CHAPTER XXII
COMING
Robert Whinnerah looked in at the door of the little bedroom, and saw Lup standing by the window, knitting his dark brows over a sheet of flimsy. The yellow envelope lay on his bed.
“What’s amiss, lad?” He had seen him take the telegram in, and wondered; and presently he had followed him up. He was a tall, gaunt, white-bearded man, with a look of Wolf about the eyes.
“Nay, I can’t make top nor bottom on it!” Lup puzzled. “If there’s owt amiss, it’s the sort as doesn’t bide shouting down a wire. It just says ‘Come at once!’ with never a why nor wherefore to its tail. ‘Come at once!’ Ay, yon’s all there is to it.”
“From Wolf? From your dad?”
“Not it! It’s from Bracken Holliday. You’ll mind the Hollidays o’ Pippin Hall, I reckon? Well, old Willie’s Brack’s uncle. He took him in an orphan and tried to put him in the way o’ things, but Brack was all for something fresh, and made off to Canada afore he was sixteen. He raised money there an’ all—he’s smart in his way, is Brack—and then come home to farm at Thweng. He’s in fine fettle, nowadays, and as throng as a dog wi’ two tails, aping quality and driving his own motor-car, but he’s no friend o’ mine. That’s why I’m capt to reckon up the meaning o’ this here.”
“Happen it’s a joke.” With Lup’s arrival, Robert had fallen speedily to the use of the old words.
“Nay, I thought of that, but I don’t hold by it. Brack thinks overmuch of himself for such-like daft lakin’. Besides—I’d a notion he’d his own reasons for wishing me out o’ the road.”
“Best wire your folk, asking if there’s owt wrong.”
Lup shook his head, folding the paper back into its cover.