Lydia of the Pines | Page 5

next her own, cried, "What's the rush, Lydia?"
"Oh, hello, Kent! Did you like the circus?"
"The best ever! You should have taken that ticket I wanted you to. Didn't cost me anything but carrying water to the elephants."
"I can't take anything I don't pay for. I promised mother. You know how it is, Kent."
"I guess your mother fixed it so you'd miss lots of good times, all right---- Now, don't fly off the handle--look, I got a trick. I've rubbed my baseball with match heads, so's I can play catch at night. Try it?"
"Gosh, isn't that wonderful!" exclaimed Lydia. The boy, who was a little taller than Lydia, led the way to the open space between his home and Lydia's. Then he spun Lydia a brisk ball.
"It's like a shooting star," she cried, spinning back a quick overhand shot, "but it makes your hands smell like anything."
"Lydia," called her father from the bow window, "it's time to come in."
"All right!" Then aside to Kent, "I'll wait till he calls me twice more, Kent. Keep them coming."
"Lydia!"
"Yes, Dad. Not so hard, Kent. Don't throw curves, just because I can't."
"Lydia! I shan't call again."
"Coming, Dad! Good night, Kent. Face tag!"
"Face tag yourself, smarty. Maybe I'll be over, to-morrow, if I ain't got anything better to do."
Lydia sauntered slowly up to the kitchen steps. "Well, I haven't anything pleasant at all to look forward to now," she thought. "The circus parade is over and I've returned the balloon. Gee, yes, there is too! I didn't eat my cake yet!"
She turned up the lamp in the kitchen and foraged in the cake box, bringing out the cake Lizzie had saved for her. With this in her hand she entered the dining-room. An extraordinarily long, thin man was stretched out in one arm chair, Amos in the other.
"You ought to sit in the parlor, Dad," said Lydia, reproachfully.
"It's too stuffy," said Amos.
"Oh, hello, young Lydia!" said the tall man. "Come here and let me look at you."
Levine drew the child to his knee. She looked with a clear affectionate gaze on his thin smooth-shaven face, and into his tired black eyes.
"Why do you always say 'young' Lydia?" asked the child.
"That's what I want to know, too," agreed Amos.
"Because, by heck! she's so young to be such an old lady." He smoothed the short curly hair with a gesture that was indescribably gentle. "I tell you what, young Lydia, if you were ten years older and I were ten years younger--"
Lydia leaned against his knee and took a large bite of cake. "You'd take me traveling, wouldn't you, Mr. Levine?" she said, comfortably.
"You bet I would, and you should have your heart's desire, whatever that might be. If any one deserves it you do, young Lydia."
Amos nodded and Lydia looked at them both with a sort of puzzled content as she munched her cake.
"I brought a newly illustrated copy of 'Tom Sawyer' for you to see, Lydia," said Levine. "Keep it as long as you want to. It's over on the couch there."
Lydia threw herself headlong on the book and the two men returned to the conversation she had interrupted.
"My loan from Marshall comes due in January," said Amos. "My lord, I've got to do something."
"What made you get so much?" asked Levine.
"A thousand dollars? I told you at the time, I sorta lumped all my outstanding debts with the doctor's bill and funeral expenses and borrowed enough to cover."
"He's a skin, Marshall is. Why does he live on this street except to save money?"
Lydia looked up from "Tom Sawyer." There were two little lines of worry between her eyes and the little sick sense in the pit of her stomach that always came when she heard money matters discussed. Her earliest recollection was of her mother frantically striving to devise some method of meeting their latest loan.
"I'd like to get enough ahead to buy a little farm. All my folks were farmers back in New Hampshire and I was a fool ever to have quit it. It looked like a mechanic could eat a farmer up, though, when I was a young fellow. Now a little farm looks good enough to me. But on a dollar and a half a day, I swan--" Amos sighed.
"Land's high around here," said Levine. "I understand Marshall sold Eagle Farm for a hundred dollars an acre. Takes a sharp farmer to make interest on a hundred an acre. Lord--when you think of the land on the reservation twenty miles from here, just yelling for men to farm it and nothing but a bunch of dirty Indians to take advantage of it."
"Look here, John," said Amos with sudden energy. "It's time that bunch of Indians moved on and gave white men a chance. I wouldn't say a word if they farmed