She surveyed his tall, graceful figure, with a mother’s pride, saying:
“Perhaps; but you are so young.”
“I’m seventeen, and I feel quite a man.”
“But I don’t like to trust you so far from home alone.”
“Oh! I needn’t go alone; Percy can go with me.”
Mrs. Vere laughed.
“A great protection he would be—another boy like yourself!” she cried. “There, there—let us not talk any more about it.”
But they did talk about it upon several occasions afterward, and Mrs. Vere’s desire to hear from her missing husband overcame all other considerations, and she consented to Percy’s request to go in search of him. She thought that the sight of his boy would induce him to return home.
Her business had proved prosperous, as I have said, and she was able to fit out the boys in good style. She hung the locket that contained her own and husband’s likeness around her son’s neck, and bade him a tearful “good speed.”
The boys took passage upon a steamboat bound for Omaha, and steamed up the Big Muddy, as the Missouri is called by the dwellers on its banks, and reached that ambitious city in due season.