Rob knew something good was going to come about. He gauged the broad grin on Peleg’s face to mean that he had news for them. The girl was smiling happily, it seemed. Yes, Fortune must have finally consented to beam upon the Pinder family, so long down and out.
“Good-morning, Mr. Jeffords! Good-morning, Ralph, and all the rest o’ you,” said Peleg as he came up the steps, holding his sister by the arm. “I just dropped over to let you know I ain’t agoin’ to work no more with you. Sorry to say it, too, sure I am, ’cause you’ve been mighty kind to me, and I never ain’t meanin’ to forget it, neither. I got a farm o’ my own now, you see, Mr. Jeffords; and we’re meanin’ to have them other three Pinders come out o’ the ’sylum and live to home.”
“Well, this is great news, Peleg,” said Mr. Jeffords, holding out both hands to the boy, and his shy sister, who looked so rosy and happy now. “Tell us all about it, won’t you?”
“Just what I was meanin’ to do, sir,” said the accommodating Peleg, his eyes fairly dancing with excitement and joy. “You see, it came to me ’bout like one o’ them bombshells I heard Rob here tellin’ he’d seen explode over in Europe. That letter I got some days back was from Mr. Green, the lawyer man down in Wyoming. It told me to come and see him that evening, ’cause he had some right good news to tell me. So I goes in, and he shows me a letter he had from another lawyer away out in Colorado. This says that my uncle, Peleg Pipps, had just died there, and in his will he leaves what he’d scraped together to me as his—er, namesake the lawyer calls it.”
Peleg looked proudly around as he said this, just as though he felt it a triumph, after all, to carry the name he did; though possibly on more than one occasion he had ardently wished it might have been plain Bill or Tom.
“This is splendid news you’re telling us, Peleg,” said Mr. Jeffords, still shaking hands with his former help. “What about the farm—is it one your uncle owned out there in Colorado?”
“Shucks! no, sir, it’s the Widow Hawkins’ place, you see, just twenty acres of fine ground that her husband made his pile out o’ before he died. I used to work there once, and always liked the house, it seemed so much like a home. Mr. Green, he fixed it so that half the money that comes to me is agoin’ to pay cash for the Hawkins farm; and the widow, she’s sent word we c’n get in right away. You see, she sold me the furniture and everythin’ as it stands. And, oh! Mr. Jeffords, just to think I got a home now, after all, where we c’n all live as long as we want; and there ain’t ever agoin’ to be no poorhouse in our dreams, either.”
Tubby, and perhaps some of the other boys as well, might have been observed to wink violently about that time, as though their vision had become more or less obscured. Rob was more rejoiced than he could have told, for it all seemed to be coming out like a fairy story, with this almost forgotten old uncle away out in Colorado dying just at a time when the little Pinders, scattered and homesick, were so much in need of succor.
They insisted on shaking hands with Peleg, each one in turn, and congratulating him most heartily on his great good fortune. Then they were also introduced to Hetty, his sister, a rather buxom girl of about fourteen, and large for her age, who gave promise of being well able to act the part of homekeeper when once Peleg had gathered his little brood under the roof of the Hawkins’ farmhouse.