“Glory be!” cried Mrs. O’Mally, when we showed up safe and sound. So full of joy was she that she even tried to hug us! But that was all right with me. I don’t mind letting an old lady hug me. “Sure, ’tis a burden that has been lifted off me mind at sight of ye. An’ what luck had ye?”
“No luck at all,” says Poppy. Then he told her about us yelling.
“Didn’t you hear us?”
“Sure, I was expectin’ to hear ye. An’ the continued silence was what set me to worryin’.”
Somewhat to my surprise Mother and Dad drove into the yard about five o’clock. The doctors had operated on Mr. Weckler, they said, and the old man was getting along all right, though he was still out of his head.
“He seems to think that his daughter Clara is in the next room,” says Mother. “And they say it’s very pitiful to hear him begging her to come to him.”
“Is his daughter dead?” says I, remembering how sad the old man had acted that day in the orchard.
“The general opinion is that she is dead. For she hasn’t been seen or heard of since the time when she ran off to get married, more than twenty years ago.”
The two women then got their heads together in “pickle” talk. And learning that our car had come here purposely to take home a bushel of cucumbers, I lugged them out of the cellar.
Mother was running around with a cucumber pickle in each hand.