"Look-a-yere," he said in a hissing voice. "Ye remember _me_. I'm a bad one ter fool with. Yer maw foun' that out, I reckon. Now ye'll promise me ye'll tell nobody who ye've seen. I'm only a tramp; d'ye hear?" He shook her roughly.
Rickey's fingers and teeth were clenched hard and she said no word. He shook her again viciously, the blood pouring into his scarred face. "Ye snivelin' brat, ye!" he snarled. "I'll show yer!" He began to drag her after him through the bushes. A few yards and they were on the brink of the headlong ugly chasm of Lovers' Leap. She cast one desperate look about her and shut her eyes. Catching her about the waist he leaned over and held her out in mid-air, as if she had been a kitten. "Ye ain't seen me, hev yer? Promise, or over ye go. Ye won't look so pretty when yere layin' down there on them rocks!"
The child's face was paper-white and she had begun to tremble like a leaf, but her eyes remained closed.
Her eyes opened. She turned one shuddering glance below, then her resolution broke. She clutched his arm and broke into wild supplications. "I promise, I promise!" she cried. "Oh, don't let go! I promise!"
He set her on the solid ground and released her, looking at her with a sneering laugh. "Now we'll see ef ye belong here or up ter Hell's-Half-Acre," he said. "Fine folks keeps their promises, I've heerd tell."
Rickey looked at him a moment shaking; then she burst into a passion of sobs and with her face averted ran from him like a deer through the bushes.
Shirley stood looking out at the rain. It was falling in no steady downpour which held forth promise of ending, but with a gentle constancy that gave the hills a look of sodden discomfort and made disconsolate miry pools by the roadside. The clouds were not too thick, however, to let through a dismal gray brightness that shone on the foliage and touched with glistening lines of high-light the draggled tufts of the soaked bluegrass. Now and then, across the dripping fields, fraying skeins of mist wandered, to lie curdled in the flooded hollows where, here and there, cattle stood lowing at intervals in a mournful key.
The indoors had become impossible to her. She was sick of trying to read, sick of the endless pacings and purposeless invention of needless tasks. She wanted movement, the cobwebby mist about her knees, the wet rain in her face. She ran up-stairs and came down clad in a close scarlet jersey, with leather gaiters and a soft hat.