“It’s the song ‘Absent’ that voice is singing up there,” said Billee, furtively wiping her eyes. “It always did get the best of me. Listen.”
“My eyes grow dim with tenderness, the while
Thinking I see thee smile.”
“You were telling me of the boy and girl,” he reminded, gently, as she sat dreaming.
“Yes. Her father and mother, who had been saved, began a frantic search for her. She was their only child. They offered fortunes to any one who would find her, dead or alive, and the river and bay were full of tugs and patrol boats, and fire boats and launches hurrying here and there under the searchlights. When they found the poor, old, dead nurse, with a little hair ribbon clenched in her hand, all hope fled. But a barge captain landed the boy and girl at the Battery. In a few minutes the city knew that the little heiress to many millions was safe in her mother’s arms. And great surgeons were working over the boy in St. Luke’s. You must read it yourself some day. I lose so much in telling it.”
“Go on. I’d rather hear you.”
“But there isn’t much more to tell. The boy refused to give his name. He seemed afraid somebody would hang a medal on him and make a speech, and that the papers would write him up and print his picture, and he’d never get over it. Said it was nothing, at last. That he could swim from Georgia to New York if the water stayed smooth and somebody was along to cook for him.
“But the girl and her mother came every day and brought him flowers and good things to eat, and in the imagination of that little child he grew to be the greatest hero in the world. And he must have liked her, for he would hold her hand and tell her the stories over and over: Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox and the Tar-Baby. The old lady I live with has one of his little songs written out. It’s ‘Little Boy Blue’—added to; Little Boy Blue and his master who found him asleep:
“Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn!
The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn!