This set his mind to thinking upon the fact that at daybreak the very next morning the ship on which his parents had bought their stateroom would sail from New York. They were already on the train which would bear them to the coast.
After they sailed it would be a long time before he could even expect a picture post-card from them—a month, at least. And then, they would be thousands of miles away!
He slipped away from Fred and Pee Wee and went into one of the schoolrooms. There was a big globe there, and he timidly turned this around and around until he found the pink splotch of color which marked Brazil.
There was the gaping mouth of the Amazon, with the big island dividing it, and the river on the south side, against which was the black dot marking the city of Para—where his parents would land.
He thought of all he had ever heard or been taught about the Amazon—"that Mighty River." He knew how the current of the vast stream met the ocean tides and fought with them for supremacy. He knew how the river overflowed its banks in the rainy seasons and covered vast areas of forest and plain.
The trader's station, to which his parents were bound, was a thousand miles up the Amazon, and then five hundred miles more up another river. Why—why, if he fell ill, or anything—
He never realized until this moment just what it would mean to have his mother and father so far away. It had been great fun to come to Rockledge to school. He liked it here. He hoped he would learn, and advance, and win his way with both the boys and the teachers.
But to have a mother and father so many, many miles away—especially to have a mother going away from one just as fast as steam could take her—
Bobby Blake put his arm on the big globe, and laid his face against his jacket-sleeve. His shoulders shook.
CHAPTER XV