She soon woke him. She said she wouldn't
no more allow him loose in that wicked place than she would--well,
she didn't know what! He could get a pass for self and wife as easy
as shootin'. Adna yielded to the inevitable with a sorry grace and
told her to come along if she'd a mind to.
And then came a still, small voice from daughter Kedzie. She spoke
with a menacing sweetness: "Goody, goody! Besides seeing New York,
I won't have to go to school for--How long we goin' to be gone,
poppa?"
Both parents stared at her aghast and told her to hush her mouth.
It was a very pretty mouth even in anger, and Kedzie declined to
hush it. She said:
"Well, if you two think you're goin' to leave me home, you got
another think comin'--that's all I got to say."
She betrayed an appalling stubbornness, a fiendish determination
to subdue her parents or talk them to death.
"I never get to go any place," she wailed. "I never been anywhere or
seen anything or had anything; I might as well be a bump on a log.
And now you're goin' to New York. I'd sooner go there than to heaven.
It's my first chance to see a city, and I just tell you right here
and now, I'm not goin' to lose it! You take me or you'll be mighty
sorry. I'll--I'll--"
"You'll what?" her father sneered. What, after all, could a young
girl do?
"I'll run off, that's what I'll do! And disgrace you! I'll run away
and you'll never see me again. If you're mean enough to not take me,
I'm mean enough to do something desprut.
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