Part 24

They were all looking at the little girl in the car beside him. They had heard about this little girl, and how “cute” she was. Her mother was some relative of Mrs. Lindsay. Leone and Vila looked at her eagerly. The boys hung back but they wanted to see her. Mr. Lindsay was proud. He said:

“Well, sir, I’ve got somebody along with me!”

“I see you have!” Mr. Sieverson answered with shy heavy jocularity and Mrs. Sieverson asked, “Is this the little girl been visiting you?”

“This is the little girl! But I don’t know whether she’s visiting or not. I’ve just about made up my mind I’ll keep her!”

They all laughed appreciatively. Leone pulled her mother’s dress. She wanted her mother to ask if the little girl couldn’t get out and play with them. “Now, don’t. We’ll see,” Mrs. Sieverson whispered. The little girl was so pretty sitting there with her soft golden-brown hair and her cream-white dress that Mr. and Mrs. Sieverson were both shy of saying anything directly to her. Mr. Sieverson cried, still trying conscientiously to joke:

“Well, ain’t you going to get out?”

Mr. Lindsay asked, “Well!--shall we, Patricia?”

The little girl looked gravely at the other little girls, and then nodded.

“All right, sir! Patricia’s the boss! I’ve got to do as she says.”

She consented to smile at that, and the two boys giggled. Mr. Lindsay lifted her out of the car. She put her arms around his neck, and her little legs and her feet in their shiny black slippers dangled as he swung her to the ground. The children felt shy when he set her down among them. Mr. and Mrs. Sieverson didn’t quite know what to say.

“_There_ she is! This is the first time this little girl has ever been out to a farm. What do you think of that, Marvin?”

Marvin grinned, and backed off a few steps.

“Yes, sir! But she and Uncle Dave have great times driving round together, don’t they?”

The little girl looked up at him and then smiled and nodded her head with a subtle hint of mischief.

“You bet we do! We have great times.”

The Sieversons all stood back in a group shyly grinning and admiring. Leone’s eyes were as eager as if she were looking at a big doll in a store window. They had never seen any child as pretty as this one, and Mr. Lindsay knew it and was brimming with pride. Her short dress of creamy linen, tied with a red-silk cord at the neck and embroidered with patches of bright Russian colours, melted its fairness into the pure lovely pallor of her skin. The sleeves were so short that almost the whole of her soft, round, tiny arms was bare. Her hair was of fine gold streaked and overlaid with brown--the colour of a straw stack with the darker, richer brown on top--but every hair lay fine and perfect, the thick bangs waved slightly on her forehead, and the long soft bob curved out like a shining flower bell and shook a little when she moved her head. Her skin wasn’t one bit sunburned, and so white and delicately grained that there seemed to Vila, in awe, to be a little frost upon it ... like the silver bloom on wildflower petals, picked in cool places, that smudged when she rubbed it with her fingers.

Mr. Lindsay became businesslike now that he was out of the car. “Well, Henry,” he said, “you got it all figured up and ready to show me? I think we’ve got Appleton where we can make a deal all right.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s ready.”

While the two men talked, the little girl stood beside Mr. Lindsay, her hand still in his, with a grave, trustful, wondering look. Leone, smiling at her, was getting closer. Mr. Lindsay seemed to remember her then and looked down at her.

“Well, Patricia, what about you while I’m looking after my business?” He smiled then at the other children. “Think you can find something to do with all these kids here?”

Leone looked up at him and her blue eyes pleaded brightly in her eagerness. “I guess they’s plenty of them to look after her,” Mr. Sieverson said shyly but still grinning. “They can entertain her,” Mrs. Sieverson put in. She could do the baking without Leone this morning, she thought rapidly, but feeling hurried and anxious.

“You going to play with them for a while, are you?” Mr. Lindsay felt responsible for Patricia. All the same he wanted her off his mind for a while until he had finished his business. “I don’t know whether----”

“Oh, Leone’ll look after her,” Mrs. Sieverson assured him, and Mr. Sieverson repeated, “Sure! She’ll be all right with Leone.”

