CHAPTER ONE
"How do you do?"
The remark was addressed to a young man who roused himself from a brown study and looked up. Then he looked down to see whence the voice proceeded. Directly in his pathway stood a wee boy, a veritable cherub in modern raiment, whose rosy lips smiled up at him blandly, quite regardless of the sugary smears that surrounded them. One hand clasped a crumpled paper bag; the other held a rusty iron hoop and a cudgel entirely out of proportion to the size of the hoop.
"And how is everybody at your house?" the babe demanded. "Are vey pretty well?"
"Very well, thank you." The young man was endeavoring to remember where, during the two weeks he had spent in Helena, he had seen this child.
"So is my people," the boy explained politely. "It is a great while since I have seen you."
Amicably enough, the stranger accepted his suggestion of a past acquaintance.
"It is a good while. Where have you been keeping yourself?"
The atom tried to drop into step at his side, tangled himself in the long tails of his little coat, gave up the attempt and broke into a jog trot.
"My mamma wouldn't let me go to walk alone for 'most a monf."
"Why?"
"'Cause I used to stay a good while, and spend all my pennies at
Jake's shop."
"Where is that?"
"Vat's where vey sells candy. I've got some now. Want some?" He rested the hoop against a convenient lamp-post and opened the bag invitingly.
"Thanks, no. You don't appear to have much to spare."
With a sigh of manifest relief, the child gathered up the crumpled top of the bag once more.
"I did have some," he explained; "but I gave half of it to a boy. Vat's what my Sunday-school teacher said I must do. And ven, by and by, I took his hoop," he added, as he resumed his march.
"Did your Sunday-school teacher tell you to do that?"
"No; but I just fought I would. He couldn't give me half of it, you see, for it wouldn't be good for anyfing if it was busted."
"No?" The stranger felt that the child's logic was better than his moral tone.
"I'm going to be good now, all ve time," the boy went on, looking up with an angelic smile. "When my mamma says 'No, Mac,' I shall say 'All right,' and when my papa smites me, I shall turn ve uvver also. Vat's ve way."
"Does he smite you?"
The smile vanished, as the child slowly nodded three times.
"Yes, awful."
"What did you do to make him smite you?"
Silence.
"What was it?"
The stranger's voice was not so stern as it might have been, and the smile came back and dimpled the child's cheeks, as he answered,—"Pepper in ve dining-room fireplace."
"What made you do that, you sinner?"
"A boy told me. You ought to have heard vem sneeze, and ven papa fumped me."
"Much?"
The child eyed him distrustfully,
"What for do you want to know?"
"Oh, because—you see, I used to get thumped, myself, sometimes."
"Yes, he fumped awful, and ven he stopped and sneezed, and I sneezed, too, and we all sneezed and had to stop."
"And then did you turn the other also?"
"No; I hadn't begun yet. I only sneezed a great deal, and papa said somefing about rooty ceilings."
In vain the stranger pondered over the last remark. He was unable to discover its application, and accordingly he passed to a more obvious question.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"What's yours?"
"Gifford Barrett."
"Mine is McAlister Holden."
"Um-m. I think I haven't met you before."
"You could if you'd wanted to, I live in ve brown house, and I've seen you lots of times. Once you 'most stepped on me."
"Did I? How did that happen?"
"You were finking of fings and got in my way."
"Was that it?"
"Vat's what my papa says, when I do it. He says I ought to look where I am going." The boy's tone was severe.
There was a pause, while Mac swung his hoop against a post. On the rebound, it struck the stranger a sharp blow just under and back of the knees. He turned and glared at the child.
"I feel just as if I should like to say confound it," Mac drawled, twisting his pink lips with relish of the forbidden word.
"So should I. Suppose we do. But how old are you?"
"'Most four."
"But little boys like you shouldn't say such words."
"My papa does; I heard him. My mamma puts soap in my mouf, when I do it," he added, with an artless frankness which appeared to be characteristic of him. Then abruptly he changed the subject. "Ve cook has gone, and mamma made such a funny pudding, last night," he announced. "It stuck and broke ve dish to get it out. Good-bye. Vis is where I live." And he clattered up the steps and vanished, hoop and all, through the front doorway, leaving the stranger to marvel at the precocity of western children and at the complexity of their vocabularies.
A week later, they met again, this time however not by accident. The young man had tried meanwhile to find out something about the child; but his sister whose guest he was, had moved to Helena only a month before, and she could furnish no clue to the mystery. His visit was proving a dull one; Mac had been vastly entertaining, so, for some days, the stranger had been watching in vain for another glimpse of the boy. At length, his efforts were rewarded. Strolling past the brown house, one morning, he became aware of a tiny figure sitting on the steps in the bright sunshine and wrapped from head to foot in a plaid horse-blanket.
