PEPSY’S INVESTMENT

For a few seconds Pepsy stood in suspense amid the spreading, dripping havoc she had caused, listening for some sound above. But the seconds piled up into a full minute and no approaching step was heard. The danger seemed over.

But the very air was redolent of kerosene; she stood in a puddle of it, and one of her stockings and both of her plain little buttoned shoes were thoroughly wet. When she moved her toes she could feel the soppy liquid. Oh, for a light! It would lessen her terror if she could just see what had happened and how she looked.

She groped her way to the small oblong of lesser darkness which indicated the open bulk-head doors, and felt better when she was in the free open darkness of outdoors. Wiggle, seeming to know that something unusual was happening, kept close to her heels.

She reËntered the kitchen, where those accusing, ghostly, red slits of eyes in the stove seemed to watch her. She fumbled nervously on the shelf above the stove and got some matches, spilling a number of them on the floor. She could not pause to gather them up while those red eyes stared.

She had planned her poor little enterprise with a view to secrecy, but in the emergency and with the minutes passing, she did not now pause to think or consider. Near the flour barrel hung several goodly pudding bags, luscious reminders of Thanksgiving. Aunt Jamsiah had promised to make a plum-pudding for Pee-wee in the largest one of these and he had spent some time in measuring them and computing their capacity, with the purpose of selecting the most capacious. Pepsy now hurriedly took all of these and a kitchen apron along with them, and descended again into the cellar.

By the dim lantern light she lifted the fallen tank and replaced it on its skids. Then she wiped up the floor as best she could with the makeshift mop which had been intended to serve a better purpose. She wiped off her soggy shoes and tried to clean that clinging oiliness from her hands. It seemed to her as if the whole world were nothing but kerosene.

She did not know what to do with the drenched rags, so she took them with her when she started again for the dark road, this time with her two cheery companions, the lantern and Wiggle. She soon found the dripping rags a burden and cast them from her as she passed the well. Wiggle turned back and inspected the smelly, soggy mass, found that he did not like it, took a hasty drink from the puddle under the well spout, and rejoined his companion.

It must have been close to ten o’clock when Mr. Ira Jensen, enjoying a last smoke on his porch before retiring, saw the lantern light swinging up his roadway. The next thing that he was aware of was the pungent odor of kerosene borne upon the freshening night breeze. And then the little delegation stood revealed before him, Wiggle, wagging his tail, the lantern sputtering, and Pepsy’s head jerking nervously as if she were trying to shake out what she had to say.

It took Pepsy a few moments to key herself up to the speaking point. Then she spoke tremulously but with a kind of jerky readiness suggesting many lonely rehearsals.

“Mr. Jensen,” she said, “I have to do a good turn and so I came to ask you if you’ll help me and the reason I smell like kerosene is because I tipped over the kerosene can.” This last was not in her studied part, but she threw it in in answer to an audible sniff from Mr. Jensen.

“You said when I came here and stayed nights when Mrs. Jensen was sick with the flu and everybody else was sick and you couldn’t get anybody to do—to nurse her—you remember?” She did not give him time to answer for she knew that if she paused she could not go on. Her momentum kept her going. “You said then—just before I went home—you’d—you said I was—you said you’d do me a good turn some day, because I helped you. So now a boy that’s staying with us—we have a refreshment parlor and nobody comes to buy anything—and he wants to buy some tents and we have to make a lot of money so will you please have them have the County Fair in Berryville this year so lots of people will go past our summer-house?

“We have lemonade and he calls to the people and tells them, only there ain’t any people. But lots and lots and lots of people come to the County Fair from all over, don’t they? So now I’d like it for you to do me that good turn if you want to pay me back.”

Thus Pepsy, standing tremulously but still boldly, her thin little hand clutching the lantern, played her one card for the sake of Pee-wee Harris, Scout. Standing there in her oil soaked gingham dress, she made demand upon this staunch bank of known probity, for principal and interest in the matter of the one great good turn she had done before she had ever known of Scout Harris. It never occurred to her as she looked with frank expectancy at Mr. Jensen that her naive request was quite preposterous.

To his credit be it said, Mr. Jensen did not deny her too abruptly. Instead he spread his knees and arms and, smiling genially, beckoned her to him.

“I can’t, I’m all kerosene,” she said.

“Never you mind,” he said. “You come and stand right here while I tell you how it is.”

So she set down the lantern and stepped forward and stood between his knees and then he lifted her into his lap. “Well, well, well, you’re quite a girl; you’re quite a little girl, ain’t you, huh? So you came all the way in the dark to ask me that! Here, you sit right where you are and never you mind about kerosene; if you ain’t scared of the dark I reckon I ain’t scared of kerosene. Now, I want you should listen ’cause I’m going to tell you jes’ how it is n’ then you’ll understand. Because I call you a little kind of a—a herro-ine, that’s what I call you.”

He wasn’t half wrong about that, either....