“Don’t you think that’s a vallable inf’mation?” demanded Jimmy anxiously. “If I hadn’t taken that letter and put it in my pocket, I shouldn’t have lost it. Barb’ra could have got it herself, and maybe it was ’portant. You can’t tell ’thout you read a letter whether it’s ’portant or not; an’ you can’t read a letter when it’s lost.”
“So you lost a letter ’dressed to Barb’ry, did you? H’m! Where’d you lose it?”
“If I knew, I’d go an’ find it,” said Jimmy soberly. “I put it in my pocket, an’ it was blue, an’ it was f’om out west. Barb’ra doesn’t know who it was f’om. But she’d like to know.”
“H’m!” repeated Peg. “You’d ought to carried it all the way right in your han’, where you c’d see it. Pockets are kind o’ dangerous when it comes to letters. I know a whole row o’ little boys ’at ain’t alive at all, ’count o’ a letter bein’ lost. They never was born,” he added by way of explanation.
Jimmy drew a deep sigh of sustained interest.
“You see it was this way,” continued Peg circumstantially. “The’ was a young feller ’at I used to know, an’ he was workin’ in a lumber-camp one winter where the’ wasn’t any pos’offis; one o’ the men used to carry the letters in an’ out, a matter o’ fifteen miles. One time he lost a letter this young feller wrote to his girl, an’ didn’t think to say nothin’ ’bout it; an’ she got all worked up ’cause she didn’t hear f’om him, an’ after a spell she up an’ married another man; an’ so the young man I was speakin’ of never got married, an’ never had any little boys o’ his own. He felt awful bad ’bout it fer a long time, but he ain’t never los’ a letter ’at b’longed to anybody else.”
The pattering sound of the rain on the barn roof increased to a steady roar as Peg related this short but instructive tale.
“I sh’d think those little boys would feel bad,” said Jimmy sympathetically. “I’d hate not to be alive.”
“Mebbe they do; an’ ag’in, mebbe they don’t,” observed Peg cautiously. “Anyhow, some of ’em would be growed up by this time; farmin’ it, mebbe, or keepin’ store.” His eyes wore a far-away look.
Jimmy dipped Peg’s pen in the red ink bottle.