The Wonderful Christmas in Pumpkin Delight Lane

Chapter IV.

As soon as Mrs. Dobson had told the story of her runaway trip to the Southington mountains, she peeped into her bedroom to see how her poor little lad was getting on, and found him asleep. Mrs. Hallock, Kate and Frank went out from the back door, that they might not awaken him, and presently Mrs. Dobson saw their carriage roll away. At the same time her eyes rested on a bit of the blue of the sea. She had not been too busy amid all her cares to remember that it was the anniversary of her wedding day. Thirty-seven years ago it was that very morning since she was married and went down to the harbor to see the Snow start on her voyage to the West Indies. The very harbor had filled up since then, so that the Snow could not enter it now even should the unfortunate ship return; but of this, Mrs. Dobson never thought. She was not conscious even that she was looking for the long-lost ship, in which her brave, bright, young husband sailed. She only went up to the window in the garret because she had acquired the habit of going up there in the little pauses she gave to herself in her busiest days. The daisies were whitening the fields along the land; the little island wore a blessed, happy look of rest and peace, amid the twinkle of light and 45water all about it. The Sound was as blue as the sea is in June. The sand cliffs of Long Island gleamed white across the twenty miles of water.

Beyond the island lay a vessel. A row of poplar trees hid it when first she looked. She gazed at the boat, thinking almost unconsciously to herself as it sailed into full view, “Yes, the Snow would look like that by this time; the sails must be brown and old and torn by the gales, just as this ship’s sails are.” Looking down upon her own hand as it lay across the windowledge, she noticed its wrinkles with sharp and sudden pain. She too, was grown old. Meanwhile the forlorn looking craft was sailing in toward the harbor’s mouth. It was only a coasting vessel laden with coal, coming in to discharge its cargo at the coal dock.

Grandmother Dobson watched it until it was half way across the bay; Josh gave a bark so loud and thrilling that the dreaming old lady awoke to the present, and hurried down. There was no one about the house, but Harry was awake and talking.

“I want to tell her all I know about the necklace,” she heard him say.

“Dear me! the poor lad is out of his head, and he hasn’t had the skullcap yet,” she thought. “My fire has gone down, too! Josh, fetch me in a stick of wood,” she said.

Now Josh is a real true dog, and he does bring in wood—not one stick only, but he fills up the wood-box, and always expects to be rewarded at the end of his toil by an extra nice bit to eat.

Josh started at once for the woodpile and returned with a small stick.

46“Now, another!” He obeyed.

Meanwhile Harry kept saying, “I must tell about the necklace. Where is she? Won’t you please tell me if she is here?”

Fully believing that the boy was talking in delirium, Mrs. Dobson did not think it worth while to answer.

“She must be deaf,” Harry thought; so, after awhile, he said no more, but tried with his hand to move the bandage, so that he could look about a little. The first thing that his eyes rested upon was a lovely cluster of roses; Kate had left them, but as she thought he could not see, she had said nothing of them.

“Mrs. Dobson!” called Harry as loud as he could call.

The dear little soul hurried into the room.

“Please, dear Mrs. Dobson, will you put these flowers in some water? I wish you would let me get up and do it,” pleaded Harry.

“No! no! The doctor says you must not get up to-day, nor to-morrow, and you must promise me not to try when I am out of the room. If you do I shall have to put Josh in here and tell him to keep you in bed.”

“Is Josh your son?” innocently asked Harry.

Mrs. Dobson laughed a merry, sunny little laugh.

“No,” she said. “Josh is my dog. He barked a little while ago to tell me somebody was about. He heard you talking, I suppose. Josh is a wonderful dog. You may see him if you promise not to move your bandage again until I tell you you may.”

“I promise,” said Harry, “unless the house takes fire or something else happens.”

47“I don’t see where the delirium went to so suddenly,” Mrs. Dobson thought.

Harry determined to find out if she would grow deaf should he ask about the necklace again. He tried it. Instantly she closed the door, bidding him “go to sleep and not talk any more,” and he, poor fellow, had not had his promised glimpse of Josh.

Harry shut his eyes, tried to sleep, tried to stop thinking about his own old home on the shore of the lake, in Michigan, but the more he tried the more he thought about it. Being weak and hurt, he grew feverish with thinking, and I am sure I do not know what unfortunate thing would have happened to him, had Kate Hallock not appeared on the scene.

She came laden with good things, or rather the carriage was laden, and she came with it and them. First were two large, hard pillows—Mrs. Dobson’s pillows were small; after the pillows there came a big basket overflowing with nice, “comforting things to eat.” Then there were two summer suits of Frank’s clothing—for either Harry had no change of garments, or they had been carried away by the “circus folks.”

“I’m going to stay with you to-day,” said Kate to Mrs. Dobson, as the good woman gave expression to her surprise upon seeing the carriage move off. “Mamma and I thought maybe you’d like to have me.”

“How kind! I should very much, for now it is time for my bit of dinner to go on the fire. You may sit in there,” pointing toward the door of Harry’s room, “but I wouldn’t talk much if I were you, for I believe he is just the least mite out of his head now and then.”

48Kate went in cautiously. The boy did not hear her. He thought he was alone, for he heard the sound of Mrs. Dobson’s movements in the kitchen.

He sighed two or three times, and moved his left arm uneasily toward his eyes. At last he said, “Dear me! I wish I hadn’t promised. I do want to see out a bit, and know where I am.”

“I’m here,” said Kate. “I’ll tell you all about it. Did you see the house when you were brought into it last night?”

“I didn’t know anything at all from the time I was on the pony until I heard somebody say, ‘He will need something to eat by-and-by, Mrs. Dobson,’ and I wondered who Mrs. Dobson was, and who would want something to eat. Pretty soon I moved a little, and then I began to understand, for somebody took hold of my arm and said, ‘You mustn’t move nor try to move, either,’ and then she told me who she was, and how I had fallen, and been fetched here.”

“You shut your eyes and try to see what I am going to tell you about,” said Kate. “I often make Frank try, but he can’t do it very well. In the first place, turn your head that way—so,” turning Harry’s face to the east; “there is the sea, the Sound—Long Island Sound is its real name—and it’s about a mile away; then,” turning his face about toward the north, “running right along past here is a road—no, a lane—Pumpkin Delight Lane, it is called. Funny, isn’t it? Well, this is the last house between the village and the sea. It is old, ever so old. The boards—clapboards I guess—are wrinkled—shrunken I mean—so that they 49kind of peal up all around and look as though they’d like to be pulled off. It’s brown, the house is; never been painted, perhaps; anyway, it’s a great deal prettier than painters’ brown paint; and there is one chimney that looks, on the outside, just as though it was right in the middle of the house. It is a stone chimney, too, and when you get well, Mrs. Dobson will let you go up the staircase—that’s stone, too—up into her garret, where you can see way out to sea, ever so far.”

“But who lives here, besides Mrs. Dobson?” interrupted Harry.

“Josh. Mrs. Dobson and just Josh, that’s all. Queer, isn’t it, a woman and a dog? Mrs. Dobson won’t go away from here to live, either. This was her father’s house, and her mother lived in it, and all her brothers and sisters, too; and,” said Kate in a whisper, “her husband, Mr. Dobson, went away to sea the very morning they were married, and he’s never come back in all this time; nor anybody who went with him, either. Mother told Frank and me all about it; and her mother told her, when she was quite a little girl, and,” breathed Kate, in a lower whisper, “don’t tell, ever. But Frank and me guess that she thinks he’ll come back again, and that’s the reason she won’t go away.”

“O, my!” sighed Harry, “that’s worse, ever so much worse, than knowing that your folks are dead; ’cause then you know they can’t come back any more, and so you don’t keep looking out all the time.”

Kate wanted very much to ask Harry about his folks, but she thought she ought not to do it; it might 50make him feel worse to talk about it; so, not knowing what else to say to divert him, she said, “Let’s play he comes back.”

“But he can’t! so many years, you know,” exclaimed Harry, raising himself energetically from his pillows.

“That makes it better fun, don’t you see?” said Kate; “harder to make out where he has been all this time—most forty years! Dear me, he must be very old now.”

“Yes,” said Harry, “and burned black, maybe.”

“How? You don’t suppose the Snow burned up, do you?”

“O, I mean by the sun,” laughed Harry. “Going to the West Indies, did you say the ship was?”

“Yes,” said Kate, fairly beside herself with excitement. “O, you’re jolly good help, making believe; ever so much better than Frank.”

“What did the Snow carry? Let us be careful and have things all right,” urged Harry, interested because Kate was, and anxious to help her on.

“I’m sure I don’t know. O, molasses and rum, I heard once.”

“O, no! Molasses and rum you mean they were going to fetch back,” suggested Harry.

“Yes, that was it,” said Kate; “and we’ll play they were going out there with a shipload of dolls for the little West Indian girls for Christmas.”

“I’m afraid that won’t do,” said Harry, doubtfully.

“Why not, pray?” said Kate.

“Forty years ago I’m afraid there wasn’t a shipload of dolls in every one of our States put together.”

51“O, never mind! we can play so, if there wasn’t.”

“Well, if it’s going to be all play we’ll go ahead,” said Harry. “The Snow was loaded with dead dolls and live monkeys, and every monkey had a doll, and when they got to the West Indies the monkeys all ran away with the dolls, and so the poor little West Indian girls got none.”

“How ridiculous!” cried Kate, laughing heartily. “Now let me see, the Snow was going and going, and sailing right on night and day, and day and night, when it struck a—a snag.”

“What’s that?” cried Harry, with a shout of laughter. “A snag in the ocean!”

“O, something that boats always hit that sinks them,” said Kate, a little red in the face. “I know; for my aunt was on a ship that went against one, and sunk too; ’cause she wrote all about it after she got home. I know it was a snag, too.”

“But that was on a river, not a sea. A snag is an old tree or something that gets caught in the mud and is under the water,” corrected Harry.

“O!” said Kate, glad that Harry was blindfolded. “Well, we’ll have something else, then—a big storm, hills and mountains of running waves, awful thunder and lightning, and the ship gets struck by lightning—no, by a big wave, and tumbles all to pieces.”

“And the dolls all spill out and go floating off!” suggested Harry.

“How can you at such an awful time think of making fun?” asked Kate, “just as the ship had been struck by lightning, too!”

52“Thunder—no, a big wave,” interposed Harry. “Don’t you remember ’twas a big wave that tumbled everything?”

“Yes,” said Kate reflectively, “and Captain Dobson—he’s captain, you know—stands on the last plank of the Snow (good captains always do that—the last plank of the ship, remember), and when the ship went down, the plank floated off with Captain Dobson on it. That’s all right, so far, isn’t it?” she added inquiringly.

“All right but the monkeys, you forgot and left them to go down with the ship,” said Harry. “Instead of that they went swimming off, each monkey with a doll in its arms, and two of them got on the same plank the Captain was on, and he——”

“No! no!” cried Kate, jumping up from her chair by the window, and in her eagerness sitting down on the bed, forgetting all about Harry’s feet. “You musn’t, musn’t say that.”

“Say what, pray?” and Harry tried to draw up his feet, but Kate held them fast, and did not even know where she was, or what she was doing.

“Why, you were going to make Captain Dobson push the poor monkeys off the plank, and—”

“No, I was not,” interrupted Harry.

“What then?”

“Really, you frightened it all out of my head. Let me think!”

“O, I know!” joyfully cried Kate, clapping her palms. “There was the mast—there always is a mast or a smoke-stack, or something to climb. This is it: 53the monkeys leaped from the plank to the mast, and ran up to the top of it and waved the dolls—all dressed in white, you see, with long, long sashes, that would float a good ways, you know; and somebody in a boat way off, on—on—the horizon’s edge”—Kate felt proud after saying “horizon’s edge,” and was greatly mortified at hearing from under the bedclothes a smothered laugh.

“I should like to know what you are laughing at,” she said, with sudden gravity, slipping down from the bed, to Harry’s most comfortable relief.

“I didn’t mean to laugh; really and truly I did not,” said Harry, moving up his bandage the least mite in the world, as he afterward admitted to Mrs. Dobson. “But how could I help it; it is so like a girl. Now my mast, if it had floated at all, would have lain down on the water just like any other big stick; but yours you could make stand up and sail around, just as easy!”

“O, never mind!” said Kate, immensely relieved on finding out that Harry was not laughing at her attempt at fine effect, “that’s nothing! all sorts of impossible things do happen.”

“Doll’s sash ribbons soaked in salt water don’t make very good signals, anywhere, I don’t believe,” said Harry. “I think we might manage that part better.”

“But we can’t stop, don’t you see,” said Kate hurriedly, “to be so very careful about everything. Nobody ever does when there’s a poor fellow on a last plank, floating on the wide ocean; they just try to get him off and into a boat as quick as ever they can, 54and rub him up, and give him something to eat, and everything, particularly” (Kate couldn’t get over that word very fast) “when the man is such a dear, good, nice man, like Captain Dobson.”

Now Josh, hearing the animated voices in Mrs. Dobson’s bedroom, had opened the door a bit with his nose, without attracting any notice; and as the dear old lady, her thoughts busy with the past, was carrying a pail of water into the kitchen, Kate’s last words fell full upon her ears. She dropped the pail, being too much startled to put it quite in its place, and with flushed face, tearful eyes, and trembling tones, appeared to the children, saying, “Tell me quick! don’t wait a bit! is there any news of Captain Dobson?”

Harry pushed his bandage aside, and said, with sincere sorrow, “No, no! Mrs. Dobson; not a word. We were only”—he stopped, with an instinctive feeling that they had been very unfeeling to make-believe on the subject at all.

Kate took up his sentence bravely. “I’ll tell you all about it, dear Mrs. Dobson,” throwing her arms about the old lady and urging her to a seat in a rocking chair. “It was all me, every bit of it; and we were just trying to make-believe that he got saved when the Snow went down.”

“Did the Snow go down? Who knows?” she asked, sobbing and crying, and quite broken down by hearing the fact put into words.

“I’m sorry we said a word,” said Kate, crying with Mrs. Dobson; and, dropping down upon a footstool, she laid her head in Mrs. Dobson’s lap.

55“You will please forgive us, won’t you?” spoke up the boy in the bed.

“Forgive you! Yes, indeed. I’m glad you thought enough about my poor—about Captain Dobson to talk of him at all, and to-day, too! Why, I always go down the harbor to-day; it is just thirty-seven years ago to-day since we were married and the ship went on its voyage.”

“And you will go this afternoon, won’t you?” questioned Kate.

“I mustn’t,” she said simply.

“Why not?”

“Why, I’ve got a little boy of my own to look after to-day, don’t you see?” she said, suddenly smiling, with an uplifted face.

Kate sprang up and kissed her, saying, with an arch look at Harry, whose eyes she looked into for the first time, “Why, you can go. I’ll take care of—the little boy while you are gone.”

“O, my dear child!” cried Mrs. Dobson, as she espied Harry’s eyes, and caught sight of the ugly wound across his eye-brow, “didn’t you promise me not to?”

“Unless the house was on fire, or something happened; and something did happen. I was afraid we had killed you.”

“Kate! Kate! mother says you must come home to dinner right away,” said Frank, who had suddenly appeared on the scene; “and” (on his own authority) “you must go this very minute.”

Chapter V.

Kate Hallock knew just as well as could be that Mrs. Dobson was going to have something nice for dinner, for when Frank went out to order her home a savory odor followed him. She wished very much to stay, and lingered about the kitchen, half hoping and altogether wishing that Mrs. Dobson would invite her to stay to dinner: but the dear little woman only looked up from her boiling and baking to say—Mrs. Dobson always called Kate “Kittie, my Clover”—

“Now Kittie, my Clover, if you and Frank will come over and stay from five to seven this afternoon, I shall be very glad to go out a little while.”

“Why, Grandma Dobson,” cried Kate, “how that fire is burning your face up; I wouldn’t cook when ’twas so warm, if I were you. Let me turn over that meat, I won’t drop it in the fire.”

“Never mind me, I am used to it,” said Mrs. Dobson, bending over the glowing coals, glad to bury her face anywhere from Kate’s sharp eyes.

“Well, then, if you won’t let me help you, I am going home, and I’ll come before five o’clock, and stay till you get back, too.”

With these words Kate went skipping through the hall and out at the front door. Once outside, her 57happiness burst into a positive run. It was too far around by the highway to Hallock Point, besides Kate felt just as every healthy young thing feels at some time on the way through the child-years, that everybody’s highways were not the ways to go in that day, so she would make her own path across the fields.

Pumpkin Delight Lane ran down to the sea, and Hallock Point extended into the sea beyond the coast line. Between the two lay grassy meadows—a depression in the level, up which the old ocean crept twice in the year, and also in great storms; a bit of a wood, beyond which came salt meadow again; and then the uplands, rising to the Point. It seemed a very short cut home to Kate. The bewitching greens that lay rolled in long and wide breadths for her feet to tread had all been prepared by Madame June, the best carpet-maker in the zone. Kate climbed the stone wall opposite Mrs. Dobson’s house, and not a soul saw her disappear into the grass behind it, save Josh, if indeed Josh has a soul.

Kate danced all over. She was so full of the sap of June that she could no more keep quiet than could the buzzing, whirring, nodding, flying things about her. She clapped her hands and cried, “O, my!” as a mad bobolink, on his way to the Wood Asylum, filled her ears with crazy melody.

Kate grew practical as the great, round, purple clover-heads nodded to her out of the tall grass. “Yes, I’ll get you, my beauties,” she cried. “Mother is so fond of dried grasses and things when the fall comes, and it’s just the time and chance to get some.” 58Presently her small hands were filled to their utmost capacity, and yet she had not half enough. Her apron proved too small before she had crossed a single field, and the first fence surprised her with her gathered-up dress skirt running over with bobbing grasses.

Next came a field of rye. “Rye is real pretty on the walls with fern and oak leaves,” she said, and she took a few heads in advance of the reapers.

Kate trudged on, past and through lot after lot, until she came to the bit of woodland. She went into it. So intent was she in watching to see where a bluebird carried its mouthful of worm, that she stumbled over a dead branch, and fell at the foot of a huge hickory tree.

Gathering up first herself and then her own hat and grasses, she proceeded to arrange them into portable form, while she rested at the foot of the tree.

Now, Josh, having seen Kate go over the wall, watched for her to reappear, but seeing no signs of such an event, after suitable time, the wise dog crossed the street and mounted the wall, looking as knowing and discreet as only Josh can look. He surveyed the scene to his own satisfaction, and then taking Kate’s trail, followed it and came up to her just as she seated herself to rest and fix the grasses under the walnut tree.

“Did him think I was lost?” cried Kate. “Good fellow, good fellow, Josh!” patting him, and very glad of his companionship. When all was ready Kate started for home, laughing at herself as she went, and not in the least surprised at Josh because he barked at 59her, for, truly, she was a surprising figure to bird or beast, as she emerged from the wood and stood looking at the bewitching green of the salt meadow through which she must pass. Her white apron was small, but she had made the most of it by tying a huge bunch of grasses with the end of either string, thus making a very full and bunched over-skirt at the back, while the bib of apron was made to do duty as grass-holder to its fullest extent. She had taken pains to put the stems all down, and as her bib was wide and stretched across to her shoulders, the grassy fringe stood up to her ears and nearly blinded her. Her hat was also alive with oats, rye, and clover. No wonder that Josh barked when she started, but she did wonder why he kept on barking harder than ever, until she reached the edge of the very bright green grass.

“Dear me! I most wish I hadn’t come this way, Josh,” Kate said, putting her feet in daintily and afraid she should get them wet. If there was one thing that Kate Hallock disliked to do more than every other thing, it was to “change her stockings and shoes in the day-time.”

She picked her way with a good deal of care for awhile; the dog following her and looking with evident interest at her over-skirt and hat. And then, finding that the ground was pretty firm and the sun getting very hot, Kate hurried on. She was about half way across the meadow, when she felt herself on marshy ground. The grass was too deep to see, but she was sure that her feet were wet, and ’twas getting harder and harder to walk, with every step.

60“Dear me! what shall I do?” she cried. “Josh! Josh! don’t go! Here, Josh!” and every instant, with every step, Kate Hallock was sinking deeper and deeper into the black mud. Finally she could go no further, for she was fast in the horrid swamp, and, worse than all, every effort that she made to get out only served to get her in deeper still.

“I wonder if anybody ever got stuck here before, and what will become of me?” thought poor Kate, adding consolingly to herself the words spoken aloud, “Anyway, they love me well enough at home to find me before I die, even if I am here.”

As soon as Josh understood the condition of affairs, he began to bark as loud as he could, but there was not a soul near to hear, although Kate could see distinctly the windows of her home. He barked until he was hoarse; then he got as near to Kate as he could and looked at her consolingly and determinedly; and then he gave his bushy tail a wag or two and started for home. The very idea of being left there alone without Josh even, was so utterly horrible to the poor little prisoner, shorter, if not smaller than ever, now that she was one-third engulfed, and sinking still, that it seemed unbearable, and she called frantically to Josh to come back and stay with her.

