“You shall!” cried Deacon Cornhill, vehemently, for almost at the outset of their conversation the subject uppermost in his mind had received an impetus he had not anticipated. “That is, you may not see the old home, but you can see another as good.”
If at first she thought him demented, he quickly explained the proposition he had made to Rob, when Joey clapped her hands with delight.
“It might bring back your health, mother.”
“I know the sweet scent of the country air would do me good, my daughter; but do not raise any false hopes. We have not a cent to get there, if we had any place to flee to.”
“Hurrah!” cried the usually dignified deacon, forgetting his staid ways in the excitement of the moment; “my case is as good as won. You shall both of you go, if you will, and never return to this wicked city.”
“Here comes Rob!” cried the happy Joe, beginning to dance along the length of the narrow room. “We’ll talk it all over with him, and what a happy day it will be!”
CHAPTER VI.
CARRYING THE NEWS.
“I can do it, and I will!”
The mixed train from the south was drawing slowly out of Wenham Junction, as Phil Hardy simultaneously uttered this speech and threw himself upon the back of old Jim, his father’s farm horse. It was in the early part of April, and the mud along the country roads was deep and soft, which fact was shown by the appearance of the horse and its boyish rider.
Phil was the eldest son of ’Squire Hardy, one of the leading citizens of Basinburg. He was a harum-scarum youth of eighteen, who always seemed to be mixed up in every affair of a shady character taking place within a radius of twenty miles. Like boys of his ilk, he ever seemed to be present whenever anything of an unusual nature was taking place, and “to get his fingers into the pie,” using a common expression current at the time in the quiet, out-of-the-way hamlet of Basinburg. Not another boy in town would have ridden five miles through the mud that day to have been in Wenham at this time. But Phil had not missed it, and as he picked up Jim’s reins, heading the horse homeward, he added to what he had already said: