“Oh, you’ve come back, my dears, have you!” smiled Mrs. Peeler. “I’m glad you got back so soon. How’s she now, Glossie?”
“Awful bad,” answered Gloss. “I’m goin’ right back, and will you tell uncle to come soon? Don’t say anythin’ to Boy, but just whisper to uncle to come as soon’s he can. She misses him so much. Now, I must go. You explain to ’em all how it is, Mrs. Peeler, will you?”
“You’re not goin’ back alone,” protested Mary Ann. “Just wait, we’ll send——”
Gloss put her hand on her friend’s arm.
“I don’t want anyone to know just how bad she is—not to-night. It would only spoil the evenin’s fun for them, and I’m not scared—why, I have little Davie.”
She put her arm about the boy’s shoulders. “You don’t know what company Davie is, and it’s scarcely dark yet. No, I don’t want anybody else. Good-night.”
She slipped out, her arm still around the daft boy, and the two passed down the path that stretched like a thread of silver in the moonlight. The lad talked to her in his strange language and she let him go on without paying much attention to him, for her heart was heavy with a great fear. They reached the creek path where the gray rushes stood and the deep creek slept beneath the moon. The lad laughed and swept his arms about, as the shrill wing-whistles of a migrating flock of pin-tails sang out and died away high above them. They turned up the path, and a whip-poor-will woke up and uttered his plaintive call from a nearby copse. Davie imitated the call, and then all about them the night-birds awoke and made the world alive with sound.
Further on the lad hooted like an owl and from the swales the feathered prowlers of the night answered him. He clapped his hands in glee, and Gloss’s arm tightened about him.
“Oh, Davie,” she whispered, “you are just like the birds—glad and free. Are you just what God intended us all to be, I wonder? Are you, Davie?”
He stroked her hand, and Pepper climbed from his shoulder over to hers.