"Who wuz the other fellow?" asked Ike Albaugh, with lively curiosity.
"Oh! I promised not to tell"; but as Lockwood said this he made an upward motion with his pointed thumb, and turned his eyes towards the office overhead.
"W'y, not Tom?" asked Ike, in an excited whisper.
"Don't you say anything about it," said George, looking serious. "He don't want his uncle's folks to know anything about it. And besides, I haven't mentioned any name, you know"; and he fell into a playful little titter between his closed teeth, as he shook his head secretively, and turned away to attend to a woman who, in spite of the rain, had brought on horseback a large "feed-basket" full of eggs, and three pairs of blue stockings of her own knitting, which she wished to exchange for a calico dress-pattern and some other things.
But Lockwood turned to call after the departing youth: "You won't mention that to anybody, will you, Ike?"
"To b' shore not," said Ike, as he went out of the door thinking how much it would interest Rachel.
Ike Albaugh was too young and too light-hearted to be troubled with forebodings. Rachel might marry anybody she pleased "f'r all of him." It was her business, and she was of age, he reflected, and he wasn't her "gardeen." At most, if it belonged to anybody to interfere, "it was the ole man's lookout." But the story of Tom Grayson's losing all his money, and even part of his clothes, was something interesting to tell, and it did not often happen to the young man to have the first of a bit of news. A farm-house on the edge of an unsettled prairie is a dull place, where all things have a monotonous, diurnal revolution and a larger annual repetition; any event with a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit which intrudes into this system is a godsend; even the most transient shooting-star of gossip is a relief. But this would be no momentary meteor, and Isaac saw in the newly acquired information something to "tease Rache with," and teasing one's sister is always lawful sport. He owed her some good-natured grudges; here was one chance to be even with her.
Ike got home at half-past six, and Rachel had to spread for him a cold supper, chiefly of corn-bread and milk. He gave her the ribbon and the little package of square candy kisses from Lockwood. Rachel sat down at the table opposite her hungry brother, and, after giving him a part of the sweets, she amused herself with unfolding the papers that inclosed each little square of candy and reading the couplets of honeyed doggerel wrapped within.
"Did you hear anything of Tom?" Rachel asked.
"Yes."
"What was it?"
"Oh! I promised not to say anything about it."
"You needn't be afraid of making me jealous," said the sister, with a good-natured, half-defiant setting of her head on one side.
"Jealous? No, it's not anything like that. You ain't good at guessin', Sis; girls never air."
"Not even Ginnie Miller," said Rachel. She usually met Ike's hackneyed allusions to the inferiority of girls by some word about Ginnie. It was plain her brother was in a teasing mood, and that her baffled curiosity would not find satisfaction by coaxing. She knew well enough that Ike was not such a fool as to keep an interesting secret long enough for it to grow stale and unmarketable on his hands.
"Let it go, – I don't care," she said, as she got up and moved about the kitchen.
"You would, if you knew," said Ike.
"But I don't, and so there's an end of it"; and she began to hum a sentimental song of the languishing sort so much in vogue in that day. The melancholy refrain, which formed the greater part of this one, ran:
"Long, long ago, long ago."
It is one of the paradoxes of human nature that young women with all the world before them delight in singing retrospective melodies about an auld-lang-syne concerning which, in the very nature of the case, they cannot well know anything, but in regard to which they seem to entertain sentiments so distressful.
"It wasn't so very long ago, nuther," said Ike, whose dialect was always intensified when there were harvest hands on the place.
"What wasn't?" said Rachel, with her back to him.
"Why, Tom's scrape, of course."
"Was it a very bad one? Did he get took up?" Rachel's face was still averted, but Ike noted with pleasure that her voice showed a keen interest in his news.
"Oh, no, 't's not him that ought to be took up; it's Dave Sovine."
Rachel cleared her throat and waited a few seconds before speaking again.
"Did Dave hurt Tom much?" she asked, groping after the facts among the various conjectures that suggested themselves.
"Well, yes," said Ike, with a broad grin of delight at his sister's wide guessing; but by this time he was pretty well exhausted by the strain put upon his feeble secretiveness. "Yes, hurt him? I sh'd say so!" he went on. "Hurts like blazes to have a black-leg like Dave win all yer money an' yer knife, 'an yer hankercher, an' yer hat an' coat an' boots in the bargain. But you mus'n't say anything about it, Sis. It's a dead secret."
"Who told you?"
"Nobody," said Ike, feeling some compunction that he had gone so far. "I just heard it."
"Who'd you hear it from?"
"George Lockwood kind uh let 't out without 'xactly sayin' 't wuz Tom. But he didn't deny it wuz Tom."
Having thus relieved himself from the uncomfortable pressure of his secret, Ike got up and went out whistling, leaving Rachel to think the matter over. It was not the moral aspect of the question that presented itself to her. If Tom had beaten Sovine she would not have cared. It was Tom's cleverness as well as his buoyant spirit that had touched her, and now her hero had played the fool. She had the wariness of one who had known many lovers; her wit was not profound, and she saw rather than contrived the course most natural to one of her prudent and ease-loving temperament; she would hold Tom in check, and postpone the disagreeable necessity for final decision.
V
THE MITTEN
Next to Tom's foreboding about his uncle was the dread of the effect of his bad conduct on Rachel. On that rainy Saturday afternoon he thought much about the possibility of making shipwreck with Rachel; and this led him to remember with a suspicion, foreign to his temper, the part that Lockwood had taken in his disgrace. By degrees he transferred much of his indignation from Sovine to George Lockwood. He resolved to see Rachel on his way back to town, and if possible by a frank confession to her to forestall and break the force of any reports that might get abroad. The bold course was always the easiest to one of so much propulsiveness. He remembered that there was a "singin'," as it was called in the country, held every Sunday afternoon in the Timber Creek school-house, half-way between his mother's house and the Albaugh's. This weekly singing-school was attended by most of the young people of the neighborhood, and by Rachel Albaugh among the rest. Tom planned to stop, as though by chance, at the gathering and ride home with the ever adorable Rachel.
When Tom reached the school-house, Bryant, the peripatetic teacher of vocal music, was standing in front of his class and leading them by beating time with his rawhide riding-whip. Esteeming himself a leader in the musical world, he was not restricted to the methods used by musicians of greater renown. It is easy for ignorance to make innovation, – the America of a half century ago was seriously thinking of revising everything except the moral law. While Noah Webster in Connecticut was proposing single-handed