The bewildered dog turned and taking her dress in his teeth, pulled until it gave way, leaving a fragment of the slight muslin in his mouth.

“You can’t, you cannot pull me out,” cried Kate, and then she remembered the story her mother had told her so often about stopping to think what might 61be done, and she held fast to Josh’s collar while she tried to think what she could do to bring someone to her aid.

“Hold, hold on, Josh!” she said, after a moment. “Now if I only had a pencil and some paper, I might send you home with a note fast to your neck; but I haven’t, and what am I to do? My apron I could spare, but then no one would know by it what’s happened to me. I’ll send my hat. Hold here, Josh”—taking it off and tying it as well as she could, for Josh resisted, on his head.

She then let him go, and the dog bounded across marsh and field for home, springing into Mrs. Dobson’s kitchen just at the moment when, having given Harry Cornwall his dinner, she had taken her chair to eat her own. Kate’s sun hat was still pendant at his neck.

“Why, Josh! you rascal, come here! you naughty dog, you! You’ve run off with Kate’s hat, and left her to go home in the sun.”

Josh could not deny the charge, but he lifted his nose toward the low ceiling and uttered howl after howl in a manner that frightened his mistress exceedingly, for Josh was not “given to howling,” she told Frank a minute later, as she begged him to go and see what it all meant.

“O, Mrs. Dobson, it’s nothing, I know—only one of Kate’s tricks,” said Frank; “but to please you, I’ll go.”

Josh began to prance and leap, and bark with joy, as he followed, with Frank, Kate’s footprints across 62the dusty road; but when he bounded over the fence, Frank stopped—

“See here, old fellow!” he cried, “I’m not going into that grass to please you; I’ve too much respect for snakes, sir.” And to the dog’s intense disgust, the boy turned back and reëntered the house.

“It’s nothing,” he again assured Mrs. Dobson. “The dog only wanted me to race in the lot with him.”

“The lot!” cried the little woman, running up the stairway to get a good outlook. “You don’t s’pose, do you, that your sister tried to go home ’cross lots?”

“Just like her to do it,” replied Frank, who had followed her up the stairs.

“And got into the swamp-mud,” continued Mrs. Dobson, just as though Frank had not interrupted her, “and sent Josh home with her bonnet on, to let us know?” she finished, all in one breath.

Mrs. Dobson and Frank were already looking across the fields; but the salt meadows, where Kate was prisoned, were hidden from sight by the strip of woodland.

“I might have known better than to look,” said Mrs. Dobson, going down. “You must run up to Mr. Bryan’s, and get someone to go where the dog leads. It’s just noon time, and the men folks’ll be at home.”

During this interval of not many minutes, Josh had been keeping up such a dismal howl out by the front gate that Harry Cornwall had disobeyed orders—gotten out of his bed, pushed up his bandage, and was peeping out of the window to see what it all meant, when he heard Mrs. Dobson and Frank on the stairs. 63In his effort to hurry back into bed, he overturned a chair with his dinner-dishes on it (Frank, in boy-fashion, having put them upon the chair, instead of the table). The clatter and breakage brought Mrs. Dobson and Frank in a hurry into the room.

“I did it,” cried Harry. “I expect you’ll have to kill me, Mrs. Dobson, unless you let me get well fast, and work and earn enough to buy new dishes. I’m just as sorry as I can be; but the dog made such a fuss, I wanted to see what had happened.”

Harry hid his face under the clothes when he had made his confession, and consequently did not see Mrs. Dobson’s imperious gesture to Frank Hallock, bidding him be gone with haste. She was too intent on thinking of “Kittie, my Clover,” to care for broken crockery just then, and did not notice even that one of her mother’s precious china cups had been cracked.

“Won’t you please forgive me?” pleaded Harry, peering forth cautiously, and watching her as she gathered the pieces.

“For what?”

“Why, for breaking your dishes and being so naughty,” said Harry, in surprise.

“O, I was thinking of the swamps and Katie Hallock,” she said, hastily.

“Yes, I forgive you. Go to sleep now. I sha’n’t open this door again or let anybody come nigh you, in as much as an hour,” and with the words she closed the door. If Harry had peeped out the window two minutes later he would have seen Mrs. Dobson, in an old-fashioned gingham sunbonnet, taking her way as 64fast as she could, whither Josh led her, through grass and grain, straight for the salt meadow.

As for Master Frank, he had taken his way, whistling as he went, to farmer Bryan’s and told him that he guessed, maybe, his sister Kate was fast in the bog. Having heard the boy’s story, Mr. Bryan, with his “farm hand,” Dick Dawson, started in haste, and so came up to the stone wall just in time to catch a glimpse of the fluttering cape of Grandma Dobson’s sunbonnet on the farther side of the field of rye.

“There she goes, this minute! My! what a hurry she is in—just as though our Kate was a lump of salt or sugar,” exclaimed Frank, jumping cautiously into the grass from the wall, and taking especial care to get between Mr. Bryan and Dick Dawson, because he considered the position one of greater security from snakes.

“Look here, youngster,” replied the sturdy farmer, “let me tell you, it is no laughing affair to get into that black sticking-plaster over yonder. More than one man has, in my day, come near losing his life in the salt marshes hereabout, and if your twin sister is prisoned over here, I reckon we shall need a few fence rails before we can get her out; so you may as well shoulder your share, if you’re coming along. Here, take this,” as he balanced a stout rail on Frank’s shoulder, and then pulled, with the “farm hand’s” assistance, four more from the fence. Thus armed, the trio proceeded to the scene of action.

Meanwhile Grandma Dobson had gone on as fast as she could to the very edge of the salt meadow, and 65called in her trembling tones to poor Kate to “Never mind, somebody would be right along and get her out.” And Kate, burned red in the face by the June sun and by the hot tears she had shed, had called back—

“I’m sinking clear down, ever so far. I wish they’d hurry and make haste.”

Just then the men and Frank arrived.

“See the little thing!” called Mrs. Dobson to them. “Pray, get her out and carry her to the other side, and see that she gets home in safety.”

“Stay back there, youngster!” cried stout farmer Bryan to Frank. But whenever did any boy think there was danger for himself? Carefully advancing, rail in hand, ready to put it down at the first bit of uncertain ground, one man went, the other followed, until they came quite near Kate, who was crying still, she could not tell why, but Frank said, “probably because she was sorry to get out; girls always did such queer, contrary things.”

Putting a rail on either side of the child, the men stood on it, and pulled Kate’s arms until she was “sure” they would pull them off; but at length she felt herself rising, rising, until she was even with the earth once more.

With much exertion the opposite side was reached, and just as Kate’s feet were on firm ground a cry from Frank was heard. His story, as afterwards told, was that he had been so anxious to follow Kate home and see the fun, that he had determined to step very light and fast, and he knew he shouldn’t have time to sink; 66Kate wouldn’t, if she hadn’t been so frightened the minute she began to go down.

“There, there, youngster,” cried Mr. Bryan, “it’s just good enough for you! You can get out as you got in,” and without waiting an instant he lifted Kate in his stout arms and bore her away across meadow and farm lot toward her home, followed by his assistant.

“It’s too bad—real mean on a fellow! I’ll pay you up for this!” moaned Frank, who, the more determined he grew to get out, the deeper he got in.

Mrs. Dobson went as near to Frank as she thought it prudent to venture, and assured him that the men would return that way and release him; she knew they would, and she must go home. Even Josh only wagged his tail at Frank, as he bounded past to follow his mistress, and never once dreamed that it was necessary to stay with him.

For more than a half hour Frank stayed there, and even when the men did return and drag him out, he did not seem suitably thankful, and would have insisted on remaining in the wood but for the snakes.

Before five of the clock, Kate, restored to cleanliness and comfort, and accompanied by her mother, drove up to the brown house in the lane. She had returned to keep her promise to Grandma Dobson.

Frank, on inquiry, was found sitting in the sun out at the back door, determined to dry the mud until it would all rub off, and quite too proud to accept the offer of a pair of clean stockings from Mrs. Dobson; but he was very glad of the opportunity afforded by 67the arrival of Neptune to get home without being seen. He crept around the house as he heard the doctor going in at the front door, sprang into the pony carriage, and was half way to Hallock Point before his mother or Kate missed Neptune from the gate. When Frank also was found missing, no further anxiety was felt concerning the safety of the horse; and in less than an hour, Frank reappeared, as fresh and good-tempered as Kate herself.

Mrs. Dobson had gone on her errand down the harbor, with no one to watch her movements; and as Frank appeared in the room, on his return, Harry Cornwall, with the bandage removed from his eyes, was, Kate said, “telling us the interestingest story, better than any book story in the whole world.” Frank was sorry that he had not heard the beginning of the story; but unless he knows it already, he will have a chance to read it in the next chapter.

Chapter VI.

Kate Hallock had no sooner shut the front door of the brown house in Pumpkin Delight Lane on that eventful day in June, than Harry Cornwall remembered the necklace story.

“Call her back,” he cried to Frank, who was rocking away as hard as he could, and fanning himself furiously with his straw hat, as he sat in Grandma Dobson’s large rocking chair.

“What for? She’s gone home to dinner; mother said she must,” replied Frank, rocking a bit farther and faster than before he was requested to call her.

“Why, I wanted to tell her about the necklace,” and Harry’s face flushed with his eagerness to get the story off his mind.

“Well, I do declare!” laughed Frank. “Just as though you hadn’t had three or four mortal hours, this very day, to tell it in! I should like to know what you two have been talking about all the time?”

“Plenty of things; but I never once thought of the necklace,” sighed repentant Harry.

“Well! tell me—that will do just as well,” urged Frank.

“No, indeed. I’ll tell no one but the owner of that bit of gold, where I’ve seen it.”

69“You’ve never seen my Kate’s gold necklace,” spoke up Frank, indignant, he knew not why, at Harry’s assurance.

“I have, then; and what’s more, I mean to get it back again for her.”

“Tell me how.” Frank had ceased from rocking, and leaned quite near Harry, full of interest and eager with curiosity.

“I’ll tell her,” was all that Harry would say; and soon after that the anxiety regarding Kate arose, and the subject was forgotten.

Later in the afternoon, Grandma Dobson having gone on her little expedition, while Mrs. Hallock sat beside an open window near Harry’s bed, and Kate, on the low stone step outside the front door, was making dandelion curls, and thinking how dreadful it would have been if a big tide had dashed in and surged over the salt meadow and drowned Kate Hallock, Harry remembered the so-oft-forgotten circlet of gold, and he started from his pillow, saying: “I want to tell her now, this minute, before I forget it.”

Kate was summoned. She gathered up in her apron the piles of curls that she had made, and went in haste to hear what proved to be quite a story.

“Maybe,” said Harry, “you’d like to know what became of your pretty necklace, that you tucked into somebody’s vest-pocket that went out West once upon a time.”

“How did you know?” cried Kate, stopping in the center of the room, and getting so surprised and confused and flushed, and everything, that she let fall her 70dandelion curls on Grandma Dobson’s lovely rag carpet, and instantly fell upon her knees to gather them up again.

“O, your brother told me that you put it in the box; but he does not know how I came to see it after it came out of the box. Jack Flibbit—”

“What a funny name!” cried Kate. “Is he a little boy?”

“Yes, and a fisherman’s boy, too; and he was left all alone after the fires—for his father and mother, and every one of his folks, were caught in the house, and hadn’t time to get away; and Jack was staying that night in a house down by the lake, or he would have been lost, too. So after it was all over, Jack was taken by a good, kind lady to Port Huron, and everybody felt so sorry for him that when he got there somebody gave him out of one of the boxes a very nice suit of clothes, and I saw Jack when he was carrying it along the street. When he met me, he wanted me to see it, and wouldn’t let me go until after we had been in and sat down on the steps of a church, and opened the bundle. Well, when it was open, and he shook out the little vest, there jingled down on the stone something that I picked up; it was a necklace, and I ’most know ’twas yours, ’cause I remember there was something inside it.”

“O, what?” cried Kate. Mrs. Hallock had ceased to sew in her eagerness to learn more.

“Well,” said Harry, “there was so much to remember about then, that maybe I’m not right; but it was, I reckon, something like this: ‘Kate; from Grandmother De—De—Deborah,’ or something like that.”

71“That’s just it—my own Grandma Hallock’s right name!” cried Kate; “and I s’pose I was very wicked to give it away, only everybody was so sorry then for the poor, burnt-out folks, and I hadn’t anything else that I thought as much of to give.”

“It is all very wonderful, my boy,” said Mrs. Hallock. “Do you know what became of Jack Flibbit?”

“Well, no, ma’am,” said Harry, “I do not. He was too small for any circus company to take along, and there wasn’t anybody belonging to him that he knew of anywhere; and I don’t quite believe that folks who live out West care so much about children who are left alone as you do.”

“O, yes, Harry. Kind folks live everywhere, only one does not always seem able to find them.”

“No!” said Harry. “I went a long ways and waited a good while, and now as soon as I get well, won’t you please find some work for me to do, so that I can pay back Mrs. Dobson?—for she isn’t very rich, I don’t think.”

“Why, Harry Cornwall!” exclaimed Kate. “There’s plenty of work for you to do. There’s your cornfield to take care of, for one thing.”

“My cornfield!” laughed Harry, thinking that Kate was making fun of him, and quite ready to join in her merriment, but Mrs. Hallock quickly bade Kate to be quiet; and immediately she asked Harry to tell how he escaped from the fire.

“My father’s house,” said Harry, “was not very far from Rock Falls, on the shore of the lake—Lake Huron, I mean—and the Saturday before the great 72fire burned Rock Falls, my father went into the village and took me with him. After we started for home—it was almost night then—the smoke grew thick away off in the distance, and some men we met told father that they wanted him to go with them and help fight the fire down, for fear ’twould get to the houses. He didn’t know what to do with me, but I told him I could run right back and find a place to stay.

“‘Go to my house! go to my house,’ said three or four of the men, and so my father told me to jump out and take good care of myself, and I called back to him to take care of mother, and then I went back. On the way, I met some little children, and they asked me where I was going—so I told them what father had gone to do, and that I was going to somebody’s house, somewhere, to stay all night, and they said: ‘You can come to our house and stay.’ So I went home with them and the next day was Sunday. Sunday night it looked awful when it grew dark to see the fires burning all around, except on the side where the lake was, but we were told to go to bed and if the fire came any nearer we should be called. We were called and shaken and pulled from our beds and bidden, with blankets in our arms, to run for Mr. Huxtable’s house on the shore of the lake. When we got there we pounded and screamed at every door and window. Presently a door opened and out rushed the entire family, eight in all, and in their night clothes. The fire was so hot as it came down, like—I don’t know what it was like—only it was so awful that nobody could tell about it. It burned us as we ran, 73Mr. Huxtable crying out, ‘Come! Come to the lake! the boat lies there.’ We all got into it, but the men had to push it out into the water, for we could not endure the heat. Then the smoke grew so thick that we could not tell where we were going and there was not a thing in the boat to guide it by, but the wind carried us swiftly where it was so cold that we shook and shivered. Mrs. Huxtable kept a single blanket and the others were given to the men, who were in their night clothes. She gathered the little ones within the blanket and hugged them until they fell asleep. For nearly two days the waves were all about us and we had only water from the lake to drink, but at last we were picked up and taken into Port Huron.”

“But what about yourself? Tell us what you did after that,” urged Kate.

“I—why I—went back to Rock Falls. What else could I do?”

“And then?” urged Kate.

“Do not ask Harry unless he chooses to tell,” said Mrs. Hallock, wiping her eyes.

“But I do; I must,” said Harry. “I shall feel better when I have told it all. And it is only that when I got back to Rock Falls, and went to the place where my father’s house had been, there was nothing there but burned beams and dry ashes; and when I asked for my father and mother, a man told me to go with him, and he showed me ever so many new graves, and told me where my father and mother lay. Folks tried to be good to me, but I walked a long way—ever so many days. I wanted to get just as far away from there as ever I could.”

74“But, my boy, had you no uncles nor aunts?” asked Mrs. Hallock.

“Why, yes. There was Uncle Horace—he lived in Maine, I believe; and mother had a good many letters from him.”

“What is his other name?” questioned Kate. “Won’t it be splendid, mamma, to find Harry’s uncle for him; and maybe he will be rich and capital and everything,” cried Kate, full of glee in an instant, and she evinced it by clapping her hands and jumping in true girl fashion.

Harry’s face flushed as he answered, “I don’t know his other name.”

“Don’t know!” uttered Mrs. Hallock in a voice that betrayed more astonishment than she intended to evince.

“But what was your mother’s name?” she added, being quite certain that some clue might be obtained.

“Bessie, Bessie Blake,” said Harry.

The same evening Mrs. Hallock addressed a letter to Mr. Horace Blake, Solon, Maine, hoping that by the time Harry was able to be about again, that she should have found an uncle for him. She waited patiently until it was July, and yet no letter came from Mr. Horace Blake.

For many days Frank and Kate had made daily, and semi-daily, and still-more-daily visits to the brown house in the lane; and at last the very day was come for Harry’s first visit to Hallock Point.

Chapter VII.

“I’m just as sure as anything that there’ll be a letter to-day from that Mr. Blake up in Maine, and I wish Hugo would hurry up and go to the postoffice, before he goes for Harry and Grandma Dobson.” Kate Hallock had said the above while standing in her own room in front of her dressing bureau, in whose drawers she was vainly searching for a ribbon with which to tie her hair.

“Kate, Kate, my child!” and a firm hand was laid upon Kate’s arm, arresting her movements.

“I know, mamma!” said Kate, “but I put every single thing in apple-pie order only Saturday, and this is Tuesday, and I was looking for my blue hair ribbon; and I’m in an awful hurry, for fear they’ll get here before I’m ready.”

“Do you think any little girl can be ready to receive company whose bureau drawers are in this state, Kate?”

“Yes, ma’am, if my hair is only nice.”

“And don’t you think while you were at play a vision of the confusion here would come up before you? Just look!” and Mrs. Hallock opened drawer after drawer, while Kate hung her head, pouted a little, and said finally,

“Well, now, mamma, I will fix everything nice the first thing in the morning.”

76“Now is the time, my child.”

“I can’t do it now,” pleaded Kate; “they’ll get here before I’m half done.”

“Now is the right time. If I compel you to do it now, the next time you want a ribbon or a handkerchief, you will not stir up everything within reach to find it. You might put your drawers in order every morning of your life, and it would be of little use if you threw things right and left, and twisted them over and over like this.”

“But I get in such an awful hurry, and my eyes dance so I can’t stop, and the first I know everything begins to hop, skip, and jump under my fingers,” said poor Kate, bursting into tears.

“My dear child,” said her mother, “life must not be such a whirl to you; let me think what to do with you.”

“Send me to the Reform School in Meriden!” sobbed Kate, with her head on the marble of the bureau.

“Here you are at your own Reform School, Kate Hallock! It is left to you to decide how soon you can go out free and happy. I’m going down now, and when you have put everything here in order, you may call me to look at your work. Here is a chance for victory over Mr. Disorder, Kate. See that you put him down completely.” Mrs. Hallock kissed the back of Kate’s neck, and left the room.

The white clock on the mantelshelf in the library struck ten. Kate heard the sweet, silvery sounds as she listened to her mother’s footsteps on the stairs.

77“It’s a great deal too bad, anyhow!” she said, raising her head, and fumbling blindly, through her tears, in the open drawer for a handkerchief. “I think she might just have let me wait till morning, and not spoiled all my fun to-day.”

Nevertheless Kate kneeled down, and drew out the lower drawer, and began the labor of assorting, refolding, and laying in order the various garments that she found there. She grew interested in her work. When she closed the first drawer, she jumped up with glad alacrity, opened the second one, made two or three very wry faces at the confusion of ribbons, ruffles, aprons, stockings, and what not besides, therein; and saying, “Get out of here, Mr. Disorder—I’m coming to oust you,” she fell bravely to work, and was upon the last drawer when, with the smallest possible hint of a knock, in rushed Frank, saying,

“Run down, Kate! They’re just coming, and I’ve got to give my hair a brush.”

Frank was off again. The visitors, Mrs. Dobson and Harry, had arrived, and Kate’s hair was flying wild about her tear-stained face. She flew to the window, heard her mother on the veranda welcoming them, and her feet ached to run down, and her tongue mourned because it could not say one word to them.

“Kate, Kate! I say, why don’t you come?” came from Frank, once more at the door, and then Kate was alone.

She hastened to complete the work she had to do. Out of the very last corner of the last drawer came the wished-for ribbon; and as Kate stands there 78before the looking-glass combing her hair, I will tell you how she appears to me—for I have heretofore forgotten to describe Kate Hallock. You know that she is short, because the corn in June and the salt meadow grass partly concealed her from view. Well, Kate is brushing her long, fair, shining hair; and as we look at her profile, she is watching her flushed face in the glass, and wondering whether or not Harry Cornwall will know that she has been crying, and—and—would he laugh at her if he knew what she had been crying about.

