The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding Part 17

"In other words," put in Papa Jack, "he's thoroughly inconsiderate and selfish, although I imagine he'd be mightily amazed if any one applied that term to him since he is so lavish in giving things in his own way."

"Yes, he is," was the answer. "I've noticed it in a dozen little ways.

It's always _his_ wishes and _his_ tastes that have to be consulted, never Lucy's. Yet aside from that trait he is a thoroughly fine man, and because she respects him and looks up to him and is such a sweet yielding little creature, he'll come in time to be the centre of her universe, and she'll revolve around him like a loyal little planet. But a girl of a different temperament wouldn't. If she were impetuous and highstrung like you for instance," she added with a smile at Lloyd, "she would see the injustice of it and resent it so bitterly that there would be continual friction and jar. With your temperament you couldn't live peaceably with anybody like that."

"I know I couldn't," admitted Lloyd frankly, "especially if he showed any jealousy. Mistah Jameson is jealous of every friend Lucy evah had at the Post. He doesn't like it a bit when she refers to the good times she used to have with the boys there, even when they were just ordinary friends. Half a dozen times I've seen the tears come to her eyes at some inconsiderate thing he'd say, and I'd think if I were Lucy I couldn't sit there and take it like a martyr. I'd have to jump up and shake him till his teeth rattled."

"What a cat and dog time you would have," laughed Mrs. Sherman. "Worse than little Mary Ware's nightmare that she had after Eugenia's wedding."

"By the way," exclaimed Mr. Sherman, slapping his pockets to find a letter he had placed in one of them, "I knew there was something I intended to tell you. Jack Ware is on his way here now."

Then in answer to the surprise and the questions that greeted his announcement he explained, "I suggested making him a.s.sistant manager of the mines and the Company wants to have a look at him, and put him through a sort of examination. He's so young they rather doubt my judgment in the matter. But they'll find out when they see him. We telegraphed him to come, and he left Arizona several days ago. He'll be here only a day and night probably."

Lloyd left her seat on the step and took a chair beside her father, sitting straight and alert in her interest. It was hard to realize that Jack Ware was grown. He was only fourteen when she had known him on the desert. "Oh, will you evah forget," she laughed, "the way he looked when we surprised him at the washtub, all tied up in an ap.r.o.n, helping Joyce with the family was.h.i.+ng?"

"His readiness to pitch in to whatever is to be done is his chief characteristic," was the answer. "That is what makes him so valuable at the mines. Patient and reliable and strong, he is one of the finest young fellows of my acquaintance. He'll be one of the big men of the West some day, for young as he is, he is into everything that makes for the welfare and development of the territory he lives in."

All the rest of the evening was spent in recalling that visit to Ware's Wigwam, and when Lloyd went up to bed, although Leland Harcourt's name had not been mentioned, she felt that her doubts and unspoken questions about him had been answered. She must not listen any more to that little name, that caressing little name that left such a thrill in its wake.

"Wise old Hildgardmar," said Mrs. Sherman in a playful tone after Lloyd had left them. "I don't suppose when you sent for Jack that it entered your head you were giving her the very safeguard of contrast that I hoped she might have, but you will be doing it all the same."

"No, I didn't," he confessed, "but I think you are magnifying the interest she has in Harcourt. She never mentioned his name all evening."

"But she talked all around him," answered Mrs. Sherman, "and I think she came to the conclusion before she went up-stairs that he does not measure up to your standards, and is almost sure that he does not even meet hers."

CHAPTER XI

THE END OF SEVERAL THINGS

THE old Colonel was in the library, telling for the hundredth time to the small listener on his knee the story of the battle that had taken his right arm. For since Wardo had found that his father's father was in the same wild charge against the Yankees, and had fought like a tiger till a wound in the head and another in the knee sent him to the rear on a stretcher, he could not hear the story often enough. And that led to other tales of things that had happened when the two soldier-friends were schoolboys. It puzzled Wardo to find any resemblance between the mischievous boy whom the Colonel referred to as Cy Bannon, and the dignified judge whose picture hung on the wall of the Colonel's den.

"Oh, his name was Cyrus Edward then, just as yours is now," explained the Colonel when he finally understood the difficulty. "But it was too long a name for such a gra.s.shopper of a lad. He'd have been out of sight before you could say it all. So they cut it down to Cy, just as yours is cut to Wardo."

"Will I be Judge Cywus Edwa'd Bannon then when I'm gwoed up?" asked Wardo.

The seriousness of the big innocent eyes fixed on him made the Colonel move uneasily. "Heaven knows," he muttered. "_I_ don't. But it's to be hoped you'll take after him instead of the one next in line of succession."

The question made such a profound impression on him he could not shake it off, and acting on the impulse of the moment he decided to take it to the Judge himself for an answer. He would show him the winsome little lad who bore his name. He would demand of him what right he had to withhold from him the protection and shelter that was his heritage. The child's father had been cast off in proud scorn for his profligate ways.

Secretly the Colonel had always thought that his old friend had s.h.i.+rked responsibility, and that the open repudiation of him by his family had given Ned his final downward shove.

It made no difference to the Colonel that Ned's name was a forbidden one in the household. _He'd_ tell Cy Bannon a few things. Then his face softened and he smiled a trifle foolishly, muttering something about its being a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The Judge might come back at him with the argument that he had been just as harsh with his own child for far less cause; but that would only give him a chance to urge a reconciliation on the ground that _he_ had surrendered gracefully, and had been glad of it ever since. Cy would be a mighty queer sort of man, he concluded, if he could hold out against such a little grandson as Wardo. He was a child to walk into anybody's affections.

