CHAPTER XXV.
FINDING A HOME.
Before Arthur could recover in the slightest from his bewilderment at this wonderful and undreamed-of appearance of his beautiful lady in such a place, she stepped forward and caught him in her arms. “Oh, my little Prince Dusty! My dear little Prince Dusty!” she cried. “Where have you been? How did you get here? Do you know that I am your cousin? Your own cousin, Harriet Dale, and that I live at Dalecourt? I never was so utterly amazed in my life as I am to find you here! We knew that you had left the Dustins; but nobody could tell where, or how, you had gone. And to think that you should have come to Dalecourt! I don’t see how you ever found the way! It is the very most wonderful thing I ever heard of! How did you get here? But, no matter now. How thoughtless I am to stand here asking all these questions. You look frozen and starved, poor child, and the first thing is to get you home as quickly as possible. Who is this with you? Not Uncle Phin! Surely not the Uncle Phin who used to be so good to me when I was a little girl?”
“Yes, Miss Hatty,” answered the old man, who had scrambled stiffly to his feet upon her entrance, and now stood with his white head uncovered, laughing and crying at the same time. “Hit am de same ole Unc Phin, an he tank de good Lawd he is lib to see a shuah nough Dale once mo. He done bring lil Marse home, Miss Hatty. Hits been powerful hard wuk; but de Lawd done sen He rabens, an He fiery chariots, an He pillows ob smoke, an now He done sen you Miss Hatty, like a bressed angel, fur to delibber us.”
“He has indeed been very good to us,” said the young lady, gently. “Now we must get this dear child home at once.”
The carriage in which Miss Hatty was driving home from Richmond, when her curiosity was attracted by the strange scene in the little old cabin, was now brought to the door. Uncle Phin, feebly protesting that it was all too fine and too grand for a “wuffless ole niggah” like him, was made to take the front seat; while on the other sat Miss Harriet Dale, with ragged, tired, hungry, but intensely happy Arthur nestled close beside her.
The perplexing tumult of his feelings was such that, up to this time, he had not spoken a word; and even now he wondered if it were not all a beautiful dream, from which he would awake to find himself lying on the floor of the cabin. It seemed as though his own dear mother must have come back; that it was her loving arm now thrown protectingly about him, and he almost feared to speak, lest she might disappear, as she always did when he waked from dreaming of her. But the beautiful lady was talking to him and asking him questions.
She could not wait until they reached home to learn how these two had wandered from the far-away place in which she had met her “Prince Dusty,” to this one. It was such a wonderful journey for them to have undertaken, that her impatience to know something of it could not be restrained. So she asked question after question, that Arthur and Uncle Phin answered to the best of their ability, until at length she knew enough of the principal events of their pilgrimage to make it seem marvellous that they should ever have accomplished it.
Among other things she learned of their experience in the runaway caboose of freight train No. 15, in the Alleghany Mountains, and this seemed to interest her more than all the rest.
Then she wanted to know if the book from which Arthur had been reading to Uncle Phin, and which he now carried clasped tightly in both hands, could be the same that she had given him so long ago, and how he had been able to keep it all this time.
“Of course it is,” answered Arthur, “and of course I have kept it. It is the very most precious thing I own in the world; and nothing but beautiful things, just like its stories, have happened ever since you gave it to me. I had to let Rusty go to get us here; but I would never, never, have let my book go, not even if we had been starving.”