Ah! Kate Hallock is laughing at herself now, to think she could have been so silly; and that laugh makes her look like herself once more, as she turns about and quickly catches with her teeth the braid of her hair, that, thus held, she may tie about it the blue ribbon.

Kate Hallock has blue, tender eyes; round, soft, brown cheeks—just such cheeks as the sun and the wind might be supposed to like to shine upon and breathe over at any time of the year; teeth small, sharp, and white—the sun and the wind never tanned Kate’s teeth; her sweet lips dance over them so constantly that you never can tell whether you are looking at the teeth or the lips when she talks or laughs.

Kate’s nose is not quite perfect; if it only were a mite smaller and straighter, Kate would be a beauty. However, Kate is the only one who ever finds time or heart to mourn over that feature of a bright, bonny, darling young face.

Now she is ready to go down (and I am sure you have not yet found out how she looks)—ready, all but 79the tying of her sash. That she manages by a rather awkward bow, tied in front, and finally jerked and pulled until the bow is supposed by the child to be in the back.

“You look like a guy!” was the accost Frank gave her as he passed her in the hall.

“What’s the matter, I should like to know, with Mr. Airy Castle now?” ejaculated Kate. Hearing her voice, Mrs. Hallock left her guests and went with Kate back to her own room, where, having examined the bureau drawers, which were found in order, Mrs. Hallock tied Kate’s bows anew, kissed her twice, and sent her down to entertain Mrs. Dobson and Harry.

“I should like to shake hands with you, if I could,” said Harry, whose right arm was still fast in a sling.

“O, never mind,” said Kate. “Come, I’m in a hurry to show you something—quick! before Frank comes!” and Kate hurried Harry off out of doors the very minute she had told Mrs. Dobson how glad she was to see her.

“Don’t you know,” said she to Harry (as they stepped from the veranda), “the morning you first came here? Well, when you rode past on that ugly little pony that threw you down and hurt you, I was just behind that stone wall over there. You can see it, can’t you?”

Harry said yes; that he could see it.

“Well, you must know that my brother Frank has been taking care of that cornfield ever since for you.”

Harry wondered what was coming next, but Kate gave him not the least mite of a chance to ask a question, 80but made haste to say, “That day the corn was Frank’s, but he ran away. Don’t you remember how he followed you to the circus grounds and stayed with you till most dinner time?”

“If he hadn’t,” interposed the lad, “I don’t believe I should ever have known you, or you me.”

“That’s just it!” responded Kate. “It makes everything we do so queer and kind of jumbled up; and yet,” she said gravely, “everything will come out right, I s’pose, if we wait long enough.”

“You don’t mean that ’twas right for Frank to run away, do you?” and Harry looked at Kate out of his clear, honest, grey eyes, very earnestly indeed.

“I don’t see why not, ’cause if he hadn’t, how could we have known you wanted somebody and a home and all?” suggested Kate.

“O, pshaw!” exclaimed Harry.

“I should like to know if that’s all you’ve got to say?” said Kate in a decidedly irritated tone.

“I beg your pardon; I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to. But don’t you suppose now that if Frank had stayed in the lot over yonder that morning, and God—” Harry suddenly stooped, grew red in the face, stooped and picked up a stone, which he kept tossing in his left hand as they went along; and he waited for Kate to speak, which she did presently, saying,

“Never mind the rest; you can tell me some other time. Here we are, close to your cornfield.”

“I should like to know why you call it mine,” said Harry; and then followed the story of Frank’s desire to earn money for himself, and the opportunity given 81to him by his father, and ingloriously lost by his runaway propensity, gratified once too often. Kate told the story with shining eyes, and was particularly careful to impress upon Harry’s mind the beautiful manner in which her brother had acted ever since.

Harry and Kate were standing on the very edge of the field, and Harry was just saying, “But, Kate, I cannot take it; you know that I can’t. I should not enjoy a thing about it,” when a thundering slap struck upon Harry’s shoulder, and a big, gleesome boy’s voice shouted close to his ear,

“Well, I say, old fellow, how do you like the looks? Ain’t much like Western corn now, is it?”

Frank had been advancing cautiously from the rear, intending to take Kate and Harry by surprise. Harry was too much hurt by the blow (for Frank had forgotten his condition) to answer for a minute or two. In fact he grew so pale that Kate was frightened, and called Frank “a great rough, cruel fellow, to slap poor Harry so.”

“I declare, I forgot your arm and everything. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” explained Frank, and after a few more sharp twinges in the broken bones, Harry said,

“It is all over and no harm done.”

“Glad to hear you say so,” said Frank. “Now this don’t look much of a cornfield, I suppose, to you who’ve seen ever so many acres all in one lot; but there’s one thing, you may call it ten acres to one—for that’s about the difference in the price of the corn out West and here—and when harvest comes, you’ll have a 82big pile of heavy ears. Don’t believe I am much of a born farmer,” added the boy, “or I should have hung to the main chance a bit longer.”

“I sha’n’t take one single ear of your corn, Frank Hallock,” spoke up Harry. “Pray don’t think I’m mean enough to touch it.”

“But you must,” cried the twins in chorus. “You’ve got to have it; and,” added Kate, “if you only knew how hard Frank has worked in the lot since he knew ’twas yours, and you couldn’t help yourself lying over there at Mrs. Dobson’s, I know you would. And you are coming here to live next week, until your uncle up in Maine, or down in Maine, sends for you, or comes after you—and, oh, you don’t know how pretty your room is. Mamma made it so on purpose, and I helped her, too. Its—” but before Kate had time to finish the sentence, Harry interrupted her by saying,

“Please don’t tell me about it, for, Kate and Frank, I can’t live at Hallock Point.”

Harry’s statement was so utterly surprising that a momentary silence followed it, and then the “I should like to know whys” and the “why nots” overwhelmed the boy; but when finally Kate burst out with “I’m sure I don’t see what we have done that you will neither take Frank’s corn when he gives it to you, nor come to live with us, when we want to have you ever so much,” Harry felt compelled to say something, and what he said was simply this—

“I’m going to live in Pumpkin Delight Lane, with Mrs. Dobson.”

83“Well, now, that is a good joke—going to live with Grandma Dobson!” laughed Frank; “just as though you meant what you say.”

“Indeed, I do,” Harry replied quite seriously.

Practical Kate said: “Why, Harry, don’t you know that Grandma Dobson is poor—I mean she hasn’t much money, nothing but the house and the land, I heard papa say one day; and before her father died and left the house to her, she used to make dresses.”

“Yes, I know she’s poor,” and Harry sighed.

“Well, then, you don’t want to make her poorer, do you?” Kate asked with an arch look at Harry, for she evidently thought her final question decided the point.

The children had turned and were walking back to the house. They were come to the spot where Kate had met the man who was faint and ill, and to whom she had given Frank’s dinner.

“Come,” cried Kate, “this is a nice place to sit, under the shade of these big trees, and we’ll talk about it.”

Down she went with her fresh white dress on the green grass; and Harry was, in truth, very glad of the opportunity of resting, for it was his first walk in over a month.

“Now, tell us what it all means,” ejaculated Kate, with her pretty chin resting in the palm of one hand, and her blue eyes somewhere between the blue of the sky and Harry’s sober face.

“Well, it means, if I must tell you, that Mrs. Dobson talks out loud pretty often. She’s lived alone a good while, with only Josh in the house; and sometimes 84when I used to lie on my bed still, and maybe she thought I was fast asleep—I don’t know, though; and I wonder if folks who live alone don’t always talk to themselves—”

“I guess so,” said Kate. “I’m sure I should have to talk to somebody—I couldn’t help it; but do hurry and tell us what she said.”

“Never mind about the particulars,” put in Frank, as Harry still hesitated.

“Why, what I thought,” began Harry at length, “was that there was somebody in the room that she was talking to: for she said that she had lived alone, waiting and waiting, ever since her mother and father died, and she meant to wait a good while longer, too, only it would be so much easier and pleasanter not to wait all alone; and then she told how lonely ’twas in the winter when the snows came, and there wasn’t for a good many days a single track through the snow, and the ice was so thick on the shore and so strong in the bay that not one ship could come into the harbor. And I began to cry when she told about the long dark nights she had to stay all alone, without one single human heart—that was just what she said—beating near her own; and then all at once I knew she was praying, for she burst out with ‘O, dear Lord, if this boy you’ve sent to my house could only love me well enough to live with me just one winter!’”

Kate sobbed and Frank whistled, and Harry said, “What do you s’pose I did then?”

“Tell!” sighed Kate.

“Out with it!” demanded Frank.

85“Why, I got up and opened the door softly, and said I do love you, and I will stay’; and then I shut the door, but not before I saw that Mrs. Dobson was getting up from her knees. She hurried into the room pretty lively, I tell you, and kissed me, and made such a fuss over me that I came mighty near being sorry I’d said I would stay.”

“Of course you’ll stay,” said Kate. “Why I wouldn’t have you at Hallock Point, not if I could just as well as not. But what will you do there?”

“O, I’ll find enough to do, so that Grandma (she says I may call her so) won’t think I’m eating her out of house and home; and then there’s the farm. Next year who knows what may happen? and as for this, why there’s a good chance to dig clams between now and cold weather.”

“Good for you!” cried Frank. “You’re a cracky chap, after all. Didn’t I see some hens and an old turkey or two in the back yard the other day, over in the lane?”

“Why, Frank, you stupid, you know Grandma Dobson keeps hens,” said Kate.

“They eat corn, like other hens, don’t they?”

“Of course,” laughed Kate.

“What then?” questioned Harry.

“Why, that cornfield yonder,” and with the words Frank walked off, before Kate and Harry had time to get up from the grass and join him.

“That’s just like him,” said Kate, bubbling with enthusiasm. She was always glad if Frank did or said the least thing to build up her sisterly pride in him. 86“It’s so kind of him to remember Grandma Dobson’s hungry hens. You’ll let her have the corn of course, Harry!”

“I don’t see how I can help it. If Frank chooses to give it to her, I’ll promise to gather it, harvest it in whatever place she chooses to have it, shell it, feed it out, and save enough for seed next year.”

And all this time that the children were talking, the bright July sun was beaming down on the broad green leaves of the corn; and that same sun saw another sight. If the sun had told Frank, Kate, and Harry what it saw, I do not know what would have happened—something interesting, I am quite sure; but as the sun told no tales that day, I will not—until the next chapter.

The letter that Mrs. Hallock sent to “Mr. Horace Blake, Solon, Maine,” should have been addressed to Mr. Horace Ludlow, since Uncle Horace was Aunt Louisa Blake’s husband, and of course had a name of his own. At the end of three months, Mrs. Hallock received her letter from the Dead Letter Office.

Dear me! if that letter had had the right name on it, poor Mrs. Dobson would have had to live all alone all winter, maybe—who knows?

“Crooked things do turn out just as straight as anything, sometimes,” Kate Hallock said, when the letter was returned to her mother.

Chapter VIII.

“Why, Mrs. Dobson, I can’t call you Grandma any more,” cried Kate Hallock on the day Frank’s corn was harvested home.

“Why not, Kittie, my Clover?” replied the little woman (with a soft tenderness in her heart that gave a winsome look to her face) as she glanced upward, for Mrs. Dobson was busy at work moving old red and blue chests and things to make room for the fine yellow ears on the floor of a room where her father used to spread the corn to dry years and years before.

“Why, because,” replied Kate, “you look too young and pretty,” she added, “to be Grandma any longer.”

“Well, now, if I ever,” said Mrs. Dobson, but Kate was down the stairs and away, watching for the first load to come. She had stayed in the field until it was half loaded, and she was afraid to stay longer lest it should get home before she could, and she did want so to tell all the hens and Grandma that it was coming.

At last it drew near. Frank was seated on top, just where Kate had thought she might take a ride; but her proposal to mount there had been frowned down by Frank in the most approved manner of brothers to sisters. Harry Cornwall was walking 88beside the sober old horse, who without doubt kept up a wondering as to what barn his master owned down that lane, since he had never drawn corn there before.

The next load of corn Kate did have the pleasure of taking a ride on, for her father not only gave permission, but lifted her to a seat on a board laid across it, and Kate enjoyed her bit of victory over Frank, to her heart’s content.

After the harvest came many frosts, then dear, beautiful, Indian Summer, which Kate said was just like a whole summerful of days, sweetened and cooked hard, and then November skies and November leaden everywhere; the first snow that didn’t amount to much—Thanksgiving that did, and then winter.

Harry went to school, cut the fire wood, made the fire (Grandma Dobson kept but one fire in her house, except on grand occasions), fed the hens, drew water from the well, went for milk, and everything else that was needed in the brown house in the Lane; and, on Sundays, now that Mrs. Dobson had company, she did not so much mind the long walk to the old First church, even if “the going” was icy and bad, for, as the dear little woman quietly expressed the matter to herself in thought, she did get so much comfort and nearness to something human, in having Harry in the house.

One night, when the moonlight was shining very bright, and Harry thought that he had been sleeping a long time, he awoke suddenly, and lay wondering what he had waked up for, when he heard a sound just outside his door. “It’s a mouse trying to get into the 89corn room,” he said; but not feeling altogether satisfied, he got out of bed and carefully opened his door just in time to see a shadow steal across the moonlight on the floor.

“Who’s there?” he shouted.

“O, ’tisn’t a thief; it’s only me,” said Mrs. Dobson.

“What is the matter?” questioned Harry.

“Nothing at all, Harry; only I didn’t feel like going to bed very early, but now I’m going,” and he heard every step on the stairs, and also the sound of the latch on the door as she went into her own room.

Now Mrs. Dobson would not have told Harry, “for anything,” what I tell you. She had been reading over just three, old-time, yellow letters, and reading them had made her feel so lonely that she had gone up to Harry’s door to listen a moment to his deep breathing in his sleep, just to feel sure that she was not, as she had been for so many years, all alone in the house.

Harry Cornwall had grown very dear to Mrs. Dobson before Christmas time; and, if I must tell all the truth, the lad had grown “pretty dear” to a number of people beside; Frank Hallock thought him “just the jolliest, grandest, pokiest, saint-of-a-fellow,” he told Kate, one day in the week before Christmas, when Frank slyly suspected that Kate was making something for a present for himself, and tried to make her think that he thought it was for Harry.

Christmas morning Mrs. Hallock sent to ask Mrs. Dobson if she could spare Harry to her for an hour or two.

90Mrs. Dobson could not help thinking that it was a little bit queer that Harry should be sent for on that morning of all others, but she said “Yes—most certainly—to be sure,” and off Harry went to drive with Frank down to the huts on Peconick Point, with gifts of turkeys, sugar, and tea, to persons living there.

He had been gone about half an hour when a queer looking wagon came “wheeling” down the lane.

“Dear me! I wonder who is moving, this cold weather. Christmas day, too,” sighed Mrs. Dobson, as she looked out and saw it going past. Josh was enjoying his morning nap behind the stove, but a minute after up went his long ears, and out came a bark so loud and quick and deep that it made the little woman jump.

A knock on the door, and in came Hugo.

“Christmas!” he said.

“Wish you many merry Christmases,” said Mrs. Dobson, looking up in surprise.

“In dem wagin out doors,” said Hugo. “Mad-am Hallock she be coming by soon,” and without another word Hugo walked out again and presently reappeared with the headboard of a bedstead in his arms. It was very bright blue, and most charmingly designed and painted.

Grandma Dobson could only look on in silent wonder as he put it down and walked off again to fetch another part.

By the time Mrs. Hallock came upon the scene, Hugo had transferred a complete set of bedroom furniture to Mrs. Dobson’s kitchen—that is, all but one piece.

91While the amazed little woman stood looking at it and wondering in her heart what it all could mean, with a bang and a thump on the back door, appeared a rocking chair, and Kate Hallock’s blue eyes peeping through the cane holes in the back of it.

Kate half stumbled into the room behind her burden, and before Mrs. Dobson really had time to hurry forward and help, Kate had put the pretty blue rocking chair right in the middle of the kitchen. The next thing that she did was to walk up to Mrs. Dobson, seize her in her two arms and push her right into the blue rocking chair, saying, “There! you belong in that whenever you are tired, or are not tired either.”

“Kittie-my-Christmas Clover!” was all that Mrs. Dobson could say, and then the foolish woman made a motion just as though she was going to pick up the corner of her blue-checked apron (which just matched the chair, Kate thought), but before she had time, Kate had been at her own pocket and tossed a nice fine handkerchief into Mrs. Dobson’s lap, so that her hand fell upon that when she was about to catch up the corner of the apron.

“What next?” and Mrs. Dobson’s coming tears hastened into a little laugh. “I’m afraid you’re going to spoil me,” she said.

“Why, Mrs. Dobson, you didn’t think, did you, that all these things, this bedroom set, was for you?”

“Well, what could I think, I should like to know?”

“I’m so sorry, if you are sorry about it too,” said Kate. “But you see, when mamma thought Harry was coming to live at our house, she fitted up a room 92on purpose, and bought this furniture to put in it; but now, as he is going to live here, and nobody ever uses that room, and he wouldn’t take the corn, you know, and everybody says he is such a good boy, why papa and mamma said he might have it, and so Frank and I give it to him. Dear me, what a long talk that was!” and Kate dropped half exhausted into one of the chairs.

“Why, I’m ever so much happier than I should be to have it all mine,” said Mrs. Dobson, “and when I saw how pretty your room looked, it made me sorry for Harry, for his chamber upstairs does look dreary enough—only I try to keep it clean for him.”

Just then Mrs. Hallock arrived, with many apologies to Mrs. Dobson for not sending her word before, and said she had come to help arrange the room.

“But it is very cold up there,” said Mrs. Dobson.

“It’ll be such good fun to make a fire on the hearth,” said Kate, and she did enjoy every bit of the labor of making that fire.

Hugo carried up the new furniture, and carried out the old. The bed did look a little bit lost in its new frame, but Mrs. Hallock said that could easily be made all right. They had worked very fast for fear that Harry would get home before it was all done, and Kate was just spreading two fresh, home-made towels on the new towel rack, when in came Frank and Harry.

“Grandma!” said Harry, for she was downstairs, “I’m sure I saw smoke in the front chimney as we came up the lane.”

“I shouldn’t wonder one mite—it’s Christmas, you know.”

93“Why didn’t you tell me, and let me build the fire before I went?”

Harry opened the door into one of the front rooms; there was no sign of fire on the hearth. His room was just above it; he heard a mysterious tread.

“Who is up in my room?” he cried, and rushed up, to witness the presence of Mrs. Hallock, Kate, and the transformation.

“You can’t get rid of taking corn this time, when St. Nicholas sends it to you!” cried Kate, positively trembling with excitement. She was excited by giving, and also at the effect of her gift.

“Can’t I go, too?” asked Frank of Mrs. Dobson. “I had the hardest work to keep him from thinking the house was on fire, and made believe I didn’t see any smoke. My! how the folks did snivel down on the Point when they saw the turkeys and things. I don’t see why women always will cry and make such a fuss when they’re glad a bit. Did you say I might go?”—edging toward the stairway.

“Yes, yes, Frank.” Mrs. Dobson was busy just then peeping into her oven. She had had hard work to get her new chair covered up in time, so that Harry should not see it as he entered the kitchen.

Frank tried to step softly, but his boots had been wet, and they creaked so that it was of no use; so he gave it up, and walked into Harry’s room.

“Halloa, old fellow! What’s happened here? Most got your wings on, haven’t you? Real butterfly colors, too—blue and yellow! I declare you look well in them,” throwing himself into one of the chairs that had been placed invitingly before the fire.

94As for poor Harry, he looked more sorry than glad; and the only words he said, when he began to realize that the furniture was his own, were:

“I wish my mother could have had them—she did love pretty things so!”

“Didn’t she have them?” asked Kate impulsively. “I thought you said your mother was a lady once?”

“Yes, she was,” said Harry; “but my father hadn’t money to buy her pretty things with.”

“Too bad, wasn’t it, mamma? What would you do without pretty things?”

“I should love you, Kate.”

“But I’m pretty, folks say,” said Kate archly; and then Harry and Frank couldn’t help laughing at Kate, and everybody felt better for that little laugh. And the Hallocks hurried home; for the brothers and sisters who were married, and had homes of their own, were come to spend Christmas at the house on the Point, and there was to be a grand Christmas dinner that day.

Mrs. Dobson and Harry sat down to eat their Christmas dinner; while Josh looked on, quite certain that his own dinner would come soon after.

After Christmas the winter wore away very rapidly, and in April Harry Cornwall began his life as a farmer. Mrs. Dobson owned about sixteen acres of land, and with the aid of her trusty helper, Harry, she resolved to till it once more, although all the old farmers shook their heads disapprovingly, and said she had much better let it out “on shares”; but Mrs. Dobson had found that her side of the “shares” was 95always very small, and that the land was getting terribly run down, as they grew smaller year by year.

