In Apple-Blossom Time: A Fairy-Tale to DateBurnham, Clara Louise
General
In Apple-Blossom Time: A Fairy-Tale to Date
Burnham, Clara Louise
Fiction; Love stories
Pete ambled away to the garage so happy that he still felt himself in a
dream. To see his goddess, and never to go back to Rufus Carder! Those
two facts chased each other around a rosy circle in his brain until he
fell asleep.
When Ben Barry came out of his room the next morning he found Pete
squatting outside his door. He regarded the broken, earth-stained shoes
and the ragged coat and trousers, which if they had ever been of a
distinct color were of none now, and the thick mop of hair. The eyes
raised to his met a gay smile.
"Hello, there," said Ben. "Did you think I might get away?"
The dwarf rose. "I--I didn't--didn't know how much--much was a dream,"
he stammered.
"I hope you had a real breakfast," said Ben.
The dwarf smiled. It was a dreary, unaccustomed sort of crack in his
weather-beaten face. "I had coffee, too," he replied in an awestruck
tone.
Ben laughed. "Good enough. You go out to the car and wait till I come.
I'm going to my breakfast now."
In less than an hour they were on their way. Pete's eyes had lost their
dullness.
Ben drove to a department store, on a small scale such as the cities
boast. He parked his car, and when he told Pete to get out the boy
began looking about at once for Geraldine.
"Is she here, Master?" he asked as they entered the store.
"No, we shall see her to-night," was the reply.
Then more miracles began to happen to Pete. He was taken from one
section to another in the store and when he emerged again into the
street, he hardly knew himself. He was wearing new underclothes,
stockings, shoes, coat, vest; even the phony legs had been cared for in
the trousers, cut off to suit the little fellow's peculiar needs, and
his eyes seemed to have grown larger in the process. Under his arm he
carried a box containing more underwear.
Next they drove to a barber's where Pete's hair was properly cut; then
to a hat store and he was fitted to a hat.
When they came out, Ben regarded his work whimsically. The boy was not a
bad-looking boy. He liked the direct manner of the dwarf's grateful,
almost reverent, gaze up into his own merry eyes. There was nothing
shifty there.
When they reentered the roadster, Ben spoke to him before he started the
car.
"Do you know why I have done all this, Pete?"
The boy shook his head. "Because you came down out of the sky?" he
questioned.
"No, it is just because you took care of Miss Melody; because you put
those letters underneath her door."
Pete's face crimsoned with happiness. "I helped her--I--I helped her get
away," he said.
"Yes, and she will never forget it, and neither will I."
"You--you--asked me if I loved her," said Pete, his mind returning to
the day of the motor-cycle visit.
"Yes, and you did, didn't you?"
"Yes, and--and when she was gone up to--to heaven, I wanted to die till
I--I remembered that she--she wanted to go."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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