“Pa’s cultivating the cotton patch yon; and Hi’s fishing—it don’t take but one arm to fish, you know. And Jim’s off at school.”
“Count Jim out, then, Mrs. McBirney. Shall I go call the others?”
“Wait. I’ve a way,” cried Mrs. McBirney, and sped toward the house. There she kept an old horn hanging. It had come down in the family from Revolutionary times; it had been used to call the men in from the fields, when the hostile Indians showed their feathered heads above the pass, and now it blew its good tidings over the fields.
“That will bring them,” said Mrs. McBirney. “They’ll come running.”
The Carsons said they would sit out in the sunshine—that there was no need for them to go into the house. They had come up unexpectedly, and they gave Mary McBirney a chance to keep her house to herself if she wished. But a kind of humble pride swelled in the good woman’s heart. She had not many vanities, but her pride in her home was one of them.
“We will sit in the sun,” she said, “for it’s the place to be days like this. But first you must see my home. I’ve seen yours, you know.”
So they were shown the homely rooms—the rooms where each and every member of the family had his comfortable place. They saw the cat sunning on the doorstep, and the hounds stretched out in the yard. They saw the braided rugs, the woven counterpanes, the homemade cotton at the windows, the shapely baskets, all the products of Mary McBirney’s busy hands.
And then they were taken to that clean little chamber, looking straight up the leafy mountain side, which the McBirneys had lovingly made for Azalea.
“Oh!” cried Carin, “Isn’t it a dear place, mamma? Quaint and dear like Azalea! My room has too many things in it, hasn’t it mamma? I like this better. And it’s almost like living in the tree tops. The next time Azalea leaves you, Mrs. McBirney, it will be because she thinks she’s a bird and flies away. Or else she’ll be a flying squirrel.”
And just then they heard Thomas McBirney calling them from below. Then they all went down to have a part in telling their good news, and while they were in the very midst of their story—not that they had much to tell, for they knew no more than Haystack’s message had brought them—Hi’s odd little figure, with its long arms and bullet head, came crawling up the rocks from the lower waterfall. His dark face was strangely old and tired, and as he moved forward, with one of his thin arms in a splint, he certainly looked like a neglected boy, and this in spite of all that Ma McBirney could do to keep him as she thought a boy should be kept.