Harry did not fancy the life of a farmer, but he loved Mrs. Dobson so well that he was fully determined to do the best he could, for her sake; and he helped with the plowing, and the planting he did with his own hands, following with shrewdness, not the advice of the farmers, but their own example in regard to the time of planting and the manner of planting: for he noticed that, like other men, their professions and their practice seldom agreed. And so, when, one night, his field for planting corn was all in readiness for work on the morrow, and a neighbor came, and leaning over the fence, said, “It isn’t time to put in corn yet for a week or ten days, my boy,” “my boy” watched, and seeing the next morning his adviser go down the lane with bags of something very like corn in his cart, he came to the conclusion that he was going to put in his seed that day, and planted his own.

Frank Hallock made many promises to help on this day or that, but something was sure to happen, and so well-meaning but unstable Frank was almost certain to be absent at the appointed time.

As for Kate, she took the liveliest interest in farming occupations both at home and abroad, and just as certain as she saw anything coming up at the Point, whether it was potatoes, beans, corn, or any other green thing, she would within a day or two contrive a drive or a walk down Pumpkin Delight Lane to the sea, to see if anything that looked like it was coming out of the ground in Harry’s brown fields.

96One day Frank got vexed because he could not have Neptune when he wanted to drive on the beach, and somehow it would be impossible to tell just how it did grow—but that little cloud of vexation, instead of clearing, grew until Kate was thoroughly out of patience with Frank. He became morose, and didn’t want to go to school.

“Frank don’t feel well,” Mrs. Hallock said to her husband on one of the warmest days in June, “and I think we may as well let him leave school.”

“O, mamma!” said Kate, “Frank is so far behind now; I don’t see how he can ever catch up in this world, if he leaves school. He will get behind me in everything, and then when he goes again in the fall he won’t be in my classes at all.”

“My head aches!” said Frank; “it aches the whole time,” and so Frank was given leave to begin his summer vacation in June; but being out of school did not help the matter one bit; it only grew worse, until Frank became so thoroughly cross and fretful that nothing pleased him. His clothes weren’t fit to wear. Other boys whose fathers weren’t one bit richer than his, according to Frank’s version, had better suits than he had, and it was mean, downright mean, to make him dress so shabby. Neptune was a slow-go kind of a horse; getting old, too, and had an ugly way of stopping, just like a doctor’s horse, at every door-yard gate. Father was mean; mother didn’t love him half as much as she did Kate; and, as for Kate, he was nowhere since that Dobson boy, Harry Cornwall, had come; Kate was growing homely, too, getting 97freckled, and was getting as—well—anyhow she acted just like a boy, and boy-girls were his abomination.

When Kate heard him give utterance to the turn of his grievances, and he came to the final one, she retorted.

“Poor, little girl-boy!”

Frank struck her on the cheek so sharply that when Kate appeared at the tea table her finger-marked cheek caused her father to ask what it meant.

“O, not much,” said Kate, with a glance at Frank as much as to ask, “What shall I say?”

“Tell me what made the mark on your cheek,” said Mr. Hallock with such sternness that Kate felt the words jerked out of her, as she said, “Frank’s fingers, papa.”

“Frank’s fingers, indeed,” ejaculated Mr. Hallock. “Tell me, sir, what you meant by striking your sister?”

“She called me a girl-boy,” said Frank.

“He called me a boy-girl first, papa, and I didn’t strike him for it,”—Kate could not resist saying so much in her own favor.

Frank was dismissed from the table and sent to his own room, there to stay and live upon bread and water until he could beg Kate’s pardon.

“I don’t want him to beg my pardon,” said Kate, “and I don’t want him shut up, either,” and Kate was following her poor, persecuted brother out of the room to share his isolated condition, when she was sternly bidden to return “and not go near Frank again to-day.”

98“It is very queer that I can never punish Frank without you taking it into your head to be punished, too,” said Mr. Hallock.

“Well, papa, I can’t help it. I love him so much, and I’m so sorry for him.”

“You ought to love him well enough to wish to have him reform,” said her father; and then the tea went on just as though Frank had not been dismissed in disgrace—only it did not.

After tea, as Kate could not go near Frank, she went around into Pumpkin Delight Lane and told Grandma Dobson all about it, and the dear little woman sympathized with her exceedingly.

The next morning Frank was not at breakfast. Mrs. Hallock went with her husband on an early train to New York, and Kate found that Frank was locked into his room for all day.

“Anyhow,” she said, “I’m not forbidden to speak to him to-day,” so she went up to his door and said,

“Good morning, Frank.”

No answer.

“Good morning, Frank.”

“You didn’t care to say good night,” said Frank in a very gruff voice mingled with a good deal of rattling at the lock of the door from the inside.

“O, Frank, you know I couldn’t. Papa told me not to speak to you last night; but Grandma Dobson is real sorry for you. She gave me some seed cakes. Want one?”

“No! not for breakfast. I say, what did you have downstairs?”

99“I haven’t been to breakfast yet, but I know there is griddle cakes. I smell them.”

“Fetch me some.”

“Wish I could.”

“Do it then.”

“The door is locked. Can’t put them through the keyhole.”

“The window isn’t locked. Toss them up. I’ll catch, first-rate.”

“Somebody’ll tell.”

“Who cares after I’ve eaten ’em?”

“I’ll try,” and Kate ran down to eat her own breakfast. It was lonely at the table. The cakes choked her. She couldn’t eat. She buttered and sugared a plateful for Frank, tossed up one or two, but the window was too high, and the cakes fell on the ground.

“I know a way,” she shouted, and presently Kate appeared on the staircase with the plate of cakes in one hand and a broom in the other.

A few minutes later Frank heard a voice that seemed to come out of the sky; at any rate it came in at his window, saying,

“Here, Frank, here’s your cakes,” and Kate reached out from the window next to Frank’s the handle of the broom, around which she had tied the cakes.

Frank took in the broom, saying,

“Jolly for you! Is this all you can get?”

“I guess there’s more. I’ll see,” and away went Kate to the kitchen.

“Laws me!” said the cook, “who wants cakes?”

100“O, Frank and I want some more,” said Kate.

“Your mother gave me orders, Miss Kate, and I’m not to give Master Frank anything.”

“Very well; give me some, then.”

Kate carried the cakes to the table, prepared them for eating, and then conveyed them on the broom handle to Frank, who received them gladly, not knowing that Kate had made one more little sacrifice—and more than a sacrifice—for his sake.

Chapter IX.

Kate Hallock was drawing near to Mrs. Dobson’s house in the lane. “Dear grandma!” she called, “I’m just perishing with hunger! I’m starved nearly to death! I’ve had no breakfast yet! Will you give me a piece of your rye bread and butter?”

The dear old lady’s curls were bound about with a muslin kerchief, for it was her morning for churning, and the stone jar, with its little wooden dasher, was waiting her hands when Kate’s plaint broke upon her hearing.

“Hungry! starving! no breakfast! What does it mean, Kittie Clover?”

“It means,” said Kate, “that I gave my breakfast to a poor fellow who had none, or next to none, nothing but plain bread.”

“Plain bread is good, Kittie; quite good enough for tramps. Do you suppose that the tramp would give up his breakfast for you?”

“It wasn’t a tramp, Grandma Dobson.”

“Who then?”

“Please don’t ask me another word. O, I am so hungry. Will you let me help myself?”

“Sit right down here, poor child, and eat all you want.”

102Kate seated herself beside the pine table, scrubbed to its best estate of cleanliness, and Mrs. Dobson placed upon it a whole loaf of bread, a three-pound roll of butter, and a four-quart pan of milk.

“I’ll tell all the tramps I meet where to come,” said Kate laughing, as she proceeded to cut the loaf.

“Josh knows a tramp the instant he sees one,” said Mrs. Dobson, “and I always have to feed them outside the gate.”

“Where is Josh this morning, grandma?”

“He has gone down to the shore with Harry; it’s most time for them to get back now. We will have the clams they fetch home for dinner, if you will stay.”

“This is my dinner and breakfast together, thank you,” said Kate. “Besides, I must hurry home; for father and mother have gone away to-day.”

“And where is Frank? I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“O, he is at home,” said Kate carelessly; “only,” she added, “I don’t think he feels very well nowadays”; and then Kate, to give Mrs. Dobson no opportunity to ask a question, began to put away the large remains of her feast, and to return her very expressive thanks for the same. “Now, Grandma Dobson, it isn’t one bit polite, I know, to eat and run away; but kiss me, and I’ll go home.”

“See here, Kittie Clover, something is the matter at home, and you will not tell me. However, I will kiss you, and when you are ready, come and tell me all about it.”

“Some time you shall know every single thing,” said Kate—more than half persuaded to tell it all out 103on the instant; but she did not, for her quick hearing caught the sound of coming, made by Josh, in the lane.

Kate hurried away. She wished to see Harry, and to urge him to find time to go and talk to Frank. Kate herself, after breakfast, had begged her brother to ask her forgiveness.

“I have not the least objection to doing it, Kate—do forgive me!”

“You know I did long ago, Frank. How I wish father and mother were here now—then you could come right out! you’ll—ask me—won’t you?—when they come.”

“I don’t think I will, Kate,” Frank had said; and poor Kate had run away around the corner in bitter disappointment.

After thinking the matter over, she had come to the conclusion that if anybody could persuade her brother to do right, Harry Cornwall could; and to him she had come.

Harry heard the story, and promised to be over some time in the afternoon. Kate went home rejoicing all the way, very certain now that the trouble would soon be over. She had not been long at home when Frank called to her that he wanted something to read.

“Fetch me Young Folks,” he said.

That magazine had been received the evening before. Kate was herself in the midst of a most entertaining story at the instant the call came. She went to the window adjoining Frank’s.

104“Bub!” she said softly. Kate never called Frank “Bub” except in a tone of endearment.

He put his head out from the open window.

“Here I am, Kate. I’ll catch it.”

“I’m just reading the loveliest story, Frank! I’ll be through in a few minutes.”

“I want it now. I’ve called you a hundred times since breakfast.”

“Frank,” said Kate, “if I give this to you now, will you please ask my forgiveness just as soon as they get home. If you will, you shall have it, right away.”

“Give it to me quick, Kate. It’s as much my magazine as ’tis yours.”

“And it is just as much mine as ’tis yours, too, Master Frank, and I won’t give it to you, unless you will promise.”

“Keep it then, and see what you will get for it,” returned Frank, dropping the window-sash heavily to close further negotiations.

Kate’s eyes grew dim with tears. Here she was, after trying so hard to conciliate her brother, at open variance with him.

She returned to her seat, opened the orange-tinted covers, sought out the place where she had left off reading, and tried to recover interest in the story, but in vain. There, right beyond the wall of her room, was her brother, and he was angry at her.

Foolish Kate! She closed the Young Folks, trod softly to Frank’s door and whispered through the keyhole, “Here is the magazine. You may have it.”

No response.

105“Frank! open the window and I’ll give you Young Folks.”

Silence.

“Frank, won’t you please take it?”

“No.”

“Do! why won’t you?”

“Don’t want it.”

“Frank, Harry Cornwall is coming to see you some time this afternoon.”

“Who said so?”

“He told me so himself.”

“I won’t see him. Tell him, when he comes, that I’ve gone away.”

“Tell a lie, Frank!” ejaculated Kate. “I won’t do it, not even for you.”

“Tell him just what you’ve a mind to, then. I don’t care what you tell him.”

“I have told him all about it,” cried Kate, “and I just wish you were like Harry. He is never cross and unkind to me.”

“I know you like him ever so much more than you do me. I dare say you wish I was dead.”

“O, Frank! Frank!” cried Kate, and for a long time Frank heard her sobbing at the door, and then all was still.

The dinner-bell rang just as usual.

Kate went down to her solitary dinner. There was but one plate laid at the table, and after a few minutes, Sallie, the little maid, placed the bell by her side, and left the room. This was the opportunity sought by Kate.

106It took but a minute or two to secrete food enough from the table for Frank; having done which, Kate sat demurely at the dinner until a reasonable time was past, before summoning Sallie. This time she was able to secure a basket, and to rap at Frank’s window and pass it in to him.

“There was only one plate of pudding,” she said, “and that I’ve put in the basket for you; but there’s a good lot of hard sauce on it—cook knows I like hard sauce.”

“Kate,” said Frank from the window a few minutes later, “you are a brick!”

“O, Frank! you know mamma can’t bear to hear you talk that way; please don’t do it.”

“I dare say she wouldn’t bear to have you fetch me, on a broom handle, this jolly good dinner. Wish you knew how good it tastes to a fellow shut up all day. I say, Sis, help a fellow out awhile this afternoon. Fetch the light ladder; it will reach to the lower window-cap, and I can let myself down by holding fast to the blind. Do now, and I’ll see Harry if you will.”

How nice it seemed to hear Frank talk to her again, and to be called “Sis” by him, and to know that he depended on her! O, how Kate Hallock did long to run and fetch the light ladder and let him down!—but she knew she ought not to do it.

“Come, now—there’s a good Sis.”

“Frank Hallock, you know better! I’m ashamed of you!” cried a breezy voice from under the window—and there was Harry Cornwall!

107Kate drew her head in quickly, and disappeared from sight and sound; while Frank glowered down at Harry’s earnest face, upturned to meet his angry stare.

“Frank,” said Harry after a moment’s peering cautiously about, lest he be overheard—“now, Frank, neither you nor I think well of a coward, do we?”

“Who calls me a coward?” retorted Frank.

“Frank Hallock will call himself one if he will see himself as others see him. I overheard you asking Kate to fetch you a ladder for you to climb down on, when you know perfectly well that she ought not to do it.”

“Who cares for your ought-nots? Go home—get off these premises!” cried Frank, trembling with rage, and hurling down at Harry the plate that had recently held the pudding.

Harry dodged, and the plate fell, apparently unharmed, upon the grass. Harry picked it up, and walked away with it in his hand.

“Frank Hallock, you’re just the meanest boy alive, and I do wish you were not my brother!” were the next words that reached Frank; and then all was silence and stillness in and about the house until the nearing wheels were heard that brought home Mr. and Mrs. Hallock.

All day long their hours had been saddened by recollections of Frank in his disobedience and his punishment.

“Poor fellow! he will be very willing to ask Kate’s pardon to-night,” said his mother as they drew near home.

108“I hope we have been wise in our decision,” said Mr. Hallock, for, that day, they had determined to send Frank to a boarding school in New Haven.

Kate was rejoiced to see her father and mother again. Her flash of anger against Frank was all gone, and she was eager for the moment of reconciliation to arrive.

“Here, Kate,” said Mr. Hallock, “here is the key. Go and liberate your brother and tell him to come to me.”

Kate ran up joyously, a candle in one hand, the key in the other. The key she thrust in at the place, turned it with a jerk, and the door flew back. “Come, Frank! Come, Bub! Papa is waiting for you, and there is all sorts of good things, an out and out feast for supper, to-night.”

Frank sat moodily by the window, unstirring and speechless.

Kate went near him—“Dear Frank,” she said, “I’m real sorry I said that, about wishing you wasn’t my brother—I’m ever so glad that you are—won’t you forgive me, Frank? Come down, do!”

Frank never moved.

Kate kissed his cheek—the very ear part of it, was all that she could touch.

Frank never stirred.

Mr. Hallock, listening, had heard Kate’s words.

“Frank!” he called.

“Sir!” responded Frank, never turning his face from the window.

“If you are willing to ask your sister’s pardon, come down!”

109“O, Frank, Frank, do come,” pleaded Kate in his ear, in the sweetest, tenderest of whispers, but Frank gave no response.

Mr. Hallock entered the room, led Kate away, and locked the door again.

Chapter X.

As the darkness grew into the room where Frank Hallock was prisoned, the boy’s misery grew around his heart. Over and over to himself he said: “I am sorry I struck Kate; but I won’t tell father and mother I’m sorry—not if I have to stay here forever! They are always praising Kate, and they think everything she does is just right, and everything I do is as horrid as horrid can be—and it isn’t fair one bit. Kate has a real good time, and I never can do anything I want to. Father and mother love Kate a great deal more than they do me. Besides, I’m fourteen and over—big enough to take care of myself, without somebody to tell me every single thing I must do or mustn’t do; and I won’t stand it! Lots and lots of boys run away from home in story books, and have capital, good, jolly times. I’ve a great mind to run away myself.”

At the same time in which Frank was thinking these thoughts, he heard distinctly the voice of conscience telling him that his father and mother were right; that the best and only just thing for him to do was the very thing they desired him to do. And far louder and deeper than the wicked suggestion concerning the absence of love, came the ringing assurance, through all the days and nights that he could remember, of 111unnumbered, untellable acts of love. Poor Frank, the good and the evil were striving for the mastery of him.

Sitting thus, and pondering the possibilities of running away from home—the home that he, for the moment, persuaded himself that he detested—there came to him a few trembling tones of sound from below. He knew that tea was over, and that Kate was at the piano. He could see the evening lamp on the table, and his father and mother sitting in the room. Yes, then it came—the song of thanks and praise for all the blessings of the day.

In the stillness that followed, Frank knew perfectly well what was going on down there. If he ran away, why he might never again hear Kate play his favorite music—never hear his father pray; and just here Frank began to wonder if the supper table was cleared away, if the good things Kate had referred to were all eaten up, if they really intended to leave him go supperless to bed. He had not heard a sound of approach to his door when there came through the keyhole a stifled “Bub!”

He answered it with “Fetch me some supper, Kate.”

“I can’t, Frank; they won’t let me. Mother is coming in a minute with some bread, and be good. Do, Frank—for they’re going to send you to General Russell’s School; you’ll wear a uniform, and everything!”

Frank’s heart beat proudly for a moment. The desire of his life was about to be gratified then. In an 112instant all of the ill feeling that had hardened him seemed to be as though it had not been.

“I’ll say it, Kate,” he whispered.

Frank was going to be good again. Away fled Kate to her mother, saying,

“Won’t you hurry, mamma, with Frank’s supper? I know he must be hungry by this time, and please let me help you to carry it to him.”

“If Frank would only do what he ought to do, he might come down and get his supper,” sighed Mrs. Hallock.

“Try him, just once, mamma, and see,” urged Kate.

“Come with me, then.”

“Frank,” called Mrs. Hallock, “are you ready to ask your sister’s forgiveness?”

“Yes, ma’am,” shouted Frank in the most amiable of moods.

He was set free, marched down stairs and into his father’s presence, where, without the slightest hesitation, he made the required apology.

Kate kissed him for answer. As she did so, she turned suddenly very red in the face and nearly bit her lip through with the quick effort she made to suppress a scream; for Frank slyly caught a bit of her arm between his fingers and pinched it cruelly. The tears filled her eyelids, and she ran away quickly to hide all sign of her hurt.

The same night, by the light of the moon, Kate saw Frank standing beside her bed.

“Did I pinch you much?” he whispered.

“Awfully, Frank.”

113“You were first-rate not to tell of a fellow by making a fuss.”

“And you were meaner than anybody I ever thought of; after I had been so good to you all day and everything.” Kate could not help saying this.

“I’ll just tell you what ’tis, Kate, you are a great deal better to me than you ought to be.”

“I sha’n’t be sorry, Frank, when you are away at school, that I was kind to you when you were at home; besides, Harry Cornwall told me something to-day that I never thought about before.”

“I hate Harry Cornwall, Kate!”

Kate made no sign of having heard the words.

Frank went on to say, “And I just wish that you would never speak to me of him again. I dare say he is putting you up to all sorts of disagreeable things on my account.”

Kate made no response for a moment, and then she said, the moonlight in the room making her pale face quite radiant as she spoke, “I wonder, Frank, what Jesus Christ would tell me to say to you, if he were here now.”

“Good night, Kate; I’m going,” said Frank.

“Bub, won’t you kiss me without a pinch?”

“Yes, I will, Kate, and I don’t really and truly hate Harry as much as I made out.”

“I am glad to hear you say so.”

“And Kate, I am just the least mite curious to know what the fellow did say to you to-day.”

“I sha’n’t tell you, because you call him a fellow.”

“Saint, then, Kate; will that do?”

114“It’s nearer the truth.”

“Tell, then.”

“No, not to-night.”

“Then I don’t give the kiss.”

“Good night, Frank.”

“Good night, Kate; you’ll be awful sorry, when I’m gone to school.”

Frank went to his own room, and to sleep.

Kate wished with all her heart it was morning. She could not go to sleep, and it was so dismal to lie there thinking about Frank’s going away from home.

Hallock Point without Frank Hallock, Kate did not think could be a home at all, and just there, Kate began to wonder why she could not go to boarding school quite as well as Frank. Certainly she was as old, and as for progress in school, she was far in advance of her brother. Besides, it would be, O, so nice, to think of it! Frank at General Russell’s, and she at school in New Haven, too. Frank would come and visit her in his gay uniform, and how proud she would be of her handsome brother, only Kate did hope he would not pinch or slap her before the other girls. And then Kate looked around her pretty room, with its adornments, each and every one with its little history of birthday gift, Christmas greeting, or token of love; and then suddenly she saw it all—her room without herself in it, Frank’s room vacant; no merry shout or sound of boyish presence—no Kate, even. Then it was that Kate thought, “No, it shall not be. Poor mamma! it would be too, too bad. I will not say one word about going to school,” and she went to sleep, at last, strong in the determination.

