Harry Fenimore's Principles

by Isabel Thompson Hopkins

“He’s not come home?” said Aleck in alarm, “then I must see the doctor!” and Joan, frightened herself, though she did not know why, opened the office-door without another word.

The doctor stood before the library with an open book in his hand, studying up authorities on a difficult point, but one glance at Aleck brought back his thoughts and sent a misgiving through them like a flash; he remembered seeing him on the school-grounds that morning.

“Have you a message from the little fellow at the school?” he asked, with one of his quick looks, and without waiting for Aleck.

“No, sir, I hoped I should find him here; but the professor wished me to say how much he regretted—indeed, sir, he is very sorry, as well as very angry, and we cannot really tell how it happened, but the boys did something or said something at recess that troubled him, and he disappeared before any one could tell which way he went. The professor was sure he was at home, or he would have sent sooner, but—”

Before the sentence was finished the doctor had thrown his book across the room with such force that it went flying through the open window, where nothing but the iron railing of the little balcony outside saved it from the sidewalk, and the doctor himself was halfway out of the front-door. He turned suddenly and put his hand on Aleck’s shoulder.

“Thank you, my man,” he said, “and thank the professor for me, if you please,” and in another instant he was gone, and sparks were flying from under the black horse’s hoofs, almost out of sight down the road leading to the almshouse. He did not know why he chose it, except that it was the way he had taken so many times to find him before, and the one most familiar to Creepy himself. On, on, a mile, more than a mile, no distance at all to the flying hoofs, but a walk the doctor had never consented to Creepy’s trying yet, though he had begged for it more than once. The almshouse was in sight now, but there was Enoch working on the road, and taking off his hat with as grand a flourish and as serene a smile as if he had never heard of such a thing as trouble in the world. Creepy could not have gone that way, but here was the old turn in the road that he used to visit so often.

A sudden thought struck the doctor. They had passed in there to follow the trout brook, and down the road, perhaps half a mile away, was a great overhanging rock, facing the brook, covered with moss, and a deep velvety bed of moss beneath it. Creepy had looked at it, and said what a place that would be to hide from a storm, and the doctor remembered the half-laughing half-serious look in his face as he said it.

He turned the black horse with a whirl round the corner and down the road toward the point where the rock lay. Not a trace of any one yet, and none to ask whom they had seen; but now the rock was coming in sight, and what was that fluttering on a torn splinter of the fence? Something white, a little thing, one of the very handkerchiefs Joan had been hemming in such a hurry that “the wee bairnie suld be as weel supplied wi’ everything as ony he might meet wi’ at the school.”

Was that Creepy, that poor little huddled up heap of something lying there, with hands holding tightly the very roots of the moss, and a white face half buried in its depths?

For one instant, at the sound of the doctor’s step, he raised the eyes that had been so bright that morning; but in another he had turned them hastily away.