With these views Mrs. Glass agreed, but Captain Rooney refused absolutely to entertain them. He had been over the ground many times. It was of the most difficult character, loose and swampy, and literally strewn with jagged stones that cut a man to pieces if he tried to do more than creep among them, absolutely impassable to a child. Again, there was the matter of distance. How could a child of four years, none too firm a walker on easy ground, as many a childish bruise and scar will testify, have made its way for more than two miles over this hellish terrain into a morass? Must it not have fallen exhausted long before and rested till the voices of the searchers in that first night had wakened it?
And how about those little shoes? Captain Rooney asks us. Of what leather were they made to have lain for eight and one half years in that impassable bog and yet to have been so well preserved as to retain the maker’s imprint?
“No, sir,” the gallant captain concludes, “those may be the bones of Jimmie Glass, but if they are, some one must have taken him there.”
Perhaps—and then again? How far a lost and desperate child will stray is not too simple a question. If, as Captain Rooney suggests, Jimmie Glass probably would have tired and lain down to rest, would he not also have risen again and blundered on? As for the durability of the leather, any one may go to any well-stocked museum and find hides of the sixteenth century still tolerably preserved. And if some one took the pitiful body of the child and tossed it into that morass, who was it?
It is much easier to believe with the parents. The enchantment of spring and sunshine, the allure of unvisited and undreamed places unfolding before a child’s eyes, and straying from flower to flower, wonder to wonder, depth to depth. And at the end of the adventure, disaster; at the wane of the sunshine, that darkness that clouds all living. It is more pleasant to think of the matter so, to believe that Jimmy Glass, four years in the world, was but a forthfarer into the mysteries, who lay down at the end of mighty explorations and went to sleep—a Babe in the Woods.
XIII
THE FATES AND JOE VAROTTA
On an afternoon in the autumn of 1920, Salvatore Varotta took his eldest son for a ride on Long Island. Perhaps it was not quite the right thing to do. The big motor truck did not belong to him. His employers might not like the idea of a child being carted about the countryside in their delivery van. Still, what did it matter? The day had been hot. Little Adolfo had begged to go. No one would ever know the difference, and the boy would be happy. So this simple-hearted Italian motor driver set out from the reeks and throngs of New York’s lower East Side on what was to be a pilgrimage of pleasure.
There was a cool wind in the country and the landscape was still green. The truck chauffeur enjoyed his drive as he rolled by fields where farmers were at their late plowing. The nine-year-old Adolfo sat beside him, chattering with curiosity or musing in pure delight. After all, it was a bright and perfect world, for all men’s groans and growls.
Presently, Salvatore came to a crossing. Another truck lurched drunkenly across his path. There was a horrid shriek of collision, the shattering tinkle of glass, the crunch of riven steel. Salvatore Varotta was tossed aside like a cork and landed in the ditch. He picked himself up and staggered instinctively toward the wreck and little Adolfo. There was a volcanic spout of flame as one of the tanks blew up. The undaunted father plunged into the smoke and managed to draw out the boy, cut and crushed and burned to pitiful distortions, but breathing and alive.