The Heart's Kingdom

"'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.