The Loves of Ambrose

After getting well away from his danger zone, however, Ambrose had chosen that the remainder of his spring journey should lie through an unfamiliar part of the state, and so had turned his horse into every likely lane presenting itself until by degrees the ever-increasing beauty of the landscape wrought its effect upon his susceptible soul.

The houses along his route were finer than those of his own neighbourhood and, being placed farther back, showed only a chimney, or the white fluted column of a veranda every now and then beyond the closely planted avenues of beech or maple trees. Sounding across the fields came the voices of the darkies closing their day's tasks with songs. Truly this Kentucky was a happy land in the days before the war, and on this afternoon there were myriads of the soft, green growing things toward which Ambrose's young spirit had yearned, – acres of corn just creeping above the mould, and miles of tiny tobacco plants.

Then unexpectedly this character of landscape disappeared, and old Liza trotted on to a hard white turnpike. The twilight was closing down, but a toll-gate keeper showed himself a few yards ahead, and then a cluster of small stores. Afterward there was nothing further to interest Ambrose until he drove straight up to a big building surrounded by a high fence and set in the middle of a grassless yard without the influence of a tree or vine near it and where from the inside came the murmur of children's voices hushed to a pathetic, uniform note.

The boy knew the place at once for a county orphan asylum, and being what he was, reflected. In times past he had seen these same orphans led through the streets of Pennyroyal, a dreary set of little human beings, dressed alike and made to keep step like a chain gang. "Glory," he whispered, "here am I running away from the fear of havin' to keep step with one person; what if I had been made to keep step with so many?"

The next moment brought him nearly opposite a woodpile, and there he slowed up, for he thought that he heard a noise behind it sounding like a scared sheep or lamb.

"Stop!" What looked like a child's figure instantly rose and ran toward him. "Hide me!" she gasped; "oh, please be quick and don't ask questions." And the girl clung so tightly to the spokes of the gig wheel that had the young man driven on she must have been dragged like a slave at his chariot.

But of course he did no such thing. "Hop in," he replied cheerfully. Then, while the child crouched shivering and panting against his knee under the thin laprobe, Ambrose whistled to indicate his entire lack of concern in this latest adventure, and also to suggest that he rode alone.

Pretty soon, however, he began wondering what character of person he had rescued and from what or from whom she was running away, it being characteristic of Ambrose that first he had done what was required of him, and later had desired to ask questions. In the haste and semi-darkness it had been impossible to tell whether the child was a gypsy or a mere ordinary waif, and she had looked so young – twelve or a little more perhaps. There was nothing much to judge by except that she was little and light and that her eyes were dark and shiny and she had two braids of long hair. But by and by of its own accord the figure under the laprobe started talking. "Don't let anybody take me away, – say you ain't seen me if they come along," she pleaded in such a tone that it was only possible for Ambrose to give a reassuring pat to her head and then to drive more rapidly along. Once when there was a moment of unusual stillness he did peep under the laprobe, only to catch sight of a pair of grateful eyes upturned to his and to jerk back his hand from the touch of cold lips.

Fifteen minutes of what had seemed totally unnecessary hiding, as there were few vehicles abroad on the turnpike at this late hour, and then both the occupants of the gig heard a furious pounding of a horse's hoofs behind them and knew that something or some one was being pursued.