“Mammy, I am falling!” he called out, as his feet slipped from the bough.
I had already made a spring from the carriage, with the sunset dazzling my eyes, when an old negro woman emerged swiftly from the underbrush by the fence, and caught the child in her arms. In that instant of terror, while my eyes were still filled with the sunset, I observed only that the woman was tall and straight like an Indian, and that her face, framed in a red turban, was as brown and wrinkled as a November leaf. Then, as she placed the child on his feet, I saw that her features were irradiated, by a passion of tenderness which gave it a strange glow like the burning light of the sunset.
“You saved his life!” I started to cry; but before I could utter the words she vanished into the shadow of the mulberry tree, and left the boy standing alone in the road.
“You might have been killed,”! said sternly as I reached him, for I was still trembling from the fright he had given me.
The boy looked up with a strange elfin glee—there is no other word for it—in his face. “I knew Mammy would catch me,” he responded defiantly.
“Suppose she hadn’t been here?” As I spoke I looked about me for the old negress.
At this the child laughed shrilly, with a sound that was like the ironic mirth of an old man. “She is always where I am,” he replied.
He was a queer child, I thought as I gazed at him, ugly and pinched, and yet with a charm which I felt from the first moment my eyes fell on him. There was a defiant shyness in his manner, and his little face, under the flaming curls, was too thin and pale for healthy childhood. But, in spite of his strangeness, I had never in my life been so strongly attracted, so completely drawn, to a child.
“You must be Pell!” I exclaimed, after a pause in which I had watched him in silence.
He stared at me critically. “Yes, I am Pell. How did you know?”