Micky drew a quick breath; for a moment the tragedy in her eyes turned him speechless. It hurt him, too, that look, and brought into his mind for a vivid second the eyes of a mother fox he had once seen, backed into a rocky corner, her frightened, shivering cubs behind her.
“Oh!” he exclaimed sympathetically, an instant later. “They won’t give him leave? But—but couldn’t, you—go to see him?”
“I could, but I’ve got no money,” flamed the woman—“and he leaves on Saturday.”
Abruptly she turned her back and resumed that fierce, monotonous sweeping of the spotless floor. Micky stared for a moment at the narrow, drooping shoulders, the plain white collar, the soft, pretty, grayish hair, and of a sudden something rose in his throat and choked him. With eyelids stinging, he reached blindly for the knob, opened the door and stepped outside. Drawing it softly shut, he blinked rapidly several times before he stepped off the stone and moved slowly down the gravelled path.
“It’s tough!” he muttered gruffly—“beastly tough!”
A picture of Jim Wright flashed into his mind—laughing, fearless, blue-eyed Jim, whose devotion to his mother had been the only thing that made him await the machinery of the draft. He might have pleaded dependency, but he did not—could not, he told Micky, who was an ardent admirer of the older fellow.
“She’ll have every cent of my pay, Micky, old scout,” he explained just before leaving. “And with you to help her over the hard spots, I guess she’ll make out all right. I just can’t stick around home when men are needed over there.”
So he had gone into training—ordered, perversely, to a distant camp instead of one so near at hand. And Micky had kept his promise to help in the spirit as well as letter. Jim had been back just once in all those months; a soldier’s pay doesn’t stretch for frequent railroad journeys. And now he is going over. It might be years before his mother saw him again; it might be—never.
“If only he was at Camp Wheeling,” growled the boy, speeding mechanically toward school. “It seems too stupid to send him all that ways. Why, the round trip costs nearly fifty dollars.” A remembrance of that look in the woman’s eyes came back to him and he ground his teeth. “Gee!” he burst out. “If I only had the money—if I could only get some!”
But in a smallish town like Wharton, with everyone feeling the effect of the war in increased prices and voluntary self denial, fifty dollars seemed a really enormous sum to raise at short notice. It was not until Micky was running up the school steps that there came to him in a sudden, blinding flash the realization that this amount and more already reposed in the scout treasury.