“We all have been fighting, I’m afraid, Mrs. Wooden,” said the latter—“three of us.”
After this preamble there had to be an account of the skirmish. Miss Beauchamp and Mrs. Wooden alike decided it was “shocking.”
“He might have drawn a pistol on both of you!” exclaimed Miss Beauchamp, “and a great deal more might have come of it.”
“Well,” Gerald protested, “the only thing that’s come of it is that I have met a friend of yours here.”
“And you couldn’t do a better thing, Gerald!” exclaimed Mrs. Wooden, beginning to stow away butter and eggs in the spring-wagon from the Ossokosee House. “Mr. Philip Touchtone is a particular pet of Miss Beauchamp’s and mine when he is a good boy—as he almost always is,” the farmer’s fat wife lightly added.
“And a capital friend,” added the grave Miss Beauchamp, with a smile, “for a boy about the age and size of one I know to have on his books. You ask Mr. Marcy over at the hotel all about him, Gerald. Now, you do that for me soon.”
“O, pshaw, Miss Beauchamp!” Philip interrupted, his wide-awake face rather red, and straightening himself up to endure these broad compliments, “you and Mrs. Wooden ought to remember that people who praise friends to their faces are said to be fond of slandering them behind their backs. Come, Mr. Wooden, I promised Mr. Marcy to be back as soon as I could. Jump in, Gerald.”
The boy swung his slender figure up to the cushioned seat. Philip quickly followed after a few more words with the farmer. Then the wagon rattled out into the road and was soon bowling along to the Ossokosee. Philip favored the baskets and bundles in the back of the spring-wagon with a final glance, and then turned to Gerald with the manner of a person who intends asking and answering a large number of questions. And Gerald felt quite eager to do the same thing.
Why each of these lads, so entirely out of his own free will, should have mutually confided details of their two histories, when each was so much a stranger, met to-day, and perhaps never sitting again within speaking-distance after to-morrow, was a riddle to both of them. But the solution of it is as old as the rocks in Wooden’s Ravine, perhaps older. We may keep our lives and thoughts under a lock and key as tightly as we like until the day comes when, somewhere along this crowded highway called Life, we all at once run square against some other human creature who is made by fate to be our best friend. Then, take my word for it, whether he is younger or older, he will find out from our own lips every thing in the bottom of our hearts that he chooses to ask about; and, what is more, we ought to find ourselves glad to trust such a person with even more than the whole stock that is there.