115The next day the good news was announced to Frank in formal manner. His parents thought their son received the intelligence very quietly.

“But, my son,” said Mr. Hallock, “if you are to go to school in September, the weeks that lie between are not to be devoted exclusively to play. You are to fit yourself to enter certain classes in the school, and you are to have a master every day.”

“How pokey, to study in summer, papa!”

“But he will teach Kate, as well. If he takes the trouble to come here every day from the village, he may as well have two pupils as one.”

“And, papa,” suggested Kate, “why not three, as well as two? There is Harry, and you know how he has had to stay out of school with the plowing and the planting and the hoeing, and all sorts of things, and now he could get time just as well as not to run over for his lessons; and papa,” she added slyly, whispering the words in at his ear so that Frank might not hear, “Frank would have to study then, ’cause he would be ashamed to have Harry get ahead, a poor circus boy, you know!”

“No, Kate, I do not know; but we will see about Harry afterward.”

The master was from the village. Captain Green was his name. He had taught school for forty years in the winter, and been a pupil of the sea during the summer for a still longer period. The villagers used to say that every billow sweeping the Sound had felt the stroke of his oar. He was out on the bay at early morn, and the last ray of light found him urging on 116his little craft at night. He trapped lobsters, caught crabs, dug clams, sat for hours together holding the line over the edge of his boat that rocked idly on summer seas, in the hope of catching a black fish a little larger than any other fisherman had caught; and perfectly delighted to spend his nights in throwing out and drawing in the long seines, in the hope of the heaviest haul of bass or bluefish that ever came to shore. This was the master, Captain Green, who proposed to spend two hours every day at Hallock Point. He could run down the harbor to the Point, tie up his boat, and then, after lessons, go outside.

The villagers heard the news with unbelieving ears. “No power on earth,” they said, “could keep Captain Green on shore for two hours a day, so long as he could move an oar.” Nevertheless, Captain Green appeared prompt to the moment at the appointed hour.

Chapter XI.

School began in the tower room of the house at Hallock Point. Harry Cornwall went to the lessons because he eagerly sought knowledge. Kate Hallock tried to study because she wished to win the good opinion of Frank, and, if possible, to excel him in everything. Frank went because, as he said, “he had to.”

Captain Green taught in order to obtain for a well-beloved little grandson, whose days on the earth were to be few in number, the nameless, numberless little helps-by-the-way to the place of parting.

Had Mrs. Hallock known what the love for the sea meant to Captain Green, instead of giving up the tower room for lessons, she would have chosen the spot in the house the most remote from sight or sound of wave; but there he was, day by day, with the blue of dancing, sun-lit water beckoning to him. He could see the gentle glide of every keel that went down the harbor, and feel the drawing of every sail that filled away under the sweet pressure of the summer winds. More than any schoolboy that ever groaned to play truant did Captain Green feel the impulse to run away from school; nevertheless, he remained faithful to his trust, and for two August weeks everything went well with the new enterprise. Mrs. Dobson was perfectly 118gleeful over the grand opportunity afforded Harry. She thought early and late, and worked all the day between the thinkings, to give Harry every moment that was possible. The dear little soul knew perfectly well that the more Harry learned, the less the chance of keeping him in Pumpkin Delight Lane; but the more she loved her boy, the less grew her selfishness, and the more she rejoiced in whatever of good came to him.

On the shore there lay an old wreck, from which Harry wrenched a few planks. By the aid of Frank Hallock, on the Saturday before school began, he got them to the marsh that lay between the Point and the lane, and placed them along the line of danger. Thus Harry made short work of getting to and from the tower room.

Josh was for a few days greatly disturbed by the new order of going and coming, and followed Harry across field and marsh until Captain Green shook out on the air the tongue of his bell, whereat the dog gave forth a recitation in a howl, and went home, only to repeat the same on the day following.

On the little island, lying off shore from the town, there was a mill for the making of oil from white fish. At the time the school began on the Point, business at the oil mill was very good. Dozens of boats sailed up to the wharf at evening, with loads of sparkling, rainbow-hued menhaden, that had been trapped into nets during the day, in the deep waters of the Sound. Far into the night, and sometimes until the day-dawn came, men would work at unloading the fish, which 119were thrown into tubs, the tubs hoisted by steam to a car, into which they were dumped, until the thousands filled it. In its turn the car was drawn up the long lines of rail leading from the wharf to the upper story of the mill.

This mill was within sight from the room where Frank studied, and by the aid of a spy glass could be seen distinctly, although lying two miles away.

Every morning early, when the wind and weather served, the schoolmaster went across to the island wharf to procure bait for his lobster pots. Occasionally when a fog dropped suddenly down, or the wind blew fast from off shore, Captain Green was late in returning from the lobster pound, and the spy glass was used in the tower to find out his whereabouts.

One morning Captain Green was caught in a fog when returning to the mainland: the three scholars waited in the schoolroom, and he did not return.

“It is just nice for you, Frank,” said Kate, “that he does not come, for now you have time to learn the lessons you did not get last night.”

“No lessons until to-morrow,” said Frank. “There is no use studying. Captain Green can never find his way in in this fog, for just before it shut down I saw him off to the east of the island; shouldn’t wonder a bit if the New Haven steamboat ran him down.”

“Frank Hallock!” cried Kate, “you speak just as though you’d be rather glad of it if something did happen to the Captain. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Why not, pray? I hate this study, study all the time. What’s the good of it, anyhow? I don’t want 120to be what folks call a scholarly man. I’d a great deal rather be a sailor—wish I was out now in this fog. It’s capital jolly getting lost in fogs, and the first you know coming up to land somewhere, and not knowing where in the world you’ve got to. I often think, Kate, I’ll run away and go to sea.”

“O, Frank!” and Kate dropped her book and flew to Frank’s chair, and putting her arms about his neck, began to cry.

“What a little goose you are, Kate,” said Frank. “I wonder if you think a few tears will keep me at home, when I’ve made up my mind to set sail.”

Kate assumed a vast amount of dignity on the instant, and in quite a stately manner for Kate Hallock, groped her way, with eyes foggy with tears, from the room.

“Don’t fall down stairs!” shouted Frank after her. And then Harry Cornwall for the first time looked up from his slate, upon which he was working out the examples of the lesson.

“Frank,” said he, “if I had a sister I don’t think I’d take such delight in teasing her as you do.”

“O, yes, you would. You’d never find out without it whether she loved you or not. Why, it’s just fun to see Kate’s great eyes when the tears are getting together in them. Kate’s tears are always close to her eyes; mine are clear down in my boots, and I’m glad of it; besides, Harry, I’m most ready to be off to sea. I’ll tell you something. There’s a right jolly good fellow working over in the oil mill at the island. His name is Victor—Victor what, I don’t know, for he 121won’t tell—and he ran away from home in Germany more than two years ago. His folks don’t know where he is. I think it would be good fun not to have it known where I went to or anything. Victor is as jolly as a regular tar: he has the nicest eyes, blue as can be, and the whitest teeth—white as a shark’s; and he says his father is rich, and his mother rides in her own carriage, and everything is in hoity-toity good shape at home. Some day, he says, he will write home, when he gets tired of working in the mill.”

“I don’t believe in your Victor, Frank. Look here, now: would you, Frank Hallock, leave your home, and go to work in that oil mill?” questioned Harry.

“Well, that is different. Maybe if I was off in Germany, and couldn’t get anything else to do, and must earn my bread some way, I should go into most any kind of a mill; but the fishing part I wouldn’t mind one bit. I wonder what has become of Kate?”

“Frank,” said Harry, “I’ve wanted to say something to you for a good many days now, but I hadn’t the courage. I thought it would be a right good time that Saturday when we laid planks across the marsh, but somehow every plank we got up from the beach made it harder, and I was a coward after all.”

“Out with it now, then; it’s foggy enough to hide your blushes.”

“It’s something you will not like to hear, Frank.”

“Out with it, I say, while your courage is up.”

“Well, then, I don’t think it was right in you to let Kate give you breakfast and dinner the day your father and mother went away.”

122“It was one of the best turns Kate ever served me. I hope you haven’t been talking to her about it, and putting notions of right and wrong into her head, about it.”

“No; I haven’t talked with Kate, and I don’t believe the thought that she was deceiving her father ever entered her mind; but she was, all the same. And you let him think you had been kept on bread all day, when I know that Kate gave you her own breakfast, and was so afraid that somebody would find it out at home, that she went to Mrs. Dobson’s to get something to eat when she was hungry, and never once told that she had gone without her breakfast for you. And then she came home and gave you her dinner, too.”

“Yes,” said Frank, rising from his chair and peering through the fog, “Kate is a good deal of a friend of mine. I know perfectly well that if I should ask her to run off to sea with me to-morrow, she would cry a little and beg a good deal not to have me go, and then would go with me after all.”

“And you are to blame, Frank.”

“To blame!” said Frank, the angry color rising in his cheeks.

At the instant the door opened and Mrs. Hallock looked in.

“I have come for Mr. Green,” she said. “Little Herbert is ill.”

“He’s caught in the fog off the island,” said Frank, “and hasn’t been here this morning.”

“Can I do anything?” asked Harry, laying aside slate and books—but Mrs. Hallock was gone.

123There was not a boatman in the village who would not risk danger that he could see, to fetch Captain Green to the little grandson whom he loved so well; but to go forth, no one knew whither, into the dense fog—of what use?

At least that was the reply made to Harry Cornwall at the town pier, when he gave the news.

“Who will lend me a boat?” questioned Harry.

“Youngster! you scarcely know how to pull an oar,” was the only answer his question received.

“But the sea is calm, and the boy may die. It will break the Captain’s heart not to see him again,” urged Harry.

The boatmen looked up and down the harbor, as far as the fog permitted them to see, and silently shook their heads.

“I will pay you for the boat if I injure it,” said Harry.

Before the man, who was about to urge Harry’s inability to pay, could speak, Frank Hallock reached the pier.

“Here’s five dollars,” he cried, “for the man who finds Captain Green and brings him in through the fog.”

In a moment a half dozen men stepped off the pier into as many boats and began to pull down into the fog. The harbor’s mouth was a half mile away.

Frank and Harry lingered only to hear the last stroke of oar, and then Harry suggested going down to the Sound beach, past which the boats must go to get to sea. When the shore was reached, the fog was so dense that the boys could see no farther out than 124a few rolls of swollen water coming in from the east. They began to shout with all their might and to listen for an answer, but none came. Landward came another sound. It was Kate, ringing, as she ran, the schoolmaster’s bell.

“I thought,” she said, coming to the shore, “that maybe you’d be down here, and I was sure Captain Green would know the sound of his own bell better than anything else; and, I do declare, if here isn’t Josh coming after me.”

“Set him to howling,” said Frank.

“Let us shout and ring and howl together,” proposed Harry, and they began.

The result was not, accurately speaking, a chorus, but they made the air ring with sounds until Kate was forced to drop the bell and cover her ears.

When a pause was made, out of sheer exhaustion, by boys and dog, they seemed to hear a voice out of the fog.

“Coming!” was the word they heard repeated.

They rang the bell after an interval, and Josh, seeming to understand, lifted up his mighty wail and cast it on the fog.

“Coming!” The answer came this time clearly from the voice of Captain Green.

In ten minutes more his little boat was drawn up on the beach and he was on his way home. There was no school that day. There was no school on the morrow, nor for a week, because the lad lay very ill—and then there was no school in the tower room any more, for there was no little grandson, for love of whom to teach.

Chapter XII.

September was come, and the day on which Frank was to go to school was drawing very near. Frank himself was devoting every minute that he could get to bluefishing, and became very greatly irritated at whatever came in the way of his pleasure. He even came to regard this going to school as something that ought to be put off until bluefishing was over; and as for “that provoking Harry Cornwall, he was good for nothing at all—all the time doing something in the lane, digging the potatoes, or pulling onions, or anything but go a-fishing, as he, Frank Hallock, wished him to do. Why, he hadn’t been out with him to the island more than three times since September came. And as for Kate, she was no good at fishing, she wouldn’t bait his hook, but just wanted to pull out the fish for her own self.” And yet Frank admitted that he might have let her come out with him in the Clover. It was a pretty boat—white and green—that lay on the ripple of the blue Sound that sweet September afternoon, and anyone passing it and beholding the face of Frank Hallock, lighted up with exultation as he whipped into his boat a gleaming bluefish, a little larger than its fellows, would have thought “What a fine-looking lad that is!” A cheery voice 126from a passing boat, whose approach Frank had not seen, called out, “Any good luck to-day?”

“First-rate luck,” answered Frank. “Where going, Victor?”

“Up to the dock after a new net.”

“When are you going to Long Island?” called Frank.

“Soon as we’ve fixed the net,” shouted back Victor. “In a day or two we’ll be off.”

Meanwhile the boat, plied by vigorous strokes, was urging its way up the harbor, so that Frank’s “Wish I was going with you!” failed to be heard.

Frank was fishing just outside the harbor.

“I want to run up, mamma, and see the Clover. I want to know that Frank is safe,” said Kate, at or about the same time that Victor’s boat was at the town wharf. From the tower room she could discern a little speck, which she imagined to be a boat. She went home and began to sew faster than ever, as though to make up for time lost in going on her little trip to investigate. Kate Hallock knew perfectly well that something had happened to make her father and mother uncomfortable. No one had said so, it is true, but she felt the worry, whatever it was, that troubled them.

“Mamma,” said Kate, after a long bit of silence between them. “I was very naughty the night you came home from New York and told me Frank was to go to school; for after I went to bed, I lay awake thinking that I ought to go just as much as Frank, and how ever so nice it would be to be at school and 127have a handsome brother like Frank coming, all dressed in his uniform, to see me.”

“But, Kate, my dear,” began Mrs. Hallock with a sigh.

Before she could utter another word, Kate had cast down her work and put her arms about her mother’s neck.

“O, mamma, I got over it right away, the very instant I thought of all the lonely rooms for you at home, and papa every night when he gets back from business, and poor Neptune in his stall, with nobody to love him much! It’s a lovely afternoon to go and give Grandma Dobson a drive, she is always so sweet, and ‘ready in a minute’ to go when I ask her! I don’t really and truly, mamma, think it would be best for me to go to school, even if you wished to have me.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Hallock, kissing the pretty face close to her own, “what should you say if your papa thought it best to sell Neptune?”

“Sell my Neptune, mamma!” ejaculated Kate, with a gasp. “I should say that I would rather live on bread and water all the rest of my life—mortal existence they call it in church, don’t they, mamma?” with a miserable little attempt at a laugh.

Kate began dimly to discern that the trouble she had felt related to money matters, and if economy could save Neptune, economy she was ready to practice to the utmost.

“If you had to choose, Kate, between Frank’s going to school and keeping your pony?”

“If I were Frank,” said Kate, “I should go to work and help papa instead of going to school. But, 128mamma, tell me all about it. I thought papa was rich. We live like rich folks, I am sure, and I don’t think we ought to make any pretence about anything. Grandma Dobson doesn’t, and I shouldn’t wonder one bit if that is just the reason that her poor brown house always seems so pleasant. Has papa lost much money?”

“Yes, my dear. Your papa may have to give up our pleasant home here; but we hope to keep it.”

Kate began to look very sorrowful.

“Then, mamma, why send Frank to school at all?” she questioned. “It will cost ever so much money.”

“We have decided that it is best to do so, hoping that Frank may become all that we wish him to be.”

“Yes,” said Kate, “it will be nice, some day, to have a president or a governor for a brother. I’ll do without new dresses this winter, and squeeze into my last winter’s cloak and shorten up my arms some way to fit the sleeves. You remember they got pretty short before the winter was over; and I’ll—let me see—what can I do? I’ll do anything in the wide world to keep Neptune. Why, mamma, I’d just as soon think of selling Frank or you! I’ll manage to feed him without costing papa one cent. There’s lots of salt grass that nobody ever thinks of cutting, and then there’s the pieces of bread that are always left.”

Mrs. Hallock smiled.

“Anyhow,” said Kate, blushing deeply and with tears in her eyes, “you just leave the feeding part to me; and I know Harry Cornwall will help me. You’ve no idea the lots and lots of stuff he has raised 129this year; and I’m sure it will be real nice to make sacrifices for dear Frank. You know, mamma, it will be like the story books.”

Kate grew quite eager as she ran on, planning what she could do, if affairs got to the very worst; and she was in the midst of it all when Frank came in with a basket of fine fish, which he displayed with all a fisherman’s pride.

“Has my uniform come yet?” he questioned.

“Mamma!” asked Kate, “will Frank’s new clothes cost much money?”

“Ah, Kate!” cried Frank, “so you want all the money for your own pretty dresses, do you?”

“No, I don’t, Master Frank; and I was wondering whether the uniform would help any in making you a great man.”

“I shall never make a great man, Kate,” said Frank, “and the sooner you give up that hope for me the better.”

“Then,” said Kate, “I’ll make a great woman of myself.”

Kate had, in the midst of her utmost devotion to Frank, moments of self-assertion. If he would not be the actor in whom she could rejoice, then she felt the necessity to be that which he would not be.

“I should not wonder one bit if you did,” mused Frank. “Let me see—which one of the distinguished will you pattern after?”

Mrs. Hallock had left the room after taking a glance at Frank’s fish, so that Kate felt quite free to impart the news she had received, in her own manner.

130“Frank,” said Kate, her eyes shining, “if I were you, I’d go to school and make of myself the very best scholar I could. I’d learn and learn until I knew enough to support myself and lots of folks besides—I would. O, Frank! did you know that papa has lost ever so much money, and that maybe Neptune will be sold to pay for your uniform, or something?”

“Whew!” cried Frank. “Who said so?”

“Mamma told me so this very afternoon, and we are going to do without ever so many things this winter, to save money for you.”

“I’ve noticed that something was going wrong for some time,” said Frank, “and now it’s out. Well, you can get along without Neptune, Kate, and it does cost a great deal to keep a horse.”

“How much did papa pay for the Clover?” questioned Kate.

“Fifty dollars. I know, because I went with him to buy it.”

“You can sell that, I know,” said Kate, assuredly, “for I know who will buy it.”

“Catch me selling my boat!” cried Frank; “indeed I won’t. I shall want it every vacation, unless it’s at Christmas holidays.”

“The Clover would be just as happy with anybody else rowing it as with you in it, Frank.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“Why, my poor Neptune would break his heart to go away from his home and from me.”

“Nonsense! Horses get used to things.”

“Frank, you know how much I love my pony, and there is only one Neptune in the whole world for me; 131but there are plenty of boats that you wouldn’t know from the Clover, that you can have some day.”

“Pshaw! Neptune would fetch a couple of hundred dollars, I think, though he is rather slow and getting a little old.”

“Yes, that is it!” burst out Kate, with a flood of tears running down her face. “He is getting old, and somebody would begin to abuse him and sell him cheap by-and-by; and he’d be driven off, lame and half starved, by a cruel old fellow from a horse-market in New York. I’ve seen them when I’ve been there, and I’ve just wanted to be the general of the biggest army that ever marched, and see if I couldn’t set some things right and save the poor, old, lame, hungry beasts that had done their best in their best days, working away for their masters. Frank, Neptune sha’n’t be sold to send you to school—there now!” and Kate ran off to the stable and was having her cry out, with her arms around Neptune’s neck, when Harry Cornwall, passing by, heard her sobbing.

“What has happened, Kittie?” he questioned, looking in.

It was too late for Kate to pretend that she was not crying and in real trouble, but Kate was too loyal to her parents to tell what had happened, and so she said:

“Thank you, Harry, it isn’t anything that I can tell you about. Perhaps you will know some day.”

She wiped her eyes and went in with Harry to show him the splendid luck Frank had had fishing.

“See what you lost!” cried Frank, exultingly, “when you might just as well as not have gone with me.”

132“I couldn’t go without neglecting Mrs. Dobson’s farm—I mean the onions,” said Harry, “and onions will be fetching a good price presently. I’ve a good many of them, too, and it’s just the weather to get them in. I don’t mean to be selfish either,” continued Harry, “but the onions and the oats are my crops on shares. Mrs. Dobson gives me half, so you see I’ve a special interest in silver-skins.”

“Do you know, Harry,” questioned Kate, “will horses eat onions?”

“What a goose!” said Frank.

“I don’t think they will, Kittie,” answered Harry. “Why?”

“Because,” bravely said Kate, “I’ve taken the responsibility of keeping Neptune this winter, and I knew you’d help me, Harry, with whatever you could spare.”

“I’ve a share in the oats, and you shall have all that Neptune can eat. We’ve a good hundred bushels between us.”

“Then Neptune will not suffer, and we’ll see what can be done when Master Frank is off in his uniform and everything is frozen up good and white for the winter,” said Kate, with a feeling of relief concerning Neptune.

Chapter XIII.

