Read Ebook: The wonder woman by Long Mae Van Norman Clement Joseph M Illustrator

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Ebook has 1978 lines and 72735 words, and 40 pages

--Je veux les expulser de toute l'Am?rique du Nord, s'?cria v?h?mentement Poignet-d'Acier, et si ce n'est ? coups de fusil, ce sera ? coups de b?ton. Ils paieront pour toutes les infamies dont ils nous ont abreuv?s depuis qu'ils se sont empar?s du Canada.

--Mais seul, comment ferez-vous? hasarda le trappeur.

--Seul! r?p?ta le capitaine avec un rire sardonique, te figures-tu donc que je sois seul avec cela?

Et il frappa du bout de sa carabine sur un des sacs de cuir qui sonna bruyamment.

--Ouir hand, and was stroking the animal's nose when I reached her side.

I said, "Allow me," and offered my hand for her foot. She glanced at my hand, looked into my face, and smiled slowly as if amused. I felt the hot blood mount to my brow, and then her foot pressed my palm, and she was in the saddle, and her mare was wheeling.

"Good Sonia," I heard her murmur, and saw her gauntleted hand steal along the arching neck. She bent to me. The grace of her supple figure, the vital alluring face, her baffling beautiful eyes, her ripe lips with their dimpled corners, were sweet as life to me. For a moment our eyes met. She said gratefully: "Thank you. My ride will be splendid beneath those whispering yews."

Of a sudden my hands grew cold, my tongue stiffened in my throat, and my eyes smarted. She was going. I had no power to detain her, no sophisticated words to cajole her. I stared after her, and saw her ride away through the swaying meadow-grass to the yew path, the sun dappling her blue riding skirt, and the breeze lifting and swaying her bonny tresses.

When I went indoors after a retrospective half hour beside the spring, I found Joey in the grip of intense excitement. The table in the front room was laid for three, there was a roaring fire in the kitchen stove, and Joey's face was crimson as he stood on a stool at the sink turning the boiling water off a kettle of potatoes.

"I've made squatty biscuits like you showed me once," he volunteered in a loud whisper, "and stewed apples. And, Mr. David--I've hung a clean towel over the wash-bench, and scoured the basin with rushes."

I looked at Joey. Out in the woods I had undergone a savage battle with my old self that had walked out of the shadows and confronted me. I had remembered things--submerged, well-forgotten things; I had exhumed skeletons from their charnel house--skeletons long buried; I had seen faces I had no wish to see, heard voices, the music of whose tones I could not sustain with equanimity; I had suffered. But as I looked at Joey, the futile little friend who loved me, and saw his pitiful efforts to please, the ice went out of my heart, and the fever out of my brain. I turned aside to the window and stood looking out with tightening throat.

Joey came and hovered near my elbow.

"There are only two pieces of gingerbread, Mr. David. I've put them on, and you can just say you don't believe in giving children sweets."

I laid my arm across the lad's shoulders. I looked down into the honest brown eyes seeking mine for approval. The pressure of the two small rough hands on my arm was comforting.

"You're a splendid provider, Joey," I cried. "But you may eat your gingerbread, my boy. There will be no guest. She has gone on to Hidden Lake."

Joey looked aghast. His jaw dropped, and his eyes grew black with disappointment.

"And I've sweetened the apple sauce with white sugar, and gone and wasted all that butter in those biscuits!"

I strolled into the front room and viewed the preparations. There was a large bunch of lupine in the big blue bowl in the center of the table, and all our best china was set forth in brave array. The bread-board I had carved graced one end of the table; at the other, Joey had arranged the two thick slabs of gingerbread on a pressed glass comport, a paper napkin beneath. I was smiling as I stood there, but I had an uncomfortable feeling that all was not well with Joey. A sound from the kitchen attracted me. I went toward it. Joey leaned across the sink, his face buried in the roller towel. His young shoulders were heaving.

"I wanted her--oh, I wanted her to stay!" he blubbered.

I knew not what to say to comfort my lad, and so I said nothing. I caught up the pail and went outside to the spring for water.

I had filled my pail and was stooping to gather a handful of cress when I heard the sharp click of wheels in the underbrush behind me. Some one was driving over the uneven ground that lay between the cabin and the workshop. I looked around. A girl sitting beneath a pink-lined, green umbrella, in a two-wheeled cart, waved her whip at me. I straightened up, dropped the cress, and ran through the buck brush after her.