Leone came up now, smiling eagerly and with a sweetness that transformed her thin freckled face. She shook back the wisps of uneven, tow-coloured hair. She took the little girl’s hand protectingly and confidingly in her hot palm that had a gleam of dusty perspiration along the life line and the heart line. The tiny hand felt like a soft warm bit of silk--or a flower.

“That’s right! Uncle Dave won’t be gone long. Don’t take her out where it’s too hot, kids. You know she isn’t used to things the way you are.”

“No, you be careful,” Mrs. Sieverson warned them.

“Will you go with Leone?” The little girl did not say that she would or wouldn’t, but she was courteous and did not draw back. “You’ll be all right! _You’ll_ have a good time! Oh, I guess Uncle Dave didn’t tell these kids who you were, did he? This is Patricia.”

“Can you say that?” Mrs. Sieverson asked--doubting if _she_ could.

Vila drew shyly back, with one shoulder higher than the other; but Leone laughed in delight. “I can say it!” She nodded. She squeezed Patricia’s hand.

“You can say it, can you? All right, then. Well, now, you kids can show this little girl what good times you can have on the farm. That so? All right then, Henry.”

Mrs. Sieverson went into the house to get back to her baking. She had a lot to do to-day. She wasn’t at all worried about leaving their little visitor so long as Leone was with her. But she turned to call back to the children, who were still silently grouped about Patricia in the driveway:

“You better stay in the yard with her. Mr. Lindsay won’t like it if she gets her dress dirty. Leone! You hear me?”

“I heard. Do you want to come into the yard, Patricia? You do, don’t you?” Leone asked coaxingly.

Patricia went soberly with her. Her eyes, gray with threads of violet in the clear iris, were looking all about silently. Her little hand lay quiet but with confidence in Leone’s. The other children followed, the boys lagging behind, but coming all the same.

“There, now! Here’s just the nicest shady place, and Patricia can sit here, can’t she, and just be so nice?” Leone placed Patricia in the round patterned shade of an apple tree, and spread out her linen dress, making it perfectly even all around, and carefully drew out her little legs straight in front of her with the shiny black slippers close together. “There!” she said proudly. “See?”

She sat down on one side of Patricia, and then Vila shyly and with a sidelong confiding smile sat down on the other. The boys hung back together.

“Leone!” Mrs. Sieverson called from the house. “Ain’t you got something to entertain her with? Why don’t you get your dolls?”

“Do you want to see our dolls, Patricia?”

So far Patricia had been consenting but silent. “You go in and get them, Vila,” Leone ordered, and when Vila whined, “I don’t want to!” she said, “Yes, you have to. I can’t leave her. I have to take care of her. Don’t I, Patricia?” But when Vila came back with the scanty assortment of dolls Patricia looked at them and then reached out her hand for the funny cloth boy doll in the knitted sweater suit. The boys laughed proudly and looked at each other, the way they had done when the swan in the park at Swea City took the piece of sandwich they put on the water for it. “Isn’t that doll cute, Patricia?” Leone begged eagerly.

Patricia touched its black-embroidered eyes, and its red-embroidered lips--done in outline stitch--and then looked up at the eager, watching children and smiled with that gleam of mischief.

The boys laughed again. They all came around closer. “That’s mine,” Vila said softly. She reached over and touched the big stuffed cloth doll, with the hair coloured yellow and the cheeks bright red, that was smooth along the top and bottom sides like a fish but crisp along the edges from the seams. Patricia took it and looked at it. She looked at every one of their dolls--there were five, one of them was a six-inch bisque doll from the ten-cent store--and then smiled again.

“I’ll bet you have nice dolls at home, haven’t you, Patricia?” Leone said in generous worship. “I’ll bet you’ve got lots nicer dolls than we have.”

Patricia spoke for the first time. The children listened, with bright eager eyes wide open, to each soft little word.

“I have fifteen dolls.”

Marvin said, “Gee!”

“Have you got them named?” Vila leaned over the grass toward Patricia, and then quickly hitched herself back, frightened at the sound of her own voice asking the question.

