There were no more raids, and the Six-Cross-Roads men who were left kept
to their hovels, appalled and shaken, but, as time went by and left them
unmolested, they recovered a measure of their hardiness and began to think
on what they should do to the man who had brought misfortune and terror
upon them. For a long time he had been publishing their threatening
letters and warnings in a column which he headed: "Humor of the Day."
"Harkless don't understand the Cross-Roads," Briscoe said to Miss Sherwood
as they left the Wimby farm behind; "and then he's like most of us; hardly
any of us realizes that harm's ever going to come to us. Harkless was
anxious enough about other people, but----"
The young lady interrupted him, touching his arm. "Look!" she said,
"Didn't you see a child, a little girl, ahead of us on the road?"
"I noticed one a minute ago, but she's not there now," answered Briscoe.
"There was a child walking along the road just ahead, but she turned and
saw us coming, and she disappeared in the most curious way; she seemed to
melt into the weeds at the roadside, across from the elder-bush yonder."
The judge pulled in the horses by the elder-bush. "No child here, now," he
said, "but you're right; there certainly was one, just before you spoke."
The young corn was low in the fields, and there was no hiding-place in
sight.
"I'm very superstitious; I am sure it was an imp," Miss Sherwood said. "An
imp or a very large chameleon; she was exactly the color of the road."
"A Cross-Roads imp," said the judge, lifting the reins, "and in that case
we might as well give up. I never set up to be a match for those people,
and the children are as mean as their fathers, and smarter."
When the buckboard had rattled on a hundred yards or so, a little figure
clad in a tattered cotton gown rose up from the weeds, not ten feet from
where the judge had drawn rein, and continued its march down the road
toward Plattville, capering in the dust and pursuing the buckboard with
malignant gestures till the clatter of the horses was out of hearing, the
vehicle out of sight.
Something over two hours later, as Mr. Martin was putting things to rights
in his domain, the Dry-Goods Emporium, previous to his departure for the
evening's gossip and checkers at the drug-store, he stumbled over
something soft, lying on the floor behind a counter. The thing rose, and
would have evaded him, but he put out his hands and pinioned it and
dragged it to the show-window where the light of the fading day defined
his capture. The capture shrieked and squirmed and fought earnestly.
Grasped by the shoulder he held a lean, fierce-eyed, undersized girl of
fourteen, clad in one ragged cotton garment, unless the coat of dust she
wore over all may be esteemed another. Her cheeks were sallow, and her
brow was already shrewdly lined, and her eyes were as hypocritical as they
were savage. She was very thin and little, but old Tom's brown face grew a
shade nearer white when the light fell upon her.