Grandma Dobson, with a snowy white cap sitting demurely upon her silver curls, sat in the blue rocking chair, knitting a gray sock. She was in the open doorway and it was near sunset. The golden light was all about the placid face, whose lines of sweet patience seemed drawn clearer and fairer than on any other afternoon of her life.

She knitted away with her busy fingers, her eyes taking harvest of all the beauty lying toward the setting sun. Now and then, looking at the quince trees that grew along the garden wall, she made anew a little calculation concerning the quantity of quinces she could gather when the time for gathering should come. There was always a good market for quinces. Beyond the garden wall, concealed by the quince trees that lay between, was the apple orchard, now heavy with fruitage. Mrs. Dobson always enjoyed the apple harvest, when there was an apple harvest to enjoy. She remembered gathering apples from that orchard for Captain Dobson to take away on the Snow, in the year before they were married.

The fingers knitted slower and slower, stumbling over the stitches at last; then they ceased from effort, and the gray sock was let fall across her dress. A 134shadow came over the slant sunlight. Mrs. Dobson caught up the sock, a half-guilty color suffusing face and throat.

“Did I frighten you, grandma?” questioned Harry. “I’m sorry.”

“I am afraid it was my wicked thoughts that frightened me, laddie. I was foolish enough to go contrary to what God thinks best for me, and when you came so quick around the corner, I was wondering what on earth I should do if Captain Dobson should come back—so foolish, after more than thirty years!”

“And you wouldn’t even know him, would you?” questioned Harry, dropping his hat on the door stone and sitting down beside it.

“Yes, Harry, I think I should. I’m sure I’d feel very bad if Captain Dobson didn’t remember me, and I never doubt that he would remember me as long as he did anything about this world.”

“And nobody ever was known to come back after being gone thirty years, was there, grandma?”

“Nobody that I ever heard of; and, Harry, it is only when I sit down and dream awake, or in my sleep, that I ever believe that he can. I haven’t let myself play he comes in a long time before, and I shouldn’t now, but I was waiting for you to come home to tea.”

“I almost hope he won’t come,” said Harry, “’cause if he did, I should have to move on somewhere.”

“Then you don’t care to go?” questioned Mrs. Dobson, with a little breath of eagerness. “I was afraid, when there was so much talk of Frank’s going off to the grand school, that my boy would grow discontented.”

135“Not a bit of it, grandma. I got grandeur enough at the circus to last me a lifetime. I’m sorry sometimes, though, because I see so much make-believe in ’most everything. I wonder if it is wicked to hate make-believe as much as I do.”

“Dear me! Harry Cornwall, what can I do if you begin to hate me?” exclaimed Mrs. Dobson, thrusting the knitting-needles into parallel lines through the sock and looking with severity at him.

“No danger of that, grandma. You are as transparent as the water in this well—and you know it is relied on always for pure clearness. I must have a drink, and while we are at tea I’ve something to tell you.”

At the table Harry related nearly everything that had happened at the Point during his little visit there, together with his thoughts and fears of what might happen.

“Dear, dear me!” sighed Mrs. Dobson. “What can we—you and I, Harry—do for our friends?”

“We can wait and watch for a chance, grandma. It won’t do to let on what we’ve found out. When everybody knows about the trouble, then we can seem to know it, too.”

“I thought you hated make-believe, my laddie.”

“That isn’t what I mean by making believe. I found Kate sobbing away and telling her grief to her pony, and I more than half think that Neptune understood every word she said, too.” Then suddenly turning his bright face upon Mrs. Dobson, the boy said: “I know one way to help them, a little.”

“What is that?” she asked, eagerly.

136“Oh! a way?”

“Tell it!” with a near approach to impatience for Mrs. Dobson.

“To have your dream come true, grandma! because, then, you would not need me. I should be in the way here, and I’ve an immense good opinion of myself—I could make myself very useful over at the Point, and save money in a good many ways for Mr. Hallock that Hugo never thinks of.”

“I can get along beautifully without you,” said Mrs. Dobson, after a pause, “that is, until the spring; after you get the crops all in, I mean; and you could come over once in a while by running across your bridge, even if it was cold weather.”

“Now, grandma, you’re making believe you’d get along comfortably without me,” said Harry, reproachfully.

“No, I am not,” she said, trying very hard to steady her voice. “I didn’t say there wouldn’t be very hard days and unpleasant hours. I said I could get along nicely, and so I can, and will, if it seems best.”

“And here we are a-dreaming away, when perhaps I am not wanted at all,” said Harry, “and Primrose is waiting by this time at the bars for me. If Captain Dobson should come before I get through milking, grandma, you swing the strainer—here it is” (catching it from a gooseberry bush by the door and tossing it to her), “white as snow—for I want a chance to run upstairs and put myself in order to do you honor before a visitor.”

“What dreamers we are, to be sure,” sighed Mrs. Dobson, as she watched the lad go his way past the 137quince trees and through the orchard to the meadow-bars, where Primrose waited.

The sun was just dropping out of sight. She watched it with eyes that grew misty with wistfulness.

“Foolish! foolish!” she murmured, smiling the very ghost of a smile, as she turned to gather up the cups and plates from the tea table.

When Harry fetched in the milk she was washing them, just as usual, he thought, while she was thinking that if Harry could be of more service at the Point than in the Lane, he ought to go there.

The next morning Frank Hallock went bounding into the brown house to exhibit himself in the uniform which had arrived the night before. “The swamp-bridge is a capital institution, Harry,” he said. “When I go to Congress, I’ll vote for swamp-bridges all along the coast. How do you like me in my fine feathers?”

Mrs. Dobson surveyed Frank’s fine figure and erect carriage, and pronounced the uniform “fit for any gentleman.”

Harry remarked: “My mother used to say that real soldiers are always gentlemen, and never” (he added on his own account) “leave a lady to find her way alone across a marsh, as our soldier left his sister just now.”

“Oh! you mean Kate,” said Frank, too well pleased at the moment to resent anything that anyone might say. “Kate had no need to come. She only wanted to hear what you would say to my new clothes.”

And just here Kate presented herself, panting for breath and disappointed. She had lost that first 138expression of pleased surprise that she longed to see. However, her enjoyment was too simple and genuine to be long delayed at any time, and one or two laughing sentences from her precious brother made far away the wrong of a few moments ago.

“Don’t be so grand, Frank, that you can’t come to see me. I am afraid the military school will spoil you for the old brown house and Grandma Dobson,” Mrs. Dobson said, as they were about to go home.

“I’ll come at the Christmas vacation,” replied Frank, “and bring three or four of the fellows and spend the day here. You see if I don’t! I’ll be civil enough, though, to let you know when, for four or five of us would eat an awful sight of your rye bread.”

“I’ll come over the day before and help you make it, grandma, and then I’ll come that day and help eat it,” said Kate, kissing the dear soul good-bye, and departing in jubilant spirits with Frank.

“Let us go home by the way of the town wharf,” said Frank. “I want to find out if there’s any chance of getting to the island to-day; and maybe we’ll catch Captain Green or some of the fishermen there.”

Frank had left unexpressed his strong motive for going, but Kate added: “O, yes, Frank, and then they can see your perfectly lovely uniform. You can’t think how fine you look and how proud of you in it I am. I’d rather not have a single new thing to wear this winter and be able to see you in it.”

“What an admiring duck you are!” observed Frank. “In return, I’ll get together the best set of adjectives I can muster to do you honor in your next finery”—with which promise they came within sight of the pier. 139On it a stranger was walking and peering with interest into every little boat thereabout.

“I wonder who that is,” said Frank, straightening himself and walking down the wharf as though he owned it and the harbor also. Kate straightened her hat and walked demurely by his side. Kate could not assume airs and graces that were not her own.

“Good morning, my lad,” said the stranger to Frank.

“Good morning,” returned Frank, a little stiff at having been called “my lad” by the man.

“That uniform looks very well, indeed. I didn’t think it could be so exact a fit as it is,” remarked the man. “You are the son of Mr. Hallock at the Point yonder. I know,” he added with a smile, “for I sent that suit to him yesterday.”

“Then you are Mr. North,” returned Frank, not quite so freezing in his air of boyish consequence.

“Yes, and perhaps you can help me. I come out to this region very often during the fall and winter for duck-shooting, and I have so great difficulty in securing a boat that I wish to buy one. Do you know of one for sale?”

“Yes,” spoke up impulsive Kate; “there is your own boat, Frank.”

“I’ll lend it to you to-day,” said Frank pleasantly to Mr. North, adding with a lordly look in Kate’s direction, “but my boat is not for sale.”

Mr. North walked to the Point with the children, and, having secured the boat, soon departed for the day. He returned at evening and was a good deal 140surprised at seeing the young girl he had noticed with Frank in the morning, waiting at the little boathouse, apparently to meet him. He was astonished when she questioned him thus:

“Do you wish to buy my brother’s boat?”

“Yes, if he will sell it to me; it is a good little affair and answers my purpose nicely: that is, if it can be taken care of here for me until the spring.”

“O, yes,” said Kate. “But how much will you give for it?”

“How much does your brother ask for it?”

“O, I don’t know as he will sell it; but I know how much my father paid for it. He gave forty dollars in the spring, and Frank named it to please me; but I wish he would sell it and you would buy it.” Then with a quick impulse, Kate asked, “How much did Frank’s new clothes cost?”

Without giving direct reply, Mr. North said: “We will make an exchange, if your brother pleases—I will take the boat for the uniform.”

“What a good way! Thank you,” said Kate softly, and before the words had died away upon the air, she was off to the house with the good news to Frank, but Frank was not at home. When he did arrive, he was cross and peevish, and would not take with a grain of good sense or amiability one word that Kate said; and so she resolved to keep her secret about the boat until morning.

Chapter XIV.

The following morning Kate waited with exceeding patience for the proper moment to arrive in which to speak to Frank regarding the Clover and Mr. North.

“And I told him, Frank,” she went on to say, as he stood glowering at her from his superior height, “that the boat cost—I mean that papa paid forty—”

“It was fifty dollars, Kate,” ejaculated Frank, “that was paid for the boat; and if you hadn’t—”

“O, Frank!” besought Kate, with an eager tremble in her voice, “I am so sorry I forgot. I thought it was forty; but you can tell him and then you’ll get back ten dollars that you can spend just as you please; and you are always wanting new things, you know. You can buy, Frank, that nice new kind of a fishpole that you asked papa for, or you can get—”

“Just like you,” returned Frank, interrupting her suggestion. “A fishpole would do me a good deal of good without the Clover to go with it. I’ll tell you what, I’ll just keep my boat and get the pole in some way. Mother will help me out with it.”

“O, Frank Hallock! if you only knew what mamma is doing, and going to do, this winter, you’d never think of asking her for a penny. When you are gone, 142Mary is going away and we will only have the cook and mamma, and I am going to do all Mary’s work; and I heard papa talking about having only Hugo or some one other man to do everything that is to be done outside of the house. I shall enjoy helping about everything so much, dear Frank, when I think that you are having a good time at school and it is making you happier.”

Frank turned away without a word and went out into the sweet, cool air of the morning.

Kate ran lightly up the staircase, and in two minutes came down again with hat and wrappings on to drive her father to the railway station.

Mr. Hallock appeared presently, looking very grave and anxious. As he came, Kate said: “All ready, papa, and waiting for you.”

“Kate, dear,” he replied, “I have a reason for wishing that Frank should go with me this morning, and you may meet me this afternoon at five. I’m coming home early to-day. Good-bye, my child,” and he gave the disappointed face a kiss and went out. Kate followed, thinking to find Frank for her father. The boy was already at the stable.

“Come, Frank!” said Mr. Hallock, “I wish you to go with me this morning.”

“Can’t Kate go, or Hugo?” returned Frank. “The tide is just right for fishing and it will use up half an hour or more.”

“Get in,” said his father, sternly. With a frown and a surly air, Frank slipped into the light wagon and threw himself upon the seat.

143“Never mind, Frank,” urged Kate in a low voice, close to the wheel on Frank’s side. As the horse started, she added: “I’ll have the fishing-tackle all ready for you, and the bait, too, if I can.”

Mr. Hallock drove and not a word had been spoken when they reached the village. As they were passing along the principal street, Mr. Hallock said:

“My son, I am in the midst of cares and business difficulties that you cannot understand. Your mother and myself are willing to do many things this winter, in order to send you to school. We do it gladly, out of love for you. If you could stay fourteen a year or two, it would not matter so much whether or not you went this winter; but time is precious. Now, my boy, Kate told me last night that Mr. North suggested taking your boat, and I wish you to part from it cheerfully and without a word of repining. It is yours, and it is you who must write to him to-day and tell him that he can have it.”

“But, father—” and then came the signal of the advancing train. In two minutes Mr. Hallock was upon it on his way to New York and Frank was rushing with speed through the village on his way home, cherishing, as he went, no very kind feeling toward his sister Kate.

Having left the horse, he was going toward the boathouse, when Kate appeared on the highway, carrying a basket.

“I was afraid to stay a minute longer,” she said, when they came within speaking distance. “I was so afraid you would be gone, Frank. I found a few 144clams—look! enough to keep you in bait quite awhile,” Kate continued, speaking very rapidly, as though apprehensive of interruption. “You know, Frank, you are going to be a beautiful brother and let Mr. North have the Clover; and mamma said I might go fishing with you to-day, if you would keep inside the harbor.”

“Kate Hallock!” exclaimed Frank, “it was none of your business to go telling father what Mr. North said. I could tell him myself, when I wanted him to know anything about it. No! I won’t let you go with me just because you did tell.”

“O, Frank! I thought papa would be so very glad, because I heard him say that he needed every single dollar he could save; and I thought you would be as happy as I was myself, when he said he would do it. And I went and got your lines and clams and everything; and I don’t care to fish, so I’ll bait your hook every time.”

“No, Kate; I’ve got to give up the boat, and I will have it all to myself this last day; besides, it is still, and if I see Captain Green outside, I’m going out beyond the island to fish. So you see you could not go.”

“O, Frank, don’t go alone; please don’t! Get Harry Cornwall to go with you,” she urged; but he resisted that appeal, and saying there was no time to spare in hunting up Harry, who was doubtless off in some potato field or other, kept on his way to the little boathouse where the Clover lay.

“I’ll tell you what, Frank,” said Kate, her heart beating fast with hope, “I’ll run across lots to the 145Lane and find him, and I’m sure he’ll go if I ask him; and you can wait and fish a few minutes down by the coal dock, till he has time to get there. I’ll be as quick as ever I can. I don’t believe mamma will care if I do not stop to go back and ask her.”

Kate was running by the time she finished speaking, and she did not hear Frank’s last call, which was “I sha’n’t wait a minute for anybody”; and she did not stop until she reached the stone wall that separated the meadow lands from the highway. When she stood within the low doorway of Mrs. Dobson’s kitchen, she could only gasp forth,

“Where’s Harry?”

“What is the matter with you, Kittie, my Clover? You’re as—”

“Please tell me quick where Harry is,” panted forth Kate. “I must find him.”

“Then you come right in and sit down until you get your breath and I’ll go call him. He’s topping corn this morning.”

Now Kate knew the Dobson cornfield just as well as anyone, and off she started, before Mrs. Dobson could take down her sunbonnet and shawl from its peg on the kitchen wall.

Arrived there, she shouted for Harry, who presently appeared out of the corn and hastened to the fence where Kate waited.

It seemed so trivial, this calling Harry away from real, necessary-to-be-done work to go fishing, just because Frank would run into danger, that for an instant, as Harry came forward, she resolved to let 146Frank go; but the wave of fear returned upon her by the time he reached the fence and she cried out:

“O, Harry, will you do something for me? Tell me ‘yes’ quick!”

“You know I will, Kittie,” said Harry, removing his hat to wipe his forehead—for he had been working fast.

“Then go fishing right off with Frank; it’s the last time he’s going in the Clover, and he would go off to the island. Make haste now and you can catch him at the coal dock. He has gone down the harbor and he is all alone, and if the wind should blow”—she said, with a sudden tremble in her tones—“or if the fog should come and he off there fishing all alone—”

Whether it were the pleading of Kate’s eyes or of her voice, or the arguments she used that influenced Harry, it were impossible to determine; but he went in haste across field and meadow to the coal dock, only to see Frank and the Clover making great speed outside the harbor toward the island.

As he stood there, helpless, on the beach, watching the boat, Kate reached his side, and, seeing her brother in the distance, she burst into tears.

“I’m sure I did everything I could,” she sobbed. “Only if Frank should get lost, I never, never could forgive myself for having told papa!” and Kate sank down on the sand and cried out her sorrow and disappointment, as well as her weariness.

Harry waited patiently until the little storm was over. Then he said:

147“If you were to tell me all about it, don’t you think I could help you a little?”

“I wanted to tell you ever since I knew,” sighed Kate, with one tear-dimmed glance seaward, “only I thought that perhaps papa and mamma might wish it not spoken of; but now I am sure—” and then Kate went on to tell Harry all that she knew and thought, and a good deal that she felt, about affairs at home. At last she said, “I can bear everything but to let Neptune go. If poor Nep goes, Harry, I want to go with him. He’s my friend—just as Josh is Mrs. Dobson’s; and O, Harry, do you think I ought to tell papa he may sell him?”

Harry was trying to see Frank’s Clover, but somehow it looked very much as though it had been caught in a sudden fog; but it was a fog easily brushed away from the lad’s eyes, as he turned to say to Kate:

“If, Kittie, it comes to selling Neptune, promise me one thing—that you will not let him go until you have told me about it.”

“I promise, Harry; but what good will that do?”

“We will see when the time comes. I am glad you have told me. But, Kittie, I must not spend my morning here. If the wind blows hard, I will go to the town wharf and get a boat to go out after Frank.”

“Mamma has not the least idea that I am not gone with Frank. I must go home and tell her,” said Kate; and thus they parted, Kate going by the way of the brown house to explain her conduct to Mrs. Dobson, and Harry to the cornfield, summing up as he went, for the fortieth or fiftieth time, his little earthly 148all and wondering whether or not it would do any good to get it all together, in readiness for an emergency.

The day went on, bright and warm for the season, until the afternoon came, and with it there breathed in from the sea a cool, damp air, that presently, almost before one thought of it, changed all the atmosphere to dense fog.

Kate had many times during the morning hours made little visits to the tower room and adjusted the glass, to take into view Frank’s boat. Seeing it, lying off the island and nearby another boat—Captain Green’s, without doubt—she had ceased to feel troubled. Even Mrs. Hallock was satisfied with Kate’s reports, as they came to her from time to time, and contented herself, being very busy in preparing Frank’s clothing for school, until she saw the fog sweep past the windows. Hugo was sent off in haste to learn the whereabouts of Captain Green and the whole household grew anxious and restless.

Kate drove Neptune to the station to meet her father, and greeted him with the news that Frank was off fishing outside of the island, all alone, when the fog came down.

The September twilight followed. It was night and still the fog held down. The old sea began to roll with an easterly swell, and Frank was not heard from. Kate put every lamp that she could muster into the tower room, for a lighthouse.

Chapter XV.

As Frank rowed down the harbor in the morning, he saw himself clearly, in the light of conscience, as a selfish, contemptible brother. He admitted to himself that he ought to have taken Kate in the Clover and given her a morning’s pleasure on this one of the latest days he should be at home.

Two or three times he half yielded to the impulse to go back for her and began to row with uncertain weak stroke outward, when, with sudden impetus, Victor, from the island, shot past him with the call “You’d better hurry! Capital morning for fishing, and we’re off at high water for Long Island.”

“It’s my last chance to see the fishing-boats and the old mill and everything, and mother won’t let Kate go outside any time,” thought Frank, and he bent to the oars and shot past the coal dock, as seen by Kate and Harry in the last chapter.

At the island everyone was busy preparing to leave for new fishing-grounds—the season for fishing in that part of the Sound being nearly past. The great seines were being taken down from the reels along the side of the wharf, casks of water were going out to sloops in small boats, and every fisherman was getting together his individual belongings, to say good-bye to the island for weeks to come.

150Frank made the Clover fast to the wharf, climbed the ladder and wandered about awhile, watching the work that was going on and secretly wondering whether or not if he had worn his uniform the men would have paid more heed to him, for a chance word was all the attention he could elicit, until Victor returned from town. Victor had been to the postoffice to obtain the latest news from the homes of the men before they should set sail. Victor distributed his letters and then went, accompanied by Frank, “to pack up.”

As he proceeded to thrust into a huge carpet-bag his belongings, he said:

“I wanted to see that land toggery of yours you’re going to school in.”

“It isn’t much,” answered Frank. “You’ll see it maybe at Christmas. You’ll be back here before that time to lay up for winter and I’ll be at home at vacation.” Then suddenly turning upon Victor, he asked, “Why don’t you go home for Christmas? I should think you’d want to see your home again.”

“I’m going some day,” said Victor, his blue eyes gleaming and his beautiful white teeth showing to advantage. “I’ll take you home to Germany. There’s much Christmas coming—plenty of time.”

