Judy Part 24

His bold eyes dropped before the fearlessness in hers.

"Good-bye," he said, humbly, and when he reached the edge of the camp he turned and looked after her, and there was a shadow on his swarthy face.

The girl on the pile of rugs called him.

"I got it," she said.

"Give it to me," he ordered, roughly. But she held the necklace away from him with a teasing laugh. "It is mine, it is mine," she cried, then shrieked, as he wrenched it out of her hand, twisting her wrist cruelly.

Judy, alone once more and with her courage all gone, so that she was so weak that she could hardly stand, ran on and on, blindly. She dared not go back the way she had come for fear of meeting again some of the hated band.

"I will keep ahead," she thought. "There must be a house somewhere, and I can get them to drive me home."

But though she walked on and on, no house appeared. She was faint with fatigue and hunger, and at last, as she came to the end of a road and found herself stranded in a great pasture, a sob caught in her throat.

She sat down on a rock and looked around. There seemed to be nothing in sight but rocks and scrubby bushes, and already twilight was descending over the land.

"I believe I am lost," she owned at last, "and if some one doesn't find me pretty soon, I shall have to stay out all night."

CHAPTER XIV

A PRECIOUS p.u.s.s.y CAT

The moon was out and the stars when Judy discovered a flock of sheep in the middle of the great pasture.

They were gathered together in a close woolly bunch as she came upon them, and they turned to her their mild white faces, but did not get up from the ground. It was nice to be near something alive, even if it was only such meek, silly creatures, and Judy sat down on a stone near them.

"I will stay here," she decided. "I simply cannot walk another step."

It was very lonely and she was very frightened. The moon lighted the world with a white light, but the shadows were black under the trees; somewhere in the distance a whippoorwill uttered a plaintive note, and from the gloomy woods beyond came the mournful hoot of an owl.

Judy slipped down to the softer gra.s.s, and resting her head on her arm gazed up at the sky, and gradually her fear went from her in the silence of the perfect night. A line marked in one of her father's books came to her:

"G.o.d's in his heaven All's right with the world."

Judy did not know that Browning had said that--she didn't care who had said it, but it comforted her. If everything had seemed to go wrong in her own little world, it was because she had made it wrong. Here under the wonderful sky was peace, and if she was afraid and out of harmony it was her own fault.

"If I hadn't gone where I ought not to have been, nothing would have happened," was her rather mixed, if perfectly correct, summing up.

The little lambs bleated now and then:

"Maa-a-a, Maa-aa-a."

And the old ewes responded comfortingly,

"Baa-aa--" which Judy interpreted as meaning, "I am here, little one, don't be afraid."

"I won't be afraid either, you dear old thing," said Judy to the motherly creature near her, who had turned upon her now and then inquiring gentle eyes. "I won't be afraid, and I am going to sleep."

She did go to sleep, and when she waked, the world was dark. The moon had sailed away like a golden boat, and the stars seemed very far off.

Judy sat up and s.h.i.+vered. A cool wind had risen, but that was not what had roused her.

She had heard something!

Something that just at the right of the flock of sheep moved silently, something blacker than the darkness that enveloped it!

She thought of wild animals, of tramps, of everything natural that might invade a pasture; then as a sepulchral cry broke once more upon the air, she remembered all the tales she had ever heard of Things that visited one in the night.

"Judy Jameson, you know you don't believe in ghosts," she tried to rea.s.sure herself, "you know you don't, Judy Jameson," but all the same her heart went "thumpety-thump."

She cowered back against the rock as a white figure appeared beside the black one, and the two bore down upon her.

There was a sudden bewildering chorus:

"Caw--caw--caw--"

"Purr--rr--meow--"

And then Judy screamed, joyfully, "Oh, Belinda, Belinda, you precious p.u.s.s.y cat," and in her relief she hugged the great white animal, as if she were not the same girl who, not many days before, had said, "I hate cats."

Becky walked around in a circle and inspected Judy.

"So it was you, Becky, was it?" asked Judy, "that I saw first? But what made you look so tall?"

She went to the place where she had first seen the apparition, and found the slender stump of a tree, on top of which Becky had been perched.

"What are you doing here, so far from home, Belinda," asked Judy, as she sat down and took the purring, gentle creature in her lap.

But Belinda could not talk, although she patted Judy's hand with her paw and curled down with her head in the crook of Judy's arm.

"My, it's good to have you here," said Judy, "but I wonder how it happened."

She gathered the big cat close to her, grateful for the warmth of the soft body, and with Becky perched up on a rock behind, she sat very still, comforted by the sound of Belinda's sleepy song, and by Becky's sentinel-like watchfulness.

It was in the black darkness that precedes the dawn that she was roused by a lantern flas.h.i.+ng across her eyes.

"Grandfather," she said, sleepily, as a haggard old face bent above her. "Grandfather."

"Judy," he said, with a break in his voice.

Wide-awake now, she saw that his hands trembled so that he had to set the lantern down.

"Oh," she said, remorsefully, as she sat up, "how tired you look, grandfather."