“Oh, yes, I always name my dolls,” Patricia assured them. “My dolls have beautiful names. They’re all the names of the great actresses and singers.” And she began gravely to repeat them. “Geraldine Farrar, and Maria Jeritza, and Eva LeGallienne, and Amelita Galli-Curci....”

While she was saying them, the boys looked at each other over her head, their eyes glinting, their mouths stretched into grins of smothered amusement, until Clyde broke into giggles.

Leone was indignant. “Those are _lovely_ names! I think Patricia was just wonderful to think of them!”

Vila stretched across the grass again. She touched the cloth doll and drew back her fingers as quickly as if it were hot. “Her name’s Dor’thy,” she whispered.

After Patricia’s gracious acceptance of the dolls, the children wanted to show her all the treasures they had--even those they had never told anyone else about. Everything, they felt, would receive a kind of glory from her approval. They liked to repeat her name now. “Patricia.” “She wants to see the little pigs. Don’t you, Patricia?” “Aw, she does not! Do you, Patricia? She wants to see what I’ve got to make a radio.” Patricia looked from one to the other with her violet-gray eyes and let the others answer for her. But after a while she said with a cool, gentle, royal decision:

“No. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay right here in this round shade.”

The children were highly delighted. They began to bring their treasures to her. Vila had run off to the edge of the garden and dug up two glass precious stones she had buried there, but when she came back to Patricia she was too shy to show them and kept them hidden in her hot little hand that got sticky and black from the earth clinging to them. The boys were getting quite bold. Marvin said:

“I bet you never saw a mouse nest, Patricia.”

“Patricia doesn’t care anything about that,” Leone said impatiently. “I wish you boys would go off somewhere anyway and let _us_ look after Patricia.”

“I can show it to you, Patricia.”

“_She_ doesn’t want to see that!”

“Yes, I do,” Patricia assured them with an innocent courtesy that made Clyde giggle again.

The boys ran off to the woodshed to get it. It was all made of wound-about string and little bits of paper and a soft kind of woolly down. Patricia examined it with her large grave eyes. She reached out one finger toward it delicately, and drew the finger back. She looked up at the boys.

“What is it?” she breathed.

“A mouse nest,” Marvin said nonchalantly.

He held it carefully in his brown sturdy hands, partly to keep it together, but more because he liked to have Patricia’s soft little fingers come near his. They were as smooth as silk, and rosy at the tips as the pointed petals of the dog-tooth violets he had found near the little creek in the woods, when he was out there one day last April all alone. A happy shiver went over him at the thought of their touching him, silvery and cool.

“Do the mouses--_mices_--live in it?”

“Sure! They did before we took it away.”

“Oh, but can’t they live in it any more? What will the mices do?”

“Gee! What can they do?” Marvin swaggered. Clyde giggled.

Her pink mouth opened into a distressed O. She looked from one to the other for help, and the violet in her eyes deepened. “But they won’t have anywhere to live! You must put it back.” She was very serious.

“Shoot! Why, they’ve run off somewheres else by this time!”

What did it matter about mice anyhow? Gee, they were something to get rid of! Why did she suppose Pop kept all those cats and fed ’em, if it wasn’t to get rid of the mice? But she looked so distressed that Leone, with an angry glance at the boys, assured her hastily leaning over and hugging her:

“No, they haven’t, Patricia! Boys just like to say things like that.”

“Aw, gee----!”

“But what will the mices _do_?”

“The boys’ll put the nest back, and then the mice’ll come there,” Leone warmly promised her. She didn’t care if it wasn’t true.

The boys had never heard anything so funny in their lives. Gee whiz! They despised her for such ignorance, and could hardly keep from laughing, and yet they felt uneasily ashamed of themselves for they didn’t quite know what. They had just wanted to bring her the mouse nest to make her interested and then to show her, too, that they weren’t afraid of things most people didn’t want to touch. But they seemed to be out of favour. They hung around while the girls talked a lot of silly talk, and laid all the dolls out in the grass in front of them.

“I’ll bet you’ve got awful pretty clothes for your dolls, haven’t you, Patricia?”