“But folks die between one Christmas and another,” remarked Frank, adding, “however, I hope your folks will not, and I’ve half a mind to run away and go to Germany with you, when you do go, anyhow.”

“I’ll remember you when I let go for the Fatherland,” replied Victor, as he gave vigorous thrusts to 151get into the bag a pair of boots. The bag, large as it was, refused to close over them; and so he made it fast with a rope, threw it over his shoulder, and carried it down to the landing.

At that instant the dinner-horn was blown from the door of the little house on the island, and every man, notwithstanding his haste, immediately responded with his presence. At the last dinner of the fishing season Frank was present and assisted vigorously, after which he rowed Victor and his big bag in the Clover out to Victor’s boat. Then he bade him good-bye and stood off while the sails went up and the anchors were hoisted on board a dozen yachts of the fishing fleet.

It was a sad sight to Frank and to Captain Green, who was fishing outside the island, to see the brave boats stepping away into the distance. The tide being fair and the wind light, they were a long time in sight; and the old man fishing thought the Sound would be lonely now, and the boy “was rather glad he was going away to school, after all; there wouldn’t be so much fun now on the water, anyway.”

Frank felt dispirited. He would have picked up his oars and rowed for home had he not heard an exclamation from Captain Green, who at the instant pulled in a fish of extraordinary size, which Frank seeing, felt a desire to do likewise. So for the first time that day, Kate’s clams came into service, and Frank fell to fishing with right good will. It was, as Victor had remarked in the morning, “a capital day for fishing”; either the bait was very alluring or the fish were very hungry, for they bit vigorously and came into the boats in great numbers.

152The Clover lay about five hundred feet from Captain Green’s position, and, so rapidly did the fog come down upon them—busy at baiting and pulling in—that neither the experienced man nor the inexperienced boy knew of its approach until it had shut them in.

“Sakes alive!” shouted Captain Green. “Frank! Frank Hallock!”

Frank responded, thinking Captain Green must have pulled up anchor and moved position since last he noticed him.

“Hold on!” called the Captain.

“I’m holding on!” screamed back Frank, trying his best to pierce the fog with his eyes.

“No, no! I’ll hold on and you get up anchor and pull for me—that will be the better way—and we’ll keep together till we get in somewhere.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” yelled Frank, wondering what in the world made Captain Green get around on the other side of him.

“Confound the boy!” thought the man in a rage. “I wonder how he got outside of me without my knowing it.”

Now it so happened that neither boat had changed position since the fishing station had been chosen. Frank toiled at the anchor line and pulled the boat out to it and lifted it on board, then took up his oars and rowed a few strokes. Hearing nothing from Captain Green, he paused and gave a call.

“Here; this way—row this way,” responded the Captain.

“All right; I’m coming,” gleefully from Frank, reached his ears; and then he listened, thinking it 153quite time he should hear the oar-strokes of the advancing boat. Meanwhile Frank peered cautiously at the veil of fog, trying to discern the outline of his friend’s boat and feeling very glad to know that it was there somewhere near him, even though he could not see it.

“Where are you?” from Captain Green, boomed against the bank of fog. He called again—he shouted—he roared; and Frank, hearing the faintest note of it, kept on rowing in the direction whence the sound seemed to come. Poor Frank was following the voice of Echo, instead of the warm, palpitating notes that the half-distracted Captain sent after him; he was rowing after the phantom voice that lured him farther and farther away from the land.

“It’s time I got to him; I’m sure it is,” thought Frank, no suspicion of the truth entering his mind. Gaily he accosted his neighbor. “Ring the school-bell, Captain, and I will come,” he called, and seemed to hear, in response, a knell of sound, as of some deep, far-away fog-bell booming solemnly.

For the first time in his life, as the Clover lay on the slow swell of the sea that he might listen, Frank Hallock felt a thrill of fear. What could it mean? Where was Captain Green? Could he have gone off and left him out there all alone?

Frank called and listened, and called again until his voice grew dull and husky with shouting, and the only sound that seemed to respond was that dreadful toll, whether of his own heart beating or of fog-bell, he could not tell.

154Meanwhile Captain Green, becoming thoroughly alarmed at the non-appearance of the Clover, pulled up his own anchor and began to row in the direction Frank’s boat had lain. After rowing around for awhile, he concluded to let his boat drift with the tide, knowing that in time it would take him toward the land. It so happened that the sound of water, swashing on the stones of the island, assailed his hearing, and, after many attempts, he succeeded in following the sound to its source.

Having landed on the island, he immediately gave the alarm, and, after having secured a boat and an oarsman, set forth in search of Frank, with a compass as guide and the dinner-horn as trumpet.

They rowed north and south and east and west, the Captain acting as trumpeter, and the only answer obtained from all their efforts was one shrill steam-whistle as a passing steamboat made haste to change its course to get out of the way of a supposed sailing vessel.

During all this time Frank Hallock was pulling out to sea, firmly believing that he was making for the Connecticut coast. He heard neither horn nor call nor whistle, as he steadily moved on his course. Meanwhile the afternoon had been passing and the early evening was drawing near. To Frank the fog seemed to be deepening, but it was the deepening of darkness.

Many times he laid down his oars and set his ears to listen with an intentness that made him feel as though he was all ears. He imagined many sounds, but heard 155nothing except the splash of his own boat’s bow on the sullen sea; then he would take up his oars, and, counting a hundred strokes, lay them down and listen once again; but each and every time with the same sickening failure to hear sound of helping man.

It was not until the darkness grew to night, and night unrelieved by light or star, that Frank became thoroughly alarmed—and that he felt to the full the dulling drench of the fog. It seemed to sink down through the crown of his cap and suffuse hair and brain; it seemed to be swept through him from shoulder to shoulder, and his very feet turned limp and his knees shook as he arose and tried to stand for a moment, to relieve the cramp that had settled down upon them.

“O that it would rain or blow or do anything but fog on like this,” he thought. “I wonder what Kate would do out here now, to-night!” Nevertheless, Frank could not help wishing, far down in his heart, that Kate was with him out there, and he began to be very sorry that she was not, for somehow a savor of comfort seemed always to be around Kate.

Whatever else came of the fog, loss of appetite did not, and Frank began to feel all the beseeching of hunger.

“I wonder how long a fellow could live out here, anyhow,” he murmured, “if it should go on fogging forever, and if, after a day or two of it, I should want my supper as much as I do now? I want a loaf of rye bread and a couple of quarts of milk like everything, and I wouldn’t mind having an apple, or even 156a glass of water would taste first-rate. There must be sailing craft around here thick as berries in a pudding—if I could only run against one now.” But the only thing Frank ran against was deeper darkness and now and then a denser fog-bank.

The last button of Frank’s coat was buttoned ere long. Whatever else of cold there was to come, he must bear as best he could. He rowed a little to keep warm and shouted a good deal, and began to feel the awful pressure of loneliness clasping him tighter and tighter. At last the cold damp affected his strained eyeballs to such degree that he was compelled to shut his eyes; and then somehow—exactly how he could not understand—he began to see himself, not out there, mistbound in the cool autumn evening, tossing up and down on the swell of the sea, but just himself as he was, as he had been living from day to day in his home, and his selfishness began to grow into something awful. He wished he could remember a few kind, nice, good things that he had done for somebody over there on that queer land, that must be somewhere, but which seemed so far away, and a good deal more like a dream than—but what was that noise? Frank shouted to it, but the rolling porpoise did not think it worth while to wait and make reply.

At last, thoroughly worn out, Frank sank down gradually into his boat and began to sob. There was no one to hear and he sobbed on until the misery of the darkness and the breathing waters grew into him. He wanted something that he had not; he wanted the solid land and safety; home, with its love and warmth, 157its lights and food; and all at once he wanted something more even than these—he wanted the God of the sea, in whose dreadful clasp he was caught, to be his friend.

He was tired of rowing, tired of calling, tired of everything. He wanted to go to sleep. Yes, Frank was, as he had said, fourteen and over and could take care of himself; but he, for the first time in many, many nights, went back to that most comforting form of petition, “Now I lay me.” With a firm resolve to be a better boy, sell the Clover, and be kind to Kate and love everybody, and always tell the truth and do just right, if he ever got to land, Frank sank into a state of damp unconsciousness.

When he awoke, the boat was tossing up and down; the fog was, if anything, denser than ever, and he was so stiff that on the first trial he could not sit up. To have had no supper was uncomfortable, to go breakfastless was hard; but the day was dawning. A light fog would be a few degrees better than a dark one; besides, by this time all the boats in the harbor must be beating about in search of him. But no boat found him all that long, cold day, and another night found Frank Hallock, limp and helpless and half unconscious, lying in the Clover, which drifted and drifted in the open Sound. It was the longest fog that had been known in many years.

Chapter XVI.

Again and again Kate Hallock reiterated the statement that only a little while before the fog came she saw two boats lying near the island.

“The boy is safe enough at the island,” said every one of the boatmen to whom Mr. Hallock applied for advice concerning the proper thing to do. Mr. Hallock himself believed that Frank was there and tried his utmost to convince Mrs. Hallock and Kate that Captain Green must have seen the fog coming in and would, without any doubt, look after the safety of Frank.

“I wish somebody would go over at low water and find out,” said Mrs. Hallock; and Harry Cornwall, hearing the words, determined to go.

“Just as soon as the fog lifts, I will go myself,” said Mr. Hallock, assuring his wife that until such time it would be unsafe for anyone to attempt it. To find one’s way across the wide stretch of sands, crossed a number of times by streams running from the salt meadows to the sea, would be wellnigh impossible.

It was low water on that night at midnight. An hour before that time, Harry Cornwall went to Mrs. Dobson’s door and told her that he was going to try to reach the island.

159In vain were all of Mrs. Dobson’s efforts to intimidate him: the darkness had no power to do it; the fog was something the experience of which he could not imagine; and, as for the possible quicksands into which he might wander, he was willing to take the chances, only too happy in the thought that by striding through danger he might be able to relieve the anxiety at the Point.

With a lantern in his hand and matches to light it, if necessary; with a board under his arm, as defense against a possible descent into the mud, he set forth, followed by Mrs. Dobson’s fears, and—in the distance—by Mrs. Dobson herself and Josh.

The Lane was narrow, or the way would soon have been a damp mystery to everybody concerned.

Harry went hurriedly, wishing to get to the bar before it should be low water; and he had reached the shore and plunged along fearlessly over quite a stretch of the tide-left sands before Mrs. Dobson was a hundred yards down the Lane. He was quite certain that he had followed the bank in about a straight line for the bar, and was going on famously when he found himself in a few inches of water.

“The creek!” he said to himself, delightedly. “I’m a third of the distance already to the bar; and when I get upon that, it will be as easy as the Lane, for I shall be fenced in with the sea.” With this assurance he went boldly into the creek, finding the water somewhat higher than the stage of the tide would lead one to expect. Harry had dug clams along the border of this creek many times and felt quite familiar with it, 160even in a fog—only it did seem wider than usual, as well as deeper; in fact, he soon felt persuaded that he was going either up the creek or down it, instead of across; but this creek seemed as wide as it was long, and on which side lay the land it was impossible to tell.

“I’ll try every direction,” he thought, “by turns,” and he went all around the compass; but whichever way he seemed to turn, he always found himself in deeper water. He tried to light the lantern, but the matches in his pocket were already wet.

Harry was compelled to admit that he had lost his way. The situation was anything but pleasant and very far from being a safe one, unless release should come before the turn of tide. He stood still awhile and listened. Reader, were you ever lost in a fog? If not, you cannot have the slightest conception of Harry’s feeling as he stood there. If he could wait until the next train passed, up or down, its signal whistles might guide him, but then the tide would have been two hours rising.

All this time the board had been tightly clasped under Harry’s arm. “How glad I am,” he suddenly exclaimed. “At least this board will float down with the tide and I shall know which way the land lies.” He laid it on the water, intending only to let it slip for an instant from his hand, when lo! it vanished into the mist and the darkness. Harry tried his utmost to vanish in the opposite direction, but it was all of no use. He wandered about with care, only to find that the water was gaining on him with every renewed effort. Truly, Harry Cornwall was in worse 161plight than Frank Hallock when midnight came to the two lads.

Meanwhile, on the little island, Captain Green had been anxiously awaiting the approach of low tide, that he might make the venture to reach the mainland. He was full of solicitude regarding the whereabouts of Frank and wished to give the alarm as soon as possible.

There was a brass cannon on the island, used chiefly to acquaint Long Island Sound with the presence of the Fourth of July on the land.

Giving directions that this cannon be fired should news of Frank be received, Captain Green started, in company with one of the workmen of the mill, for the Connecticut shore. They were aided by the light of a lantern and their guide was a compass.

During this time Mrs. Dobson, unwilling to be left alone in the mysterious fog even for a minute, held Josh by the collar and slowly felt her way along the Lane fence to the beach, wishing with all her heart, as she went, “that the Lord had not made boys and men so venturesome. Poor, dear lad!” she thought, as she stumbled along from post to post. “He never will get there! He’ll be lost on the awful sands! the cruel, creeping tide will draw him down. O, Harry, Harry!” and then she was crying out to him in the thick darkness, for at last she was come to the brink of the bank leading down to the sea-sands.

At her cry of “Harry! Harry!” Josh made one bounding leap for freedom, which he gained with a glad bark and was off, leaving Mrs. Dobson alone. Into the mist leaped Josh, easily following Harry, until 162he lost scent at the water’s edge. Then he stopped and uttered a few barks, just enough to reach the hearing of Harry and to gladden his heart more than I can tell.

Harry whistled, and in plunged the dog, getting to his friend in a marvelously short time and uttering his thankfulness at having found him by a perfect jubilation of sound, that made the old fog-banks, landward and seaward, echo and reecho his joy.

Captain Green and his companion had come to the land-end of the bar, where they also heard the bark.

“Sure’s I live,” said the mill-man, “that was Josh Dobson’s bark! I wonder what in the world he’s out on the coast for this night.”

“Somebody’s out there, lost, trying to cross, you may be sure,” replied Captain Green, and he sent a cheery call as far into the night as his voice would carry it, and all the time he was keeping close to the sea’s edge, by the dim, misty light of his lantern, anxious not to lose the water-line for an instant.

They shouted singly as they went, and they shouted together, and at length Harry, floundering still under Josh’s guidance, heard the call and responded. With the regularity of a fog-bell’s toll came the call and answer, until at last Harry caught the lantern’s glimmering light, and shortly after saw two forms, like giants, stretching out of the misty darkness.

The joy of being found and safe was quickly obscured by the news of Frank’s loss, which Captain Green and he together bore to Hallock Point, having left Mrs. Dobson safe at home on the way with Josh 163to guard her—although I’m quite sure no eye would have suspected that the brown house was in the Lane that night.

The dawn came at last, but the fog was not gone. It seemed denser than ever; boats went down the harbor and outside, but came back only too soon, to say that it was of no use, nothing could be done,—clear weather could alone solve the mystery.

If the day was long on the shore, it was yet longer to the lad in the boat. He rowed aimlessly; as dinner time came he looked at the fish, a few of which lay in the boat, and wondered if he could eat raw fish. He varied his rowing with sitting afloat and shouting. He shouted and shouted, until he had changed the monotony by calling “Father,” and “Mother,” and “Kate,” and “Harry,” and every name of boy or man it seemed to him that he had ever known; and not one, of all the number, would give answer to his great beseeching.

As the day when on the cold increased, and the great sea beneath him rolled in a sullen swell that grew with the cold. At length Frank knew that another night was gathering on the face of the waters. All the hope that with so many sails on the Sound, one must come out of the mist, somewhere, to meet him, died out.

Poor Frank! he burst into a passion of tears. He felt forgotten, neglected. It seemed to him that somebody might at least have tried to find him. If it had been Kate now, and he had been on shore, why, he would have had boats, as thick as berries, out looking for her.

164Frank’s tears made him colder than ever. He took up a fish for the first time and looked at it. With fast numbing fingers he scraped with his knife a few scales and cut a bit of the fish, but he could not eat it, or the deepening swells sickened him, and he cast it into the sea.

It is useless to follow Frank through the night. He prayed with all his heart, feeling that no one but God could come to his aid. He made solemn promises to his Maker; at last he said that he would trust Him whether he lived and was saved, or whether he died alone in the boat. Frank meant to do just what he had promised. The mist was drenching him now more than ever; he tried to row, but his hands refused to hold the oars and one oar fell from his grasp into the sea. With a despairing clutch he tried to recover it, but it floated off on the swell and he could not get the boat around to the rescue; so it went off, as the great world had done, with all its light and warmth and food. Why, that pretty room of his own in the house at Hallock Point seemed, as he thought of it, like the loveliest place on earth, and oh! to hear Kate say “Dear Bub!” once more, what joy that would be. How Frank remembered the loving touch of his mother, tucking him into bed long ago. Frank seemed to remember every sweet and pleasant thing that ever had happened to him, and with equal power he recalled all his own bitter selfishness, and saw it, for the very first time, in its true light.

But how cold it was growing, and the billows were heaving the little boat up and down in a helpless kind 165of toss that was pitiful to think of. The second night and nobody to find him!

Frank was too cold to care much more. He shivered and cried again and tucked himself into a little roll down in the boat, and soon grew to be unconscious of all that was passing. All night the tiny boat went up and down on the sea. At midnight the fog lifted and the stars shone down, but Frank had suffered too much to know it. At day-dawn a gale began to blow and still the little cold bundle of boy lay in the Clover and knew not that the day had come, nor the gale, nor that a schooner had seen what was supposed to be a boat adrift and was bearing down to pick it up.

When Frank knew anything more, he was lying on a captain’s bed, in a captain’s cabin, with strange faces looking on; and there was a cup of hot soup at his lips, and somebody was urging him to “drink it.”

Very kindly, when Frank could tell his name and home, the schooner Blue Bell put into harbor at New Haven, to land him there.

“You’d better telegraph home, my boy, the instant you get on shore,” said the Captain to him. “It won’t be a moment too soon to relieve their minds.”

“I suppose, Captain,” said Frank, thanking him with a deal of boyish gratitude for having been so good as to save him, and go ten miles out of his way to land him—“I suppose, Captain, by the time you’ve sailed home to Maine, you’ll find three or four reams of paper done up into thanking letters, waiting for you.”

166“All right,” said the captain of the Blue Bell.

Frank thought it would be so much nicer to witness all the pleasure and surprise his appearance in the village would occasion—to go right in on the first train and meet everybody. Of course! What was the use in sending a telegram? And then suddenly Frank remembered how long the minutes must seem at home; and the first real self-sacrifice that he was conscious of for the good of others, was in hastening with all speed to the nearest telegraph office, and sending to his father this message:

“I’m all right at New Haven.”

You may be certain that the young man who received that message did not keep it many seconds lying in the office. No; he didn’t even wait to write it out, but appeared on the platform of the little station with shining visage, and announced “Frank Hallock’s all right in New Haven!”

“I’ll carry it!” cried half a dozen volunteer messengers; but while he hastened back to put it into proper form, three lads started on a run for Hallock Point.

Such a race as it was, to be sure! for everything was clear and bright now, and a steam-tug had steamed up at the town wharf, all ready to start, with orders to cruise up and down until the boy was found; and on board the tug were Mr. Hallock and Harry Cornwall; and many a man interested in the recovery of his neighbor’s lost boy was only too glad to lend his presence and sympathy to the occasion.

167Flying went the six feet down the highway, reaching the stone gateway leading into the grounds at the very instant Kate Hallock and her mother, in the phaeton, were putting Neptune to his utmost speed to try and reach the wharf before the tug should start.

“Hurrah!” cried three cloth caps—no, three boy voices (the caps were taking a circle around the heads and got a little mixed); but Kate, in her hurry, could not stop and cried, “Take care!” as the nearest lad almost pitched into Neptune’s fore feet.

“Stop, stop! he’s all right!” fairly yelled the lads, turning and running after the ladies.

“What do they say?” gasped Kate.

Neptune felt an awful pull at his mouth, and stood still.

“Why, Frank’s found!” gasped one.

“Found!” groaned Mrs. Hallock.

“He’s to New Haven!” panted No. 2, dashing his cap on his head, and thinking “They don’t act very glad, after all.”

“I say he’s all right!” ejaculated No. 3, “and he’s telegraphed it to say so. The man told us so and he’s a-going to send it down.”

“Frank’s alive and safe!” repeated Kate, bursting into tears.

“Thank you, boys! Come and see me this afternoon—will you?” said Mrs. Hallock, and gathering the lines in her hands, without waiting to hear their answer, she drove rapidly on, anxious to spread the glad tidings on board the tug.

Never in all his life had Neptune been so urged before to hurry over the well-known road to the town 168wharf. He went flying down the hill and out upon the wharf, Kate’s handkerchief waving as they went. But what did it mean, that instead of the tug starting, everybody on board was hurrying to get off? It meant that the good news had arrived a moment earlier. Neptune was duly turned around by the head on the narrow landing-place, and permitted to pursue his way more leisurely to the railroad station, to await the arrival of the next train from New Haven.

