"Aw, shucks, no!" he cried. "I don't want y' back! I miss y', but I'm awful glad y'r gone! And I don't mind bein' left here."
He felt hopeful, ambitious, independent.
He rose with a will. He was stiff, just at first, but strong and steady on his feet. As in the past he had never made a habit of pitying himself, he did not pity himself now, but took his aches and pains as he had taken them many a time before, that is, by dismissing them from his mind. He was hungry. He was eager for his daily wash. He wanted to get at his morning exercises, and take with them a whiff of the outdoors coming in at the window. By a glance at his patch of sky he could tell that this whiff would be pleasant. For how clear and blue was that bit of Heaven which he counted as a personal belonging! And just across the area the sun was already beginning to wash all the roofs with its aureate light.
Three sparrows hailed him from the window ledge, shrilly demanding crumbs. Crumbs made him think of Mrs. Kukor's stealthy gift. Sure enough, the yellow bowl held soup. In the soup was spaghetti—the wide, ribbony, slippery kind he especially liked, coiled about in a broth which smelled deliciously of garlic. As for the black bread, some nibbling visitor of the night had helped himself to one corner of it, and this corner, therefore, went at once to the birds.
"My goodness!" soliloquized Johnnie. "How the mice do love Mrs. Kukor's bread!" And he could not blame them. It was so good!
Then, a trifle startled, he noted that the wheel chair was not in the kitchen; but guessed at once that Barber had quietly rolled Grandpa into the bedroom at a late hour. Next, his roving glance dropped back to the old mattress, and he caught sight of the dolls. Forgetting what a comfort they had been to him the evening before, this while feeling boyishly ashamed and foolish at having had them with him, in a panic he caught them up and flung them, willy-nilly, out of sight upon Cis's couch; after which, looking sheepish, and wondering if Big Tom had, by any chance, seen them, he put away his bedding, filled the teakettle, and reached down the package of oatmeal.
It was not till he started to build a fire that he remembered! In the fire box still was all that remained of his uniform, his books, and the Carnegie medal. He lifted a stove lid; then as a mourner looks down into a grave that has received a dear one, so, for a long, sad moment, he gazed into the ashes. "Oh, my stories!" he faltered. "Oh, my peachy suit o' clothes!"
But it was the medal he hunted. On pressing the ashes through into the ash-box, something fell with a clear tinkle, and he dug round till he found a burned and blackened disk. Fire had harmed it woefully. That side bearing the face of its donor was roughened and scarred, so that no likeness of Mr. Carnegie survived; but on the other side, near to the rim, several words still stood out clearly—that a man lay down his life for his friends.
After more poking around he found all the metal buttons off the uniform, each showing the scout device, for, being small, the buttons had dropped into the ashes directly their hold upon the cloth was loosened by the flames, and so escaped serious damage. Also, following a more careful search, he discovered—the tooth.
The clock alarm rang, and he surmised that Big Tom had wound it when he came out for Grandpa.