She kissed him underneath the short yellow curls in the back of his neck.
“Oh, Jimmy,” she sighed, “I wish you were grown up now!”
The child straightened himself anxiously.
“My head’s way above your belt when I stand up,” he said, “‘n’ I ate lots of brown bread an’ milk for breakfast. I’m growing jus’ as fast’s I can.”
Barbara hugged him remorsefully.
“You’re just big enough—for six,” she assured him. “And—and we’ll come out all right, somehow. We just will, precious!”
“‘Course we will,” echoed the child. He slipped from his chair and eyed his sister with a searching gaze.
“If you’re scared of anybody, Barb’ra,” he said valiantly, “I’ll take a big stick, ’n’—’n’—I’ll—I’ll—I won’t let anybody hurt you, Barb’ra!”
The girl laughed rather unsteadily as she hurried him into his coat and cap. “Learn a lot at school, dear,” she murmured, “and you’ll have the best kind of a big stick.”
The remembrance of his warm little arms about her neck comforted her as she drove the wall-eyed mare along the road. She was going to do a very strange thing. Something she had never heard of any woman doing before. Just how the idea had taken form and substance in her mind she did not know. She appeared to herself to have awakened with the resolve fully formed, distinctly outlined, even to the small details, which she busily reviewed while she was tying the horse before the house of Thomas Bellows, auctioneer. There was a shop in the lower front story of the house, which had once been a piazza, but now protruded with two bulging front windows to the edge of the sidewalk. The windows disclosed a variety of objects in the line of household appurtenances, clocks, flatirons, a pile of tin-ware, likewise a yellow placard reading, “Auction to-day,” surmounted by a professional flag of a faded red color.