Patricia didn’t like to say, or to talk about her dolls because she didn’t really think that these dolls’ dresses were one bit pretty. Leone went on questioning her, with naïve admiration, and Vila listened with her eyes glistening.

“I’ll bet you’ve been into lots of big stores, Patricia. Did this dress you’ve got on come from a big store?”

They both bent and examined the creamy shining linen with its coarse silky weave and the large roughened threads that Vila scarcely dared to touch with her fingers all dirty from the precious stones. Patricia graciously let them touch and see until, gently but with a final dignity, she drew the cloth out of their fingers.

“Now you mustn’t touch me any more.”

The boys giggled again at this, admiring but feeling abashed.

A striped kitten came suddenly into sight at a little distance--became motionless, saw them--and flattened and slid under the cover of the plants in the garden. Patricia gave a little cry. Her face bloomed into brightness.

“Oh! Do you have a kitty?”

“A cat! Gee!” They all laughed. “_One_ cat! I bet we got seventeen.”

“Really seventeen kitties? Did your father buy them all for you?”

“Buy them!” The boys shouted with laughter. “Gee, you don’t buy cats!”

“Oh, you do,” Patricia told them, shocked. “They cost twenty-five dollars, the kitties that sit in the window in the shop.”

“Twenty-five dollars! Pay twenty-five dollars for a _cat_!” _Cats_, when you had to drown half of ’em and couldn’t hardly give the others away! The boys were hilarious with laughter over such ignorance.

Leone couldn’t help knowing that Patricia was ignorant, too. But she gave the boys a hurt, indignant, silencing look--it was mean of them to laugh at Patricia when she didn’t know! Anyway, she was so little. Leone put her arm around Patricia, in warm protection.

“But they do!” Patricia’s eyes were large and tearful and her soft little lips were quivering. It was dreadful to have these children not believe her, and she couldn’t understand it. “Some of them cost a hundred dollars!”

“Oh, gee!” the boys began.

“Maybe some of them _do_,” Leone said quickly. “You don’t know everything in the world, Marvin Sieverson.” She knew, of course, that cats couldn’t--but then, she wasn’t going to have the boys make fun of Patricia. “Come on now, Patricia,” she pleaded. “We’ll go and see our kitties. Shall we?”

The boys watched anxiously. They didn’t want Patricia to be mad at them. They wanted to take her out to the barn and have her look at everything.

She considered. Her eyes were still large and mournful and a very dark violet. At last she nodded her head, held out her hands trustingly to Leone to be helped from the grass, smoothed down her skirts--and the whole tribe went running off together.

* * * * *

Patricia had to climb up the steep stairs into the haymow one step at a time. She felt along the rough sides carefully with her little hands. The boys would have liked to help her and were too bashful, but all the time Leone was just behind her, telling her, “Don’t you be afraid. Leone’s right here, Patricia. Leone won’t let you fall.” When they got up into the haymow Patricia was almost frightened at first; it was so big, and there were such shadows. A long beam of sunlight fell dimly and dustily golden from the high window in the peak, across the great beams and the piled hay, and widened over the great stretch of wooden floor.

“Haven’t you ever been up in a haymow before?” Clyde demanded.

“Of course she hasn’t,” Leone answered indignantly.

Patricia looked around at them, and her face was pale with awed excitement. “It’s like the church!” she breathed.

“Gee, a _hay_-mow!”

Still, it really was. Even their voices and the way they walked sounded different up here. The boys were tickled and a little embarrassed that Patricia had thought of that.

“Is this where the kitties live?”

“The little ones do. Where are the little bitty ones, Marvin?”

“_I_ know!” both the boys shouted. They leaped up into the sliding mounds of hay, calling back, “Come on if you want to see, Patricia!”

“I’ll help you, Patricia,” Leone encouraged her.

She boosted and got Patricia up on to the hay pile and helped her flounder along with her feet plunging into uncertain holes, and the long spears of hay scratching at her bare legs above the half socks, and the dust making her eyes smart. Then Patricia began to laugh. She liked it!

