and I suspect she's gone to the swamp with the Bird Woman for pictures and knows him that way. I've heard that he is a master hand with the birds, and that would just suit the Bird Woman to a T.”
On the street the Angel walked beside Freckles to the first crossing and there she stopped. “Now, will you promise to ride fast enough to make up for the five minutes that took?” she asked. “I am a little uneasy about Mrs. Duncan.”
Freckles turned his wheel into the street. It seemed to him he had poured that delicious icy liquid into every vein in his body instead of his stomach. It even went to his brain.
“Did you insist on fixing that drink because you knew how intoxicating 'twould be?” he asked.
There was subtlety in the compliment and it delighted the Angel. She laughed gleefully.
“Next time, maybe you won't take so much coaxing,” she teased.
“I wouldn't this, if I had known your father and been understanding you better. Do you really think the Bird Woman will be coming again?”
The Angel jeered. “Wild horses couldn't drag her away,” she cried.