“Why, he [ain’t] safe!” he said. “He ain’t safe! If the women folks can sit up on their thrones an’ give the word for things like that to be done, who’s to know what’s happening to him this very minute?”
“Well,” said Dick, though he looked rather anxious himself; “ye see [this ’ere un] isn’t the one [that’s bossin’] things now. I know her name’s Victory, an’ this un here in the book,—her name’s Mary.”
“So it is,” said Mr. Hobbs, still mopping his forehead; “so it is,—but still it doesn’t seem as if ’twas safe for him over there with those queer folks. Why, they tell me they don’t keep the Fourth o’ July!”
He was privately uneasy for several days; and it was not until he received Fauntleroy’s letter and had read it several times, both to himself and to Dick, and had also read the letter Dick got about the same time, that he became composed again.
But they both found great pleasure in their letters. They read and re-read them, and talked them over and enjoyed every word of them. And they spent days over the answers they sent, and read them over almost as often as the letters they had received.
One day they were sitting in the store doorway together, and Mr. Hobbs was filling his pipe, whilst Dick told him all about his life and his elder brother, who had been very good to him after their parents had died. The brother’s name was Ben, and he had managed to get quite a decent place in a store. “And then,” said Dick, “blest if he didn’t go an’ marry a [gal,] a regular tiger-cat. She’d tear things to pieces, when she got mad. Had a baby just like her; [’n’] at last Ben went out West with a man [to set up a cattle ranch.”]
“He oughtn’t to [’ve] married,” Mr. Hobbs said solemnly, as he rose to get a match.
As he took the match from its box, he stopped and looked down on the counter.
“Why!” he said, “if here isn’t a letter! I didn’t see it [afore.] The postman must have laid it down when I wasn’t noticin’, or the newspaper slipped over it.”
He picked it up and looked at it carefully.