To Nathan, the white mule, I owed it that I was able to take good care of Penelope Blight in the first hours of my guardianship. But for him I should have brought her face to face with the mob that rode out of Malcolmville to storm the clearing. I knew but one road home from the gut, and that was the way James had brought me fishing. Had we followed it, we should have hardly crossed the ridge before we met the van of an ill-organized but determined army, and then to her grief terror must have been added by the wagons filled with men armed as though they were going into battle. The obstinate temperament of the mule served us a good turn. When Penelope and I led him from the barn and climbed to his back, he must have supposed that we were going to the store and should leave him tied for hours in the hot sun, switching flies, while we sat comfortably in the shade of the porch discussing the universe's affairs. Believing this, he protested, stopping in the middle of the clearing to enjoy a few tidbits of sprouting corn. Discovering that the small boy on his back lacked his master's strength and courage, he decided to go on, but as he chose. He chose first a trot. To Penelope and me it seemed a mad gallop, and I clung desperately to his scanty mane while she clutched my waist and pleaded with me to halt him and let her down. In this eternity of suffering--ten minutes really--her greater grief was forgotten, and she was spared the pang of a last look at her deserted home, for when Nathan decided to walk she turned her head to see only a long archway of trees ending in a green wall. "Davy," she cried, "please let me get off!" Now I wanted to get off myself, but I suspected her desire to run back to the clearing, and my over-powering thought was to carry her away from that forbidding place. I had promised the Professor to take care of the girl, and responsibility had added years to my age and inches to my stature. I was no longer a shivering, frightened boy clinging to her hand, and, though I was not the master of the mule, while we stayed on his back I was Penelope's master, and that was what I had determined to be. "Don't be afraid, little 'un," I returned boldly, when I had recovered my breath and balance. "I can handle him all right." To make good my boast, I even dared to kick Nathan, fearing lest a pause in our journey might allow her to slip from his back. "I want to find father--to go with him," she pleaded. It was the hundredth time she had told me that. "He said you were to come with me, Penelope," I argued. "And he told me particular that he wouldn't be home till a week from Monday." This last was a little fiction of mine, which seemed warranted by the circumstances, and had Penelope pressed me and asked me when her father had made such a definite statement I was ready to go to any extent with like imaginings if only I could keep her with me. She did not, and her cheerier tone quieted my conscience.