Good-byes were said by all save Hi. He, it seemed, was not to be found. He had slipped away in his own fashion, and at that moment he lay on the red pine needles back of the cabin, “just bawling,” as he would have phrased it.
He was astonished at himself, and thoroughly disgusted. He remembered that during all of his troubles, when Sisson beat him, when he went hungry, when he lay out in the wet, he had not once “bawled.” It seemed perfectly disgusting that he should be doing it now when everything was coming all right.
CHAPTER XIII
AT HOME AGAIN
At four o’clock that afternoon, at which time the train bearing Mr. Thompson and Azalea was due at Lee, Ma McBirney went to the “Outlook” and fastened an old sheet in the crotch of the tulip trees, and there being a fine breeze blowing across the flank of the mountain, it caught the folds of this copious flag and spread it to the breeze.
“Azalea will be the first to see it, likely,” thought Mrs. McBirney. “She has such sharp eyes.”
But the sharp eyes of Azalea were busy, at that moment, staring disconsolately from the car window, many miles from home. For there was a freight wreck not far ahead of them, and, according to the conductor, there was no telling when they could move on.
It was quite possible for Mary McBirney to hear the roar of the approaching train from her high-swung home-nest, although the railroad lay across the valley from them, but Jim had come home from school and heard all the story, and he and Hi had sat on the bench and nearly stared their eyes out watching for the locomotive to push its black nose over the gap, and supper had been eaten, and the darkness settled down for the night, before the shrill and apologetic whistle of the engine was heard.
“That child will be clean starved,” ma said to the boys. “And pa, too, unless he had the sense to go to the inn and get supper. And I don’t suppose he did, me not being along. Seems like married men didn’t know enough to eat unless their wives was by to tell ’em when to do it.”
Not that Ma McBirney was scolding. She was merely passing the time.
“I reckon we’d best take that there sheet in, ma, and swing out the lantern,” Jim said as he heard the distant shriek of the train.