FATHER, MOTHER AND CHILD
The boy had taken off his coat and thrown it over me for a saddle cloth.
At first I went very slowly, but I soon found that Mrs. Duff was an
expert horse-woman. Riding without a saddle did not trouble her at all.
Her husband walked beside her, and Dallas led me. For a time the man, in
his intense relief that this meeting had turned out so well, said
nothing, but when the rough part of the trail was over he remarked, "You
two look like brother and sister."
We were not going home by the way we had come. That trail would have
been too hard on Mrs. Duff. Dallas was taking us along an old wood road
by the Merry-Tongue, and at first he did not hear what his father had
said, for the brawling noisy river was talking so much louder.
So Mr. Duff repeated his remark and then Dallas turned his head.
"Oh! parents--if you only knew how delicious it is to have your own
family," then seeing tears springing to his mother's eyes he added
quickly, "I do hope you'll both have good appetites for dinner. We get
scrumptious things to eat here."
Both parents smiled, and Mrs. Duff said in a low voice, "I feel hungry
for the first time in weeks."
Dallas in his joy broke into song. I felt that he did not just yet know
how to handle this delicate young mother, so to keep his tongue out of
trouble he gave it something else to do.
He sang her a soothing song about a graceful Virginia deer who got lost
in a strange wood and was rescued by a kindly wolf.
His gift for making up stories and singing them on the spur of the
moment was wonderful, and it delighted him because it was a new game
taught him by the Devering children.
His mother listened most attentively. She was plainly enchanted with his
voice, and I thought what a good teacher she would make for him.
When he stopped for lack of breath, Mrs. Duff said, "Who taught you
that?"
"No, one," said the boy.
I felt that husband and wife were exchanging looks in the way proud
parents do. What a source of common interest this treasure of a boy
would be to them.
When we got to the fields back of the farm Dallas said, "If I don't do
something to get the jump out of my legs I'll never be able to sit still
at dinner--can't I run ahead and proclaim you?"
They both laughed, the man in a hearty natural way, the woman with the
low silvery trained laugh of the stage. She wasn't making it, though. I
felt that she was really enjoying herself.
They laughed again when their boy took a flying leap over a rail fence,
and she said, in her pathetic voice, "Douglas, I should like to walk the
rest of the way."
He took her off my back, and when I saw that he knew where the gate
was, I too went over the fence, and feeling that they were staring with
great interest at me, I dashed after my boy.
He was absolutely yelling at the back door, "Bingi! my mother and father
are here," then he raced round the veranda shouting in every window, "My
parents are here--Uncle Jim, Aunt Bretta, take notice, also Big Chief,
Cassowary, Champ, Sojer, Dovey and little Big Wig. Oh! kids, one and
all--I'm just like other boys. I've got a mother exactly like yours."
Joyful yells and cries answered him, and Mrs. Devering herself
forgetting her anti-noise laws, put her head out of an upper window and
gave a happy hail to the two dear persons coming down the hill.
"Squirrie Sore-Feet!" screamed Dallas to the chipmunk who came out of a
hole in a tree, "no one will ever catch me and make me perform in public
like poor you--my father wouldn't let them. Birds in the trees, sing
with me--my mother is here, is here, is here. Barnyard and stable folk,
I'll come up after dinner and give you the good word."
By this time, a gleeful procession of grown-ups and children was
hurrying up the hill, Barklo shrieking at their heels, Constancy
following him and Baywell limping behind them.
Mr. and Mrs. Devering gave the two parents the warmest greetings, then
Mr. Devering took his pale-faced sister on his arm, walked down to the
veranda with her and put her in a big rocking-chair.
There she held court, all the children gathering round her, and Bingi
and O-Mayo-San bowing respectfully in the distance.
There was nothing painful about the situation, and I saw young Mrs.
Duff's anxious expression fade away. Those children and grown persons
were not thinking about her family difficulties, so she settled back in
her chair and made up her mind to be happy.
Mr. Macdonald, the nice Scotsman, was very much impressed by Mrs. Duff,
and when she took her dinner from a tray he was the one who handed all
the things to her from the big table where sat the laughing restless
crew of children.
The little lady ate scarcely anything, although she had said she was
hungry. That is from a pony's point of view. We eat a good deal and eat
a good while. It is a very bad thing to hurry any of the horse family
with their meals, for we are nervous creatures, and we should never be
groomed when we are eating. Who would wash a boy while he was taking his
dinner?
Instead of eating, Mrs. Duff kept her wonderful eyes going, going all
round the table from one face to another. These were her relatives, and
she had no other ones. I saw that she was pleased with the Devering
children, but it was to her own boy that her glance came oftenest and
lingered longest. The mother spirit had waked up, and when it once wakes
in a soul like hers it never goes to sleep again.
As soon as the lively dinner was over, her husband, who was watching her
carefully, said, "Ranna, you will rest a while, won't you?"
"Not inside," she said, shaking her brown head with the soft hair wound
round and round it, "not inside. I could not breathe. Out here where I
can see the children."
"Heigh ho!" said Mr. Devering, who was standing nearby, and catching her
up in his arms as if she had been a baby he ran round the house to the
north veranda where the wind was not blowing. There he deposited her in
a hammock swung outside his office.
"Lie here, my lady," he said, "and I will play you to sleep," and
getting his violin he drove everybody away and sitting down beside her
sang and played nice northern songs about good bears and little lost
cubs, and nice Indians and squaw mothers and happy papooses.
Dallas and the children watching her from a distance, fell upon Mr. Duff
and swept him up to the stables.
The man was delighted, but soon he became exhausted in his tour of the
farm and said, "Mercy! dear children, I've been having nervous
prostration. If you won't despise me too much I'll go lie down."
"There's a very good thpot under the treeths," said little Big Wig
kindly.
"If it's quite the same to you," said his uncle, "I think I prefer a
bed."
"Then take mine, thir," said Big Wig grandly.
"Or mine," said Big Chief.
"Mine! Mine!" called Sojer and Champ.
"He'll take his son's," said Dallas, stretching up to put his arm in
his father's. "It's got dandy fir balsam pillows that will make him go
to sleep, but I say, kids, after I put him to bed can't we have a gallop
round the lake?"
"You bet," said Big Chief, and the others shouted approbation.
Shaking with silent laughter, the tired man allowed Dallas to tuck him
in bed, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him at the window when the
merry troop of boys and girls swept by on the backs of their various
pets.
I knew what my boy wanted. He was going to tell all the settlement this
wonderful news about his mother. He certainly was the hero of this day.
However, first we were to have an adventure.
As we trotted slowly up the market road, for the children all wanted to
talk, we saw Guardie and Girlie and the pigs coming down from the
sawmill. They were getting home earlier than usual.
Dallas was beginning to shout to them when the animals, who were by this
time abreast of the Widow Detover's, made a sudden and peculiar stop. I
knew that something had alarmed them.
Then Guardie, after a word to Sir Vet, dashed into the Widow's lane and
strange to say he was followed by Girlie.
"Well! I vow," exclaimed Cassowary, "that's something not in my
notebook. Big Chief, did you ever see both dogs leave their pigs before
and in the middle of the road too?"
"Never!" said Big Chief. "Get on, Attaboy--there's something wrong at
the Widow's."