When it came up to the little station, a stranger would have thought—well, there is no telling what he would have thought; for the platform was solid with men and boys, while here and there, amid the number, peeped out a gladly tearful face of woman or little girl. In the phaeton, behind the station, Mrs. Hallock waited until, held by the grasp of his father’s hand upon his arm, Frank came around to smile and kiss and say how glad he was to be safe again.

“Mother, I think it’s done Frank good,” said Kate, aware in some mysterious manner that a change had come to her brother, even before he had told out the half of his story of the fog, and the cold, and the hunger, and the goodness of everybody on the Blue Bell.

O, that was the true Thanksgiving Day at the house on the Point. Mrs. Dobson was there for dinner, and Harry Cornwall; and Josh Dobson was remembered, for the part he acted, by all the turkey-bones a reasonable dog could eat; and everybody was just as happy as happy could be, and not one disagreeable word was spoken by anybody from the moment Frank was found until the last good night was said.

Chapter XVII.

After a night of blissful rest in his own bed at home, Frank wrote with absolute good will to Mr. North, delivering over to his ownership the Clover, then in care of a boatman at Long Wharf, in New Haven.

Frank was a happy, contented hero for a whole week, petted and noticed by whomsoever he was met. At the end of that time he went from this condition of affairs to be only “the new boy from the country” in General Russell’s school.

We may not stay to give the history of Frank’s school days, nor of the trials he there met. At Christmas he was expected home.

Kate subdued and endured her loneliness from day to day, her chief relief from Frank’s absence being found in writing to him long, loving letters, in which, very soon, many lines began to be taken up with the lovely times she was having at her drawing and painting lessons. Kate began to feel the stir of a growing affection for form and color. She scarcely understood the feeling; she did not try to understand its development; but she ran across the marsh bridge with every bit of fresh achievement, whether of pencil 170or brush, to show the same to delighted Mrs. Dobson and critical Harry.

Harry was exceedingly industrious in those days—more so than ever before. Harry had all the joy of an old miser in his well-stored crops, and he knew just when and where he could find sale for them.

For a number of days Mr. Hallock had returned from business bearing a brighter face, and Kate firmly believed that the old, bothersome days of trouble were passing away. Kate did not mind wearing last year’s dresses one bit; and as for last winter’s hat and cloak, the only day on which she sighed for better raiment was the one on which she went to call upon Frank at the school, and that sigh and wish were altogether on Frank’s account; but when he whispered to her, as she was leaving, “Kate, I say, I haven’t seen a girl in New Haven half so good-looking as you are,” she thought no more of old-fashioned hat or cloak, and would have been willing to wear even the precious old bonnet safely stored away in a big yellow bandbox in the garret at the Point—the bonnet that had been worn by her great-grandmother. Anything Kate would have worn to call forth such a remark from Frank.

The evening of the day on which the first snow fell that year, Kate drove Neptune to the station to meet her father, and her brightest smile faded before his sad, careworn face. She knew at a glance that some new thing to worry him had happened; so, on the bit of journey home, she tried her utmost to tell him of every cheery crumb of news that she could think of, and appeared not to notice any unusual thing about his manner.

171That night Frank’s school-bill came. Mr. Hallock, forgetful of Kate’s presence, looked at it and laid it down with a long sigh.

“May I see, papa?” was the first intimation he received that she had heard.

“Yes, Kate; and you may pay it, if you like,” he replied, with a cheerless attempt at a smile.

Kate looked at it.

“What a lot of money!” she said. Presently, after a minute’s thought, she asked: “Papa, have you got the money to pay this?”

“No, my child. At present I have not.”

“Would Neptune do it?”

“Neptune?”

“Why, yes. Don’t you remember asking me one day if I would sell him? and I will, papa, if it is to somebody who will treat him kindly and love him.”

“Kate, my dear, perhaps I may be compelled to take your offer; but we will see about it; and if I do, you shall have the finest pony—”

“O, papa! don’t,” cried Kate. “I don’t want any other pony, not as long as I live; it’s so dreadful to love anything that can be bought and sold. I will try never to do it again,” and Kate made excuse to leave the room, fearing that she should spoil her offer by crying. Kate had been a long time in coming to the point of being willing to give Neptune up; but now that she had made the sacrifice in so many words, she was resolved not to cry about it—not if she could help it; but feeling very greatly the need of more sympathy than Neptune could give, and not wishing to make 172known her grief to her mother, she carried her little moan over to Mrs. Dobson; and finding her all alone in the house, Kate had a good cry, and felt better by the time Harry came in; so much better, indeed, that she looked up, smiling at him, and said: “Neptune is going some day before long. I’ve told papa he might sell him; and please, I don’t want anybody to say they are sorry for me, ’cause it isn’t myself that I’m sorry for, but Neptune”; and Kate bit her lip to keep it from quivering into another spasm of crying.

“Who is going to buy Neptune?”

The question came from Harry, who somehow did not seem to feel half as much sympathy for Kate as that young girl thought he ought to feel; and a bit of indignation, more at him than at the talked-of sale, escaped her lips in the words,

“O, anybody who wants him!”

“Why, Kittie, my Clover, didn’t you tell me not ten minutes ago that Neptune was to be sold only to somebody who would be ever so kind to him?” questioned Mrs. Dobson, with a bit of self-assertion quite unusual in her manner, if not in her words.

“Anybody could promise, but I should not be there to see the kindness or the cruelty. O, I wonder what makes God let men be so cruel! I pray and pray, every time I see a horse whipped and jerked, and made to carry too big a load, that some awful thing may happen to the men who do it! O, I wouldn’t touch a cent of money, not if I starved, that was made out of the horse-railroads in New York—such dreadful, dreadful loads as the poor things are made to carry, and everything! I don’t think it is a bit worse—”

173But Kate did not finish; she was ready to cry. Harry, foreseeing what would happen, took a letter from his pocket and held it up before her face, saying:

“Just see! What news!—from Michigan, too—from one of the Huxtables!”

And Harry opened it and began to read, but the heart of the letter he kept to himself, not feeling able to have anyone bear it with him.

On the night when Frank was out in the fog, Harry, waiting in his room for the approach of low tide, wrote the first letter he had sent back to his old home since he had found a new one, and this was the response, and this was the portion of the letter he had kept to himself: “Last summer there was a real nice man—ever so rich, folks say, whose name was Mr. Ludlow, from Maine, out here looking for you. He went everywhere, where anybody about here told him you might have gone; and then when he couldn’t find you anywhere, he put it in the papers, asking where you were. We kept one awhile, but I can’t find it now; but he told me he was your Uncle Horace; and you must find him out, mother says, right off; and there’s some land out here that belongs to you, that Mr. Ludlow found out about, and he’s taking care of it till you’re found.”

Now Harry had had a whole mile of a walk in which to sober down, after hearing this great, good news for himself; and he very quickly foresaw what might come of it, not only to himself, but to his best friends, and he resolved to keep it all to himself until he could find out the best thing to do; and it was the 174effect of this letter that Kate Hallock felt, although she knew not of it.

“I’m ever so glad you’ve heard from your friends, Harry,” said Kate, preparing to go home; “and, for my part, I don’t see why that queer uncle of yours up or down in Maine isn’t looking you up.”

Harry’s face grew very red—and Harry wasn’t given to blushing. Had he stood where Kate’s quick eyes had read more of the letter than he did? But no; he had stood with the last of the sunlight coming through the window on his letter and Kate was where it was impossible to overlook it. Surely Kate had a very curious manner of feeling things that she could not see. He opened the door for her departure, and, closing it after himself, he said:

“Let me go across with you, Kittie. When the snow and ice come, we can’t slip over the near way any more.”

Over the stone wall they went, down the slope and through the meadow, and they had even emerged from the bit of woods before Harry found courage to ask:

“When you know of anybody who wants to buy Neptune, Kittie, will you come right away and tell me, because I know of a person who would like to own him?”

“Who is it? Anybody in this town?” quickly questioned Kate.

“There is a reason why I can’t tell you who it is; but if the time comes, you remember—”

“I will, Harry,” promised Kate; and on the Point side of the marsh they parted.

175Before Christmas the snow came down for three days in succession. It became doubtful whether or not sufficient laurel, pine and hemlock could be unsnowed from the forests and river hills to afford the usual Christmas furnishings for the churches. The marsh bridge was buried deep from sight, and one vast gleam of white extended from the house on the Point to the house in the Lane, broken only by the bit of forest that lay between, whilst a round of snow showed where the stone fences lay.

The ice began to grow in the harbor and stretch downward and outward into the bay. Every morning more and more of the Sound was frozen over. It was a cold, cold time, the coldest that had been known in many years. Harry Cornwall was compelled to assist Josh in bringing in the wood, for that industrious dog could not fetch it fast enough to supply the fires it became necessary to build to keep everything from freezing up.

The Lane, from Mrs. Dobson’s, seaward, had not been broken, when, a few days before the twenty-fifth of December, Neptune appeared, shaking his merrybells adown the snowclad way. Not a dozen sleighs had been before him since the snow fell. It was Kate and her mother whom he was taking to pay Mrs. Dobson a little visit.

“Mamma, what if it shouldn’t be?” ejaculated Kate, as they reached the house, adding immediately, “I wonder that Harry didn’t hear us coming,” for Harry did not appear.

“Now, Kate,” added Mrs. Hallock, “I warn you once more not to say anything to spoil it all.”

176“You may trust me, mamma,” returned Kate, tossing the blanket over Neptune and carefully adjusting it; “only I do so want it to be really and awfully true.”

To be very brief, the apparent object of this visit was to invite Mrs. Dobson and Harry to spend Christmas at the Point; the real object was to ask certain questions regarding the young captain who went to sea so many years ago. Not that he had been heard from, but there had appeared a man, unearthed as it were from an asylum for the insane, in a distant state, about whom a number of persons had become curious to learn more. After thirty years of insanity he had begun to show signs of a restored intellect and claimed to be—well, no less a person than the Captain Dobson who was master of the Snow.

The story he told was singularly deficient in dates and details, but he was steadfast in his adherence to the statement concerning his native state and town, and remembered nothing between his life under a torrid sun on an uninhabited island, whither he drifted from his sinking ship, and his present state and condition.

The state in question claimed from Connecticut the money due for the support of one of her insane citizens for thirty years, and investigation in this matter led to Mr. Hallock’s learning the before-unheard-of circumstances.

Not a word of all this must reach Mrs. Dobson, although the old town was alive and bubbling over with excitement on the subject.

177Mrs. Hallock had undertaken the mission to ask Mrs. Dobson certain questions, but as the moment drew close, she would gladly have relinquished the task.

“Be real brave, mamma!” whispered Kate, the second before the door was opened to admit them.

There was Mrs. Dobson, in the sweetest of moods, and snowiest of caps, making mince pies.

“I’m so glad you’ve come, ’cause I know Harry don’t know how to go to your house to-day, and I just wanted to know if you would not come to the old house and take Christmas dinner with me this year, you and Frank, and his friends, if they come.”

Before Mrs. Hallock had time to thank her, or decline her invitation, she went on to say, “This year has been an amazing good year. I never felt so prosperous and as if I wanted to keep Thanksgiving all the time as I do now, and I believe I’ve fairly done with the foolishness of looking out on every feast day for the Captain. How he must pity me, if he is permitted to look down and know how I’ve watched for him!”

“Why, grandma,” said Kate, rocking the blue chair in which she sat until she made the floor creak, “what kind of a man was it that you looked for when you did look? He must be very brown, and dried, and kind of grizzly by this time, living nobody knows where, mustn’t he?”

Mrs. Dobson had taken her hands from the work she was doing and sat down to talk to her guests. In reply to Kate’s question, she said: “Kittie, I’m only 178waiting for you to get to be the great artist I know you’re going to be, to get you to paint his picture for me.”

“O, I will!” exclaimed Kate. “But what will there be about him that isn’t a bit like other men?”

“There will be two crowns upon the top of his head, the hair of one must be black and the hair of the other must be red,” replied Mrs. Dobson, “only I don’t see exactly how you can make that show in a portrait.”

Kate suddenly ceased to work, bit her lip and tried to avoid looking at her mother.

“I think we can manage it somehow,” said Kate. “Perhaps we could paint him saying his prayers on occasion of your marriage in the church.”

“We were not married in church; we were married at home, and everybody stood straight up and Captain Dobson was the tallest man in the room,” said Mrs. Dobson.

“Did they wear gloves then?” asked Mrs. Hallock.

“Yes,” returned Mrs. Dobson, “but Captain Dobson never liked to wear gloves, because one little finger was gone, and he said it made him feel as though he didn’t know what to do with that glove finger a-hanging.”

It did not take a half dozen questions more—not one of which seemed to arouse Mrs. Dobson’s curiosity—to learn all that was desired. The description of the man corresponded with the statement Mrs. Dobson made, save that the black crown had come to be white.

179“Mrs. Dobson,” said Mrs. Hallock, “our errand here was to ask you to take Christmas dinner with us; but this year, since you have been so kind, we will come to you, only you must let me send down an assistant with a few articles that I am sure you will need, to accommodate so large a party.”

They left in haste. Neptune thought his little mistress must be very cross—she snatched the blanket so from his back; and he had been doing his best to stand as still as he could! Straightway to a farmhouse lying four miles from the village they went. It was here that Isaac Dobson, only and younger brother of Captain Dobson, lived; and to him they delivered the photograph and the description that had been sent, together with the story of their late visit to Mrs. Dobson.

“It does seem, if true, a little more like a return from the dead, than anything I ever heard tell of,” said Mr. Isaac Dobson, who looked and appeared like a man who was walking in a fog. “To think that I may see my brother face to face again! Why, I was a little mite of a chap the day he went away, and there was such a crowd on the dock that I was lifted up to see the ship sail.”

“Be sure, Mr. Dobson, that you get him home by Christmas,” cried back Kate, after they had started for home.

“You may trust me to do my best,” he said, and immediately made preparations to go for his long-lost brother.

After the evidence given, it is quite needless to assure the reader that this man was, indeed, the Captain Dobson of this story.

180The happenings of Christmas day came in the following manner:

Very early in the morning, long before day-dawn, Mrs. Dobson, on hospitable thoughts intent, was up and doing.

As soon as it was light, Harry, looking across at the Point, saw the signal flying from the tower room that he knew was placed for him.

“Something’s the matter over at the Point; I’m wanted,” he said to Mrs. Dobson. “But I’ll not be gone an instant more than I can help, and you needn’t save any breakfast for me; I’ll keep my appetite for the coming dinner.”

It was Kate who had signalled for Harry, on learning the night before that in the morning a stranger would come to look at Neptune. Very early she was on the outlook for Harry. Frank had arrived late the evening before, and in his uniform looked in some way unusually brave and fine beside Harry in his much-worn suit, that Kate had again and again reminded him was getting a little too old for dress-up wear; but Harry had only smiled an answer and kept on wearing it. Kate would not have said one word had she not been perfectly certain that Harry was able to afford a new outfit.

“Kittie tells me,” said Harry to Mr. Hallock, whom he sought out, “that Neptune is to be sold, and I have found a buyer for you.”

“Who is it?” asked Mr. Hallock, looking keenly at the flushed lad.

“I’m not to tell,” returned Harry, “but you can trust me—can’t you?—that it is someone who will be 181very kind to the little horse. I hear that your price is two hundred dollars, and I am authorized to pay the sum to you.”

“Somebody trusts you, my boy,” remarked Mr. Hallock, “and so will I.”

“Thank you, sir. Will to-morrow do for the money?”

“All right, Harry. You shall have Neptune, though it goes very hard for Kate to part with him—very.”

“Not half so hard, papa, just now,” chimed in Kate, who had been lingering about in great excitement, “when it’s Christmas and Captain Dobson—”

“Kate!”

Kate thrust both her hands over her mouth.

“Papa, I think he ought to know,” she added immediately, removing them.

“Tell him, then.”

And Kate poured out the story in a manner as refreshing as a summer shower, ending it with the good news that papa had just received a telegram from Mr. Isaac Dobson that “we will be home on the midday train.”

“And grandma is going to church!” said Harry. “I’m afraid somebody will tell her he’s coming.”

“Not a soul will dare to do it,” remarked Mrs. Hallock. “I would carry the sad news of a death far sooner than this dreadful joy to Mrs. Dobson. We must just wait for the truth to discover itself.”

Grandma Dobson went that Christmas morning, for Kate had the bliss of driving her to the church.

182During the service, Mrs. Dobson was pitifully disturbed. Why was it that everybody seemed to regard her with unusual notice? Was it because her bonnet was “on one side”? No, that was not it; and she passed her hands softly over the clustering curls—they were all in place; and who was it, she wondered, for whose safe return from a long absence thanks were given. Who could it be? She hadn’t heard of anybody’s return. She would ask when service was over; but she did not ask, for everybody put the thought of asking far away from her mind. She never knew her townfolks so polite and kind before. Everybody seemed so glad to stop and shake hands and wish her a “Happy Christmas!” Some way she told Kate, who rushed her home over the snow, that she supposed folks thought she was getting too old for a merry Christmas any longer; “But, Kittie, my Clover,” she said, “I am not so very old after all, only fifty-nine; and this Christmas, with you all at the old brown house, will make me quite young again. I do hope Harry has remembered to look into the brick oven after the things I put in.”

“Don’t worry, grandma. Mother was going right over and the cook, and I just this minute caught sight of Frank hiding behind the corner. Go on, Nep.!”

Kate was intensely excited. Had Captain Dobson got there already? Was he in waiting in the house? and, O dear! how would everybody bear it? What a dreadful thing too much joy was, after all!

Frank advanced to assist Mrs. Dobson. The door opened and Mr. Isaac Dobson came out.

183“I thought,” he said, “you wouldn’t mind having one more at your Christmas dinner to-day—or three or four, for that matter; so I’ve brought my family over; but we fetched along a roast turkey and some other things with us—so don’t worry.”

“I’m very glad to see you, Isaac. I wonder what will happen next. This is a queer Christmas, I must be allowed to say”; and as she alighted and glanced backward up the Lane, she saw a dozen or more sleighs approaching. Where could they be going?

She hastened forward up the narrow walk, and had not arrived at the door when the foremost sleigh drew up by the side of Neptune, and she discovered old Dr. Paul, minister of the First church, and close behind him the rector of St. John’s with his smiling face.

“Is it a funeral?” she questioned; and then the sweet, tired woman felt a little like crying, or laughing, she did not know which; but Mrs. Hallock had opened the door and said “Come right in. I want to see you a minute before anybody else comes”; and so Mrs. Dobson was led right into the room where Harry was attended so lovingly in the early part of this story, and Kate slipped in behind her; and so the door was closed and the story told as only one sweet, loving woman can tell life’s best story to another woman as sweet and loving.

The words that were said we cannot repeat, nor even express the maze of emotion which filled the heart of Mrs. Dobson—but she arose equal to even that occasion, when Mrs. Hallock reminded her that too great a shock might be disastrous to Captain Dobson, who was like a little child in some things.

184“Let him come in, alone,” she said, “and find me here. To think that God has answered my prayer, when I’ve been thinking it wicked to keep on praying so long. Go, Kittie, and let him come in.”

Captain Dobson was in the little bedroom opening from the long kitchen, and from this room also Mrs. Hallock knocked at the door. Captain Dobson opened it, and silently that lady and Kate passed into the little room and through it into the long kitchen, that was half filled with sympathetic friends.

“How did she bear it?” asked one and another.

“Just as we might expect Mrs. Dobson to bear everything,” Mrs. Hallock replied.

Then, without a word or warning, in her sweet childish voice, Kate Hallock began to sing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” She began alone, but at the second word everybody in the room added voice to voice, and at the close the door into the front room was found standing ajar and Dr. Paul went in. He gravely shook hands with Mrs. Dobson and the Captain, and, after stating the fact that the first marriage ceremony at which he officiated in his ministry among them was that of Captain Dobson and Mrs. Dobson, he said he would now, with the consent of the parties, renew it. “It is too long for the silver-wedding and too short for the golden-wedding, and, my friends, we will call this the Praise God wedding.”

Without in the least intending form or ceremony, Kate Hallock entered the room and stood beside Grandma Dobson and Harry Cornwall found himself very near Captain Dobson. The room was very full, 185as good Dr. Paul repeated the marriage service over the bride with the silver curls and the man with the calm, grave, happy face. “Not at all grizzly,” Kate admitted.

After that, hunger came down on all the multitude, and so great was the care taken by Mrs. Hallock and Mrs. Isaac Dobson, to say nothing of the contents of the brick oven, that the minister and the rector and all the friends who had come down to witness the dread joy, thought not of Christmas dinner elsewhere that day.

You know already—you must know—that Harry Cornwall had turned his farm-products into money in order to buy Neptune, that he might have the happiness of restoring that loved animal to Kate Hallock, and that the plan was well carried out; and you ought to know that you can never find in the Connecticut Records that the charge for caring for Captain Dobson so many years was ever borne by the state; but you cannot know with what great reluctance we bid Kate and Harry and Frank good-bye.