“Why, certainly, my boy. We can find something to satisfy his appetite; and if you think best he shall pass the night in our barn.”
The stranger started to speak as though trying to express his gratitude. Something, however, stopped him; perhaps he choked, for he coughed severely several times, so that Mrs. Horner became visibly anxious.
“You have indeed been sick, my poor man,” she hastened to say. “Come directly into the house and get warm. What you need is a cup of hot coffee, and something to eat. Dick, you did the right thing to bring him home with you.”
Even Grandfather Horner, who had been shaking his head while this was going on, seemed to be ready to echo the kind words of Dick’s mother.
“Only one who has been a soldier for four long years, and endured the pangs of hunger many times, knows what it is to want,” he declared earnestly. “When I escaped from Libby Prison I spent six weeks in the swamps, being hunted like a dog; and I had to live on nuts and roots and berries most of the time, except when some slave managed to give me a sheaf of cornbread. Nobody ever passes the Horner home hungry as long as we have a bit to spare.”
The stranger was visibly shaken with emotion. He started toward Mrs. Horner and held out both his trembling hands.
“Polly, don’t you know me?” he demanded, at which remark Dick’s mother bent forward, stared closely into his seamed face, and then almost shrieked:
“Oh! it’s my older brother Silas, whom we believed died years ago in Alaska!”
CHAPTER XIV
LESLIE ON GUARD
Leslie Capes, coming around the corner of the house just then, gaped in sheer amazement at the remarkable picture before him. And when he saw Dick’s sweet little mother, after giving vent to those words, embrace the shabby looking stranger as though she at least had no doubt concerning his identity, Leslie shook his head in his suspicious way.