"Wait, wait, Wanza," I cried.

I heard her say: "Whoa, Rosebud!" And the buckskin pony she was driving curveted and pawed the ground and set the green paper rosettes on its harness bobbing coquettishly as she pulled it up.

"Were you coming to the cabin, Wanza?" I asked, as I reached the cart.

"Whoa, Rosebud! No, I wasn't to-night, Mr. Dale--I was only taking a short cut through your field."

She leaned out from beneath the shadow of her pink-lined umbrella and smiled at me. Seldom it was that Wanza smiled at me like that. Friends we were--friends of years' standing--but Wanza was chary of her smiles where I was concerned, and I must confess I found her frowns piquant enough.

The day that passed without Wanza whistling from her peddler's cart at my door seemed more cheerless than usual. Wanza peddled everything, from shoe laces to linen dusters. She was the apple of her father's eye, the pride of the village, and the delight of the steamboat men on the river. Ever since I had known her she had been her father's housekeeper. Her mother had died when Wanza was a baby. And she and her father lived alone in a funny little house, flanked by a funny little garden, on the edge of the village.

"Wanza," I cried eagerly, "come in to supper with Joey and me."

I looked up at her pleadingly. Her charming elf-face continued to smile down at me. She shook her head slowly.

"Please," I begged.

Gradually the smile left her face, a shrewd look replaced it.

"I can make you a cake," she began hesitatingly, "if you've got any brown sugar in the cabin."

"We don't want you to bake for us, Wanza--we have a good meal laid out, and we want you to honor us by sharing it."

"Glory! Is that it, Mr. David Dale? Well, I'll stay. Not," she added quickly, "that I wouldn't be too tickled to make you a cake, only--"

"Only--Wanza?"

"Only it's great to be invited, with all the supper ready before hand and waiting--it sure is!"

"You usually earn your supper with us, girl," I said, as we walked toward the cabin. "There is no one can bake such cakes as yours, and as for your cherry pies--well, I have no words!"

She tossed her head. And then catching sight of a long-tailed chat, tumbling and rollicking above a hawthorn thicket, she stopped, her head poised high, her delicate subtle chin lifted, her expression rapt. All unconscious of my eyes she began making a funny little noise in her throat:

"Crr--crr--whrr--tr--tr--tr--"

It was pure felicity to look at Wanza Lyttle as she stood thus. She wore a gown of pink cotton, and her tangled maize-colored hair was looped back from her face with a knot of vivid rose-pink ribbon. Her wide-brimmed beribboned hat hung on her shoulders. Her collar was rolled away from a throat of milk. Her sleeves were tucked up, exposing brown, slender arms. Her feet were encased in white stockings and sandals. She was a picturesque, daring figure. And her face!--it was like a flame in a lamp of marble.

Her father, old Griffith Lyttle, was fond of dilating on the beauty of his daughter to me. Once he said: "She do be the prettiest young gal astepping--but, man, I reckon she'll see trouble with that face o' hers. It's the face as goes with a hot temper." Looking at her now it was difficult to associate anything but loveliness of disposition with her face, which seemed at this moment fairly angelic.

"The chat has a variety of songs, Wanza," I ventured. "He is laughing at you. Unless you can caw like a crow, and mew like a cat, and bark like a dog you can't attract him."

"I like him because he is so bouncing and jolly," the girl answered. "I like bouncing, jolly people, Mr. Dale."

We walked on to the cabin. When we entered the kitchen and Joey saw us, he gave a shout of joy.

"Now, I'd liever have Wanza to supper than the other woman, Mr. David," he vouchsafed. "I like the other woman, course I do, but I ain't used of her yet."

I refrained from meeting Wanza's eyes. I went to the stove and took the biscuits from the oven with assiduous care. But when we were seated at the table, Wanza in the post of honor at the head, she leaned across the battered tea-things, rapped smartly on the table to attract my attention and demanded:

"What woman did Joey mean by 'the other woman,' Mr. Dale?"

I coughed. "Why--er--only a strange lady who stopped at the workshop to enquire if this place were for sale. She saw Russell's old sign at the crossroads, and, as she explained, thought the hand pointed to Cedar Dale."

Wanza looked at me intently; an interesting gleam came into her big eyes.

"What sort of a looking person was she, Mr. Dale?"

I reached out, helped myself to a biscuit, spread it with butter, and answered with assumed nonchalance:

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