"Good-morning, Mac!" he called blithely.
"How do you do?" The voice was a shade more subdued, to-day.
"Well. What are you doing?"
"Nofing much." The minor key was still evident.
"Are you sick?"
"No; 'course not."
"Playing Indian?"
Mac shook his head.
"What is the blanket for, then? It isn't cold, to-day."
The lips drooped, and the blue eyes peered out suspiciously from under their long lashes.
"I wants to wear it," he said, with crushing dignity.
"All right. Come and walk to the corner fruit stand with me."
The invitation was too tempting to be refused, and Mac scrambled to his feet. As he did so, the blanket slipped to one side. Swiftly Mac huddled it around him again; but the momentary glimpse had sufficed to show the stranger a dark blue gown and a white apron above it.
"Why, I thought you were a boy!" he gasped, too astonished at this sudden transformation to pay any heed to Mac's probable feelings in the matter.
"So I are a boy."
"But you are wearing a dress."
Mac hung his head.
"I ran away," he faltered. "Vat's why."
The stranger tried to look grave. Instead, he burst into a shout of laughter.
"I think I understand," he said, as soon as he could speak. "You have to wear these clothes, because you ran away, and the blanket is to cover them up. What made you run away?"
"Aunt Teddy."
"Who?"
"My Aunt Teddy."
"Is it—a woman?" The stranger began to wonder if it were hereditary in
Mac's family to confound the genders in such ways as this.
"Yes, she is my aunt; she's a woman, not an uncle."
"Oh. It's a curious name."
"Ve rest of her name is Farrington," Mac explained, pulling the blanket closer about his chubby legs, as he saw some people coming up the street toward him.
"And she made you run away?"
Mac nodded till his cheeks shook like a mould of currant jelly.
"What did she do?"
"Talk, and talk some more, all ve time. I want to talk some, and I can't. She eats her eggs oh natural."
"What? What does that mean?"
"'Vout any salt. Vat's what she calls it, oh natural. I like salt."
"Don't you like grapes?"
"Yes."
"Let's get some."
Wrapped like an Indian brave, Mac started off down the street, his yellow and blue toga trailing behind him and getting under his feet at every step. His dignity, nevertheless, was perfect and able to triumph over even such untoward circumstances as these, and he accepted the stranger's conversational attempts with a lofty courtesy which suggested a reversal of their relative ages. Just as the corner was reached, however, and the fruit stand was but a biscuit-toss away, he suddenly collapsed.
"Vere vey are!" he exclaimed.
"Who?"
"My mamma, and Aunt Teddy." And, turning, he scurried away as fast as his blanket would let him.
As he passed them, the young man gave a glance at the two women, swift, yet long enough to take in every detail of their appearance and stamp it upon his memory. The shorter one with the golden hair was evidently Mac's mother, not only because she was the older, but became the child's mischievous face was like a comic mask made in the semblance of her own gentle features. Her companion was more striking. Taller and more richly dressed, she carried the impression of distinctiveness, of achievement, as if she were a person who had proved her right to exist. Gifford Barrett's eyes lingered on her longer, at a loss to account for a certain familiarity in her appearance. Where had he seen her before? Both face and figure seemed known to him, other than in the relation of Mac's Aunt Teddy.
"I saw the small boy again, to-day," he told his sister, that night.
"Who? Your little Mac?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I decline to assume any responsibility for him, Kate. He passes my comprehension entirely. He looks like a cherub on a Della Robbia frieze and converses like the king of the brownies. I expect to hear him quote Arnold at any instant."
His sister laughed.
"I can't imagine who he can be," she said. "I wish you weren't going East so soon, Giff, and we would go on a tour of investigation. Such a child isn't likely to remain hid under a bushel; and, if I find him, I will let you know all about him. What is it, Jack?" she added, as her husband looked up from his paper with an exclamation of surprise.
"I've have been entertaining angels unawares,—in the next block, that is," he answered. "Listen to this: 'Mrs. Theodora McAlister Farrington, the novelist, who has been spending the winter with her sister, Mrs. Holden of Murray Street, left for her home in New England, to-night.'"
"Ah—h!" There was a sigh of content from across the table. "Now I have my bearings. My imp is Mac Holden and Mrs. Farrington is Aunt Teddy, of course. I met her in New York, last winter, at a dinner or two; but she evidently had forgotten me. Such is fame!"
"Which?" his sister inquired, as she rose to leave the table.