Lloyd had left the pair so deeply absorbed in war-stories, that she was surprised on her return to the library a little later, to find no trace of either of them. They'd gone for a trolley ride Walker told her, and expected to be gone most of the morning. So relieved of her responsibility Lloyd made a longer visit in Rollington than usual. The crisis had been pa.s.sed some time now, and Ida was so much better she was beginning to talk about Wardo's return. She would be able to sit up in a few days. As Lloyd entertained her with accounts of Wardo's sayings and doings she realized more and more what a large place he had come to fill in the household, and how sorely they would all miss him when they had to give him up. Ida's future looked so hopeless. It would be a long time before she would be strong enough to begin sewing again. She talked wearily of the burden she must a.s.sume as soon as possible, and Lloyd came away weighed down with a sense of the injustice and wrong in the world and her helplessness to right it.

It was nearly noon when she reached the house. Wardo, who had just come in with her grandfather, rushed down the steps to meet her, his sailor hat on the back of his head, and his arms outstretched to give her glad welcome. He clasped her around the knees, and put up his face to be kissed. His morning's adventures made him feel that he had been away an age. Then his voice trembling with the importance of his news, he announced the three things of his visit which had made the most impression on him.

"I saw the place on my gwan'fahvah's head where the Yankee bullet hit him, wite over his eye! An' the Colonel he shaked his stick at my gwan'fahvah, and got wed in the face when he talked." Then digging down into the mite of a pocket that graced his blouse, he triumphantly brought out the third item, a silver dollar that Judge Bannon had given him.

By this time the Colonel had come out, and in answer to Lloyd's excited questions confessed the truth of Wardo's tale. He _had_ shaken his stick at the Judge. They had had a stormy interview and he lost his temper. He was sorry at first that he had taken Wardo, the child was so frightened, but it proved a good move, for his appealing little face pleaded his cause better than anything else could have done, and in the end the Judge was completely won over by his handsome little namesake.

"_And_," concluded the Colonel triumphantly, "he's promised to take Ned back and give him one more chance. He'll keep the lad and his mother in any event, and he's to send for them just as soon as she's able to be moved."

"Oh, you blessed old peace-makah!" cried Lloyd running up the steps to throw her arms around his neck and give him as rapturous a hug as Wardo had given her. "You're a perfect darling, and you've made me so happy I don't know what to do or say. I believe I'm as happy as Ida will be when she heahs it, and I'm going ovah there the minute I've had lunch, to tell her. You're a public benefactah and everything else in the dictionary that's extra nice and fine."

It was joy to the Colonel to have his praises sung like that, and he went around the rest of the week with a self-satisfied virtuous feeling that kept him beaming benignly on everything and everybody. In such an angelic humour was he, that Walker confided to Mom Beck that he was "right sma'ht worried 'bout ole Ma.r.s.e."

It was a day of surprises for the whole family. On Lloyd's return from her second visit to Rollington, about the middle of the afternoon, she saw Jack Ware on the rear platform of the trolley-car, which pa.s.sed the carriage when she was nearly home. He had arrived two days sooner than any one expected he could. Taller, broader and browner by far than the slim lad who waved her farewell from the Wigwam, he was unmistakably the same Jack, and she would have recognized him anywhere.

The second glance showed her father standing just behind him. They both leaned out and waved their hats as they pa.s.sed the carriage. A moment later they were stepping off the car opposite the entrance gate, and waiting for her to come up.

"Anothah knight comes riding," she thought with a smile, wondering what put the whimsical notion in her head, for she did not count Jack in that cla.s.s. He was simply her good comrade of the plains, nothing picturesque about _him_.

"I don't suppose there could be about the modern knight," she thought, amused that such fancies should come to her. "His only thought is to 'get there.' When young Lochinvar comes out of the West now, his 'steed _is_ the best' from that standpoint, but you can't make the pictuahs and poems out of trolley-cars that you can out of hawses in those old-time fancy trappings."

Stepping out of the carriage, she sent it on ahead and turned to Jack with such a cordial welcome that he reddened with pleasure under the brown of his sunburned cheeks.

"This is my 'Promised Land' as well as Mary's," he said as they walked slowly towards the house, and he paused to look up at the grand old trees arching over them. "You've no idea how I've looked forward to seeing all this. Mother always pictured it as a sort of Beulah land.

Then Joyce took up the same tune, and lastly Mary. She's the most enthusiastic of all, and sat up till midnight the day she found I was coming, to make a list of all the things she said I mustn't fail to see or ask about."

Taking a memorandum book from his pocket he opened it and held it out for Lloyd and her father to see. There were three pages whereon Mary had set down instructions for him to follow. Lloyd laughed as she glanced at the head-line.

THINGS TO DO WITHOUT FAIL

1 Make Mr. Rob Moore's acquaintance, and see Oaklea.

2 See The Beeches and all Mrs. Walton's curios, especially the bells of Luzon and mother-of-pearl fire-screen.

3 See if Elise Walton is as pretty as she used to be, and notice how she does her hair now.

4 Ask Lloyd to play on the harp and sing the Dove Song, when the candles are lighted in the drawing-room.

The list was such a long one that Lloyd did not read farther, but glanced at the page headed--

THINGS NOT SO IMPORTANT, BUT I'D LIKE TO KNOW

1 Ask about Girlie Dinsmore if you have a chance. Is she as much of a baby as ever?

2 What has become of that horrid Bernice Howe?

3 Does Betty still correspond with the "Pilgrim Father?"

4 Look in the book-case on the north side of the library, and copy the name of that book on Spiders.

5 Find out all you can about the man Allison is going to marry.

There were a dozen similar items.