“Here they are!” the boys shouted.

A bevy of half-grown cats suddenly fled down the hay like shadows. “No, no!” Patricia screamed when the boys tried valiantly to catch a little black cat by its tail. Leone was assuring her, “Never mind, they won’t hurt the kitties, Patricia.”

“Look here! Come here!” the boys were calling.

Patricia was almost afraid to go. The boys had found the nest of little kittens. They had got hold of the soft, mousy, wriggling things and were holding them up for her to see. Fascinated, she went nearer. The little kittens had pink skin fluffed over with the finest fur, big round heads, and little snubby ears, and blue eyes barely open.

“Oh!...” She looked up at Leone with her pink lips pursed. She loved the little kittens but she was afraid of them. “Oh, but they aren’t kitties! They don’t look like kitties.”

The boys were highly amused. “What do they look like?” Marvin demanded. “What do you think they are? Cows? Horses?”

She said tremulously, “No, I _know_ cows are big. But their heads look the way little baby cow heads do in the pictures. They do.”

“I think they do, too,” Leone asserted stoutly. She coaxed, “Touch them, Patricia. They won’t hurt you.”

The boys grinned at the way Patricia put out her fingers and drew them back. How could these little bits of kittens hurt her? Didn’t she know they couldn’t bite yet? Their little teeny teeth couldn’t do anything but nibble. It was fun to feel them. Marvin caught up the white one and held it out to her, and they all kept urging her. He hoped her fingers would touch his. She cringed back, her mouth pursed in wonder.

“Oh, but they have such funny tails!”

“No, they ain’t. They got tails like all cats got.”

“Oh, no, Marvin. In the show the kitties have tails so big, and they waved them--just like the big plumes on men’s hats riding on horses.”

The boys doubled up with laughter. “Who’d put cats in a show?”

“Oh, but they are!” Patricia looked at them in distress.

“Why shouldn’t they be?” Leone demanded.

Of course she knew why, as well as the boys did. Nobody would pay to see a cat! Patricia had meant the tigers. She was so little she didn’t know the difference. The boys were not to tease her though! Clyde was giggling. Gee, if she didn’t have the funniest notions!

At last they got her to touch the kitten. She did it first with just the pink tip of one finger--then it felt so soft, so little and fluffy, with tiny whiskers like fine silk threads, that she reached out her hands. Marvin felt the brush of her fingers, as if a cobweb had blown across his hand, and a shiver of joy and pain went down his backbone. Patricia laughed in delight, and looked from one to the other of the children with her large shining eyes, to share her wonder.

“Take it!” Marvin urged.

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t!”

“Why not? Go on and take it!”

She shook her head.

“She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to,” Leone said warmly.

“Yes, she does!” Marvin thrust the kitten into her hands. She gave a little shriek and squeezed it by its soft belly, while the weak pinkish legs wavered and clawed out of her grasp.

“I’m going to drop it!”

“No, you won’t!”

Its fluffiness filled her with ecstasy. “Oh, see its claws! They look like little bits of shavings from mother’s pearl beads!” The boys grinned in amusement and delight at each other. Vila laughed happily. “Oh, and inside its little ears! Just the way shells look inside--only these are _silk_ shells!” The boys grinned broadly. She caught the kitten to her cheek and held it wildly wriggling. “Oh, kitty, I love you! I want to have you to take home!”

“You can--you can have it,” the children all urged her eagerly. Marvin said, “Gee, we got all kinds of cats, and that old gray one----” Clyde pinched him. “Shut up!” He grinned and blushed. Patricia laid the kitten gravely and reluctantly back in the rounded nest. She shook her head until the fluffy bell of shining hair trembled. She said solemnly, and as if she had forgotten that the others were there:

“No. I won’t. Because all its other little sisters and brothers would be lonesome for it. And its mother would.”

The boys stood grinning but they said nothing.

What were the kittens’ names? Patricia asked. She was horrified that they had none. “Gee, we call ’em kitty,” Marvin said; but Leone hastened to add, “Well, we call that one we have Old Gray.”