re innocent-appearing delinquents than she.

His eyes wandered over her thin, childish figure as she sat there beside
him, still intent upon the movements of the glittering dragonfly, and he
shuddered. Those horrible, shapeless shoes might very well have been
prison-made, and the striped dress was exactly like those he had seen in
some pictures of female convicts. Her freckles, too, might have been the
result of only a few days' exposure to the sun, and he had already
observed the whiteness of the skin beneath; that whiteness which
resembled the prison pallor.

Could it be that her very gawkiness and frank simplicity were the result
not of bucolic nature, but of dissimulation? Every instinct within the
man cried out against the thought, but a devil of doubt and uncertainty
drove him on.

"I thought that didn't look like the dress of a farmer's daughter!" He
essayed to laugh, but it seemed to him that there was a grating falsetto
in his tones. "You haven't worked in the garden much, either, have you?"

"Garden!" Lou sniffed. "They promised the welfare workers that they'd
give me outdoor chores to build me up, but when I got there I found I
had to cook for eighteen farm-hands, as well as the family, an' wait on
them, an' clean up an' all. Said they'd pay me twelve dollars a month,
an' I could take the first month's money out by the week in clothes, an'
for the first week all they gave me was this sunbonnet an' apron. I left
them the other dress an' things I had, an' I figgered the rest of the
money they owed me would just about pay for this ham an' bread an' the
knife an' soap. The comb was mine."

She added the last in a tone of proud possession, and James Botts asked
very soberly:

"The welfare workers found this position for you, Lou Lacey? But where
did they find you?"

"Why, at the institootion," she responded, as though surprised that he
had not already guessed. "I ain't ever been anywhere else; I've always
been a orphin."

CHAPTER II

Partners

For a moment James Botts turned his head away lest she see the deep red
flood of shame which had suffused his face. Poor little skinny, homely,
orphan kid, thrown out to buck the world for herself, and stopping in
her first flight from injustice to help a stranger, only to have him
think her a possible criminal! He was glad that his back twinged and his
head throbbed; he ought to be kicked out into the ditch and left to die
there for harboring such thoug