Rebecca?” shrieked Mrs. Meserve, too agitated, for a moment, to notice the child’s companion.
“It’s right here in my lap, all safe,” responded Rebecca joyously.
“You careless, meddlesome young one, to take it off my steps where I left it just long enough to go round to the back and hunt up my door-key! You’ve given me a fit of sickness with my weak heart, and what business was it of yours? I believe you think you own the flag! Hand it over to me this minute!”
Rebecca was climbing down during this torrent of language, but as she turned she flashed one look of knowledge at the false Simpson, a look that went through him from head to foot, as if it were carried by electricity.
He saw that he had not deceived her after all, owing to the angry chatter of Mrs. Meserve. He had been handcuffed twice in his life, but no sheriff had ever discomfited him so thoroughly as this child. Fury mounted to his brain, and as soon as she was safely out from between the wheels he stood up in the wagon and flung the flag out in the road in the midst of the excited group.
“Take it, you pious, stingy, scandal-talkin’, flag-raisin’ crew!” he roared. “Rebecca never took the flag; I found it in the road, I say!”
“You never, no such a thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Meserve. “You found it on the doorsteps in my garden!”
“Mebbe ‘t was your garden, but it was so chock full o’ weeds I thought ‘t was the road,” retorted Abner. “I vow I wouldn’t ‘a’ given the old rag back to one o’ you, not if you begged me on your knees! But Rebecca’s a friend o’ my folks and can do with her flag’s she’s a mind to, and the rest o’ ye can do what ye like an’ go where ye like, for all I care!”
So saying, he made a sharp turn, gave the gaunt white horse a lash and disappeared in a cloud of dust, before the astonished Mr. Brown, the only man in the party, had a thought of detaining him.
“I’m sorry I spoke so quick, Rebecca,” said Mrs. Meserve, greatly mortified at the situation. “But don’t you believe a word that lyin’ critter said! He did steal it off my doorstep, and how did you come to be ridin’ and consortin’ with him? I believe it would kill your Aunt Miranda if she should hear about it!”
The little school-teacher put a sheltering arm round Rebecca as Mr. Brown picked up the flag and dusted and folded it.
“I’m willing she should hear about it,” Rebecca answered. “I didn’t do anything to be ashamed of! I saw the flag in the back of Mr. Simpson’s wagon and I just followed it. There weren’t any men or any Dorcas ladies to take care of it so it fell to me! You would n’t have had me let it out of my sight, would you, and we going to raise it to-morrow morning?”
“Rebecca’s perfectly right, Mrs. Meserve!” said Miss Dearborn proudly. “And it’s lucky there was somebody quick-witted enough to ‘ride and consort’ with Mr. Simpson! I don’t know what the village will think, but seems to me the town clerk might write down in his book, ‘This day the State of Maine saved the flag!’”
Chapter V.
The State O’ Maine Girl
The foregoing episode, if narrated in a romance, would undoubtedly have been called “The Saving of the Colors,” but at the nightly chats in Watson’s store it was alluded to as the way little Becky Randall got the flag away from Slippery Simpson. Dramatic as it was, it passed into the crowd of half-forgotten things in Rebecca’s mind, its brief importance submerged in the glories of the next day.
There was a painful prelude to these glories. Alice Robinson came to spend the night with Rebecca, and when the bedroom door closed upon the two girls, Alice announced her intention of “doing up” Rebecca’s front hair in leads and rags, and braiding the back in six tight, wetted braids.
Rebecca demurred. Alice persisted.
“Your hair is so long and thick and dark and straight,” she said, “that you’ll look like an Injun!”
“I am the State of Maine; it all belonged to the Indians once,” Rebecca remarked gloomily, for she was curiously shy about discussing her personal appearance.
“And your wreath of little pine-cones won’t set decent without crimps,” continued Alice.
Rebecca glanced in the cracked looking-glass and met what she considered an accusing lack of beauty, a sight that always either saddened or enraged her according to circumstances; then she sat down resignedly and began to help Alice in the philanthropic work of making the State of Maine fit to be seen at the raising.
Neither of the girls was an expert hairdresser, and at the end of an hour, when the sixth braid was tied, and Rebecca had given one last shuddering look in the mirror, both were ready to weep with fatigue.
The candle was blown out and Alice soon went to sleep, but Rebecca tossed on her pillow, its goose-feathered softness all dented by the cruel lead knobs and the knots of twisted rags. She slipped out of bed and walked to and fro, holding her aching head with both hands. Finally she leaned on the window-sill, watching the still weather-vane on Alice’s barn and breathing in the fragrance of the ripening apples, until her restlessness subsided under the clear starry beauty of the night.
At six in the morning the girls were out of bed, for Alice could hardly wait until Rebecca’s hair was taken down, she was so eager to see the result of her labors.
The leads and rags were painfully removed, together with much hair, the operation being punctuated by a series of squeaks, squeals, and shrieks on the part of Rebecca and a series of warnings from Alice, who wished the preliminaries to be kept secret from the aunts, that they might the more fully appreciate the radiant result.
Then came the unbraiding, and then—dramatic moment—the “combing out;” a difficult, not to say impossible process, in which the hairs that had resisted the earlier stages almost gave up the ghost.
The long front strands had been wound up from various angles and by various methods, so that, when released, they assumed the strangest, most obstinate, most unexpected attitudes. When the comb was dragged through the last braid, the wild, tortured, electric hairs following, and then rebounding from it in a bristling, snarling tangle, Massachusetts gave one encompassing glance at the State o’ Maine’s head, and announced her intention of going home to breakfast! Alice was deeply grieved at the result of her attempted beautifying, but she felt that meeting Miss Miranda Sawyer at the morning meal would not mend matters in the least, so slipping out of the side door, she ran up Guide-Board hill as fast as her feet could carry her.
The State o’ Maine, deserted and somewhat unnerved, sat down before the glass and attacked her hair doggedly and with set lips, working over it until Miss Jane called her to breakfast; then, with a boldness born of despair, she entered the dining-room, where her aunts were already seated at table. There was a moment of silence after the grotesque figure was fully taken in; then came a moan from Jane and a groan from Miranda.
“What have you done to yourself?” asked Miranda sternly.
“Made an effort to be beautiful and failed!” jauntily replied Rebecca, but she was too miserable to keep up the fiction. “Oh, Aunt Miranda, don’t scold, I’m so unhappy! Alice and
