It wasn’t a case for argument. The children were beginning to look up apprehensively, and Mary called them to come to bed. In the darkness of the kitchen when she was getting down the lamp, Billy waited to whisper: “He didn’t say I could go to school, did he?”
It was hard to look into the wistful, searching face and say “No.” It was harder when Billy turned away quickly and kept his face averted while he got the little tin basin to wash his feet. His mother’s hard, gentle hand rested for a moment on his shoulder and dropped away discouraged
at the quivering of the resolute little back. Her whole body ached to take him in her arms. He really wasn’t much more than a baby yet, but such expressions were denied her in the never-ending struggle to keep her emotions dammed back. Only the anxiety of love, the eagerness of service were busy in a thousand ways from the first stirrings of daylight until long after the family were asleep.
As she hung up the key of the clock Dan came in. At the entrance to the darkness of the little bedroom off the kitchen he stopped, slipping a brace over his shoulder, and looking back with a hard little glitter in his eyes inquired:
“C’n you git that fellow up to catch the horses by five o’clock? .... ’Cause if you can’t I kin.”
Another of the thousand bitter details!
In the morning Mary kindled the fire and busied herself about the kitchen as long as she dared before climbing the narrow stairs to Billy’s room. Then she hesitated. There was something so blue and drawn about the closed eyelids; already his hands were bent and calloused like a man’s.
“An’ him not much more’n a baby,” she murmured. It seemed nothing short of cruel to disturb him. Perhaps he would waken himself if she just kept looking at him.
But Billy didn’t waken. Once he twitched
nervously, but a boy consumed with the weakening fever of growth doesn’t waken easily after working the length of a man’s day, with “chores” afterwards. He had to be shaken several times before the slow, painful process began. It started somewhere in his dimmest consciousness, and gradually sent a long, slow quiver down through his healthy little muscles and back again, emerging in a gulping breath that seemed to shake his eyes open. Ordinarily he would have closed them again, but this morning the bewildering memory of something dreadful hanging over him brought him to, suddenly.