The little woman, laughing and crying together, was seized by this big whirlwind of a boy and hugged until she gasped for mercy.
"Oh, Laddie Lombard!" she cried. "I—I'm so glad—Oh, do let me cry just a minute! I thought—oh, Laddie!"
Saunders, with a delicacy that still further endeared him to the adoring girls, silently reached forth a long arm and dropped the tent flap. Mr. Black, his kindly face beaming with sympathy, pushed his way in; Laddie, rather close to tears himself, led his weeping mother to a bench under the trees.
"Her name," explained Mr. Black, seating himself at the breakfast table between Bettie and Jean, "is Mrs. Tracy Lombard. She wasn't in Pittsburg; but a friend of hers saw the notice in the paper and telegraphed her, and she came as fast as she could."
"Mother!" he cried. "Mother! It's my mother!"
"Of course she did," breathed Mrs. Crane. "But how did the boy——"
"Billy—Laddie, I mean—wasn't well this spring. It happened that he was coming down with typhoid; but his mother didn't know that—thought it was overwork in school. Hoping to benefit him by a change of climate, Mrs. Lombard, always rather fussy, I imagine, over this one precious infant, started West with him, over the Canadian Pacific route. She had relatives in Seattle or Portland—I've forgotten which. But that part of it doesn't matter.
"The second day after leaving Pittsburg, Laddie became so alarmingly ill that Mrs. Lombard was glad to accept the invitation of a fellow-traveler, a motherly, middle-aged woman, who lived in a small village on the north shore of Lake Superior."
"In Canada?" queried Marjory.