“Your father said he heard that Captain Harrison was ready to sail, and knowing that you have decided to sleep under Rankin’s bridge we concluded that you were going with him, since the vessel is in the river just below there.”
Tommy’s heart was so full that he could not speak. Instead of being told to come into the house and behave himself, as he would have been only too glad to do, here was his mother actually helping him to run away, and talking as if she thought it was the best course he could pursue.
“I suppose you are in a hurry, Tommy,” said Mrs. Gibson, kindly, “so I won’t detain you. We shall be glad to see you if you should conclude to come back here. Good-by. I hope you will enjoy yourself better than you ever could at home.”
The door was closed, and the almost broken-hearted runaway could do no less than continue his flight, out of which all the romance had been taken.
II.
As Tom walked from the house he was in a very uncomfortable frame of mind. He felt that his mother had been unkind in allowing him to do as he had at first wanted to do, and that if she had really loved him she would have obliged him to come back. He felt as if he had been wronged because he had not been punished severely, and he was fully convinced that he had made a mistake when he had decided that the only thing he could do was to run away.
There was no possible excuse for him to return. If his mother had not seen him, he believed he would have sneaked back into the house and have borne all the jeers of his schoolmates because he had “backed out.” But he decided that he could not even do that now, and that it was absolutely necessary for him to go on as he had begun.
“How I wish I hadn’t started!” he said to himself as he trudged along toward Rankin’s brook, his bundles growing heavier each moment. “She told me about Captain Harrison’s going away to-morrow, so that I could go with him and that she’d know where I was. But I won’t do anything like that. I’ll go ’way off where she won’t ever see me again, and then she’ll be sorry she was so willing to let me run away.”
Tommy was being severely punished for wanting to leave his home and he knew it, but he had not suffered enough to cause him to be willing to admit his fault and to ask his mother to forgive him; therefore the discouraged runaway very unwillingly continued his decidedly desolate course.