"'I knows when to run and not be caught,' Jacob answered, as he put
another apple in the parson's pocket and went back into the grocery
door."
"Do you ever see Martha?" I asked with a kind of impatience. I had been
three times down to the Last Chance and each time Jacob's excuses for
Martha had been positive though courteous, and I had come away baffled,
with the green groceries I had purchased as a blind to my visit. I had
written to her and had had no response. At that I had stopped, with a
self-sufficient feeling of a duty well done, but through it all I also
felt that she was on the other side of a prison wall crying to me.
"Never," answered Mother Spurlock, with real pain in her voice. "She
stays in that back room and cooks for Jacob, and the child stays with
her and has only the small yard back of the bar in which to play. Jacob
only let him come up to sing with Mr. Goodloe and the children a few
times and now he is kept as near in prison as his mother. Jacob's
attitude grows more morose about her and the child every day. I don't
understand it. I never will. Martha was the loveliest girl that ever
bloomed in the Settlement, and now she has been plucked and thrown into
the dust. And the child is too young to share her prison fate. He must
be got out and away."
"He will," I answered, with a calm confidence. I didn't tell Mother
Spurlock, and I didn't know exactly why I didn't, but I was deeply
involved in a clandestine affair with the Stray which was fast becoming
one of the adventures of my life. It had begun in a positively weird
manner and was continuing along the same lines. One morning several
weeks after my first acquaintance and turtle adventure with him I had
waked up at dawn and gone to look out of the window just as the morning
star was fading over Old Harpeth. In the dim light I had spied a small
figure down in the garden, hopping along by a row of early young rose
bushes, with a can in one hand and a long stick in the other. Hastily
getting into a few clothes I crept down through the silent house and out
in the garden to find the Stray busily engaged in knocking large slugs
off into a can.
"I feed 'em to mother's bird in the cage, 'cause he can't get out to get
'em," he explained. "They all sleep hard 'cause they work so late and I
crawl out the window and go back while they don't wake up. I like your
yard better than I do mine." The statement was made simply, without envy
of apology.