CHAPTER XXVII 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."