He saluted sharply in return, and turned again to those under his personal charge.
"Get into the car," he said. Mary Gage felt his hand steadying her arm. He took his place at the steering wheel, Wid Gardner alongside, Annie and herself being left to the rear seat of the tonneau. It was reckless driving that Doctor Allen Barnes did once more. They out-ran the approaching valley storm, and so presently came into the gate of that place where once had lived Sim Gage. They dismounted from the car and stood, a forlorn group, looking at the scene before them as funeral mourners returning, not liking the thought of going into a deserted home from which a man is gone never to return.
CHAPTER XXXV
ANNIE ANSWERS
All at once Annie Squires, usually stolid, now overstrained, gave way to a wild sobbing. "I can't go in there," said she. "I'm scared. I want to go home! I want my mother, that's what I want."
"Where is your mother?" asked Wid Gardner. He had come over near to her when Doctor Barnes was helping Mary into the house.
"Dead—dead long ago," wept Annie. "When I was a little girl. Like her, Mary, there—we didn't neither of us ever have a mother. We done just the best we could, both of us. We've tried and tried to find some sort of place where we belonged, and we couldn't. We haven't got any place to go to. I haven't got a place on earth to call my home.
"And it's something a woman wants sometimes," she added after a while, dabbing her wet handkerchief against her eyes. "That's the Gawd's truth."
Wid approached more closely the weeping girl, touching her arm with a brown hand now gentle as a child's.