“How might a street car look? Tele—telephone, what’s that?”
So the eager questioning went. Lee Renaud found himself leaping conversationally from point to point, drawing word-pictures of a host of everyday conveniences that had seemed so commonplace to him but that seemed almost like magic when recounted to this boy who had never seen anything.
In the midst of all this talk, Sarah Ann Bobb, Jimmy’s mother, still in the flopping sunbonnet, came forward bearing a tin platter set with the usual Cove meal of corn pone and fried hog-meat. “Set and eat,” she said hospitably.
“I—thank you, ma’am, no—” Lee leaped up in confusion. He hadn’t known he was talking so long. Night had dropped down upon him. “Uncle Gem—he’ll be worried—doesn’t know where I am, or what might have happened to me. I—I reckon I better trot along,” Lee stammered, as he reached for his cap that was “resting” where the woman had hung it on a wall peg.
“You, Mackey,” said Sarah Ann Bobb with her kind, crude courtesy, “draw out one of these here pine knots from off the fire so you can light him down the path.”
As Lee said his hasty good-byes, crippled Jimmy Bobb sat in his prison chair like one dazed.
“Street cars, 'lectric lights, talking contraptions!” he muttered to himself. “If,” shutting his eyes tightly, then opening them wide, “if I could only see something myself, oncet, anyway!”
CHAPTER IV
THE GANG TAKES A HAND
For days after that visit, Jimmy Bobb stuck in Lee’s mind. The cripple boy had so little. If only there were something one could do to give him a little pleasure!
Then a plan came to Lee. He just believed he’d—well, what he believed was so vague that he couldn’t put it into words, but it started him off on a very busy time.