He walked into his bedroom with the ring still in his hand and closed the door.
Chicken Little waited and waited, not knowing whether she ought to go and tell Sherm what she suspected. It seemed too strange to be possible. And if it were true, surely Captain Clarke would want to tell him himself. Perhaps she oughtn’t to be there. She rose softly and slipped out to Wing in the kitchen. After a time she heard Sherm get up from his seat on the veranda step and go into the library. Immediately after, the bedroom door opened and she heard the murmur of voices. She left a message with Wing and running quietly out to Calico, untied him, and rode home in the twilight.
“You needn’t ever say again, Ernest Morton,” 383she wrote to her brother the next evening, “that E. P. Roe’s stories are too goody-goody and fishy to be interesting. He can’t hold a candle to what’s happened to the Captain and Sherm. I have to go round pinching myself to believe it is really so. I am almost afraid I will wake up and find it isn’t, still. Do you remember the picture of the Captain’s little boy that looked like Sherm? Well, it was Sherm. I can hear you say: ‘What in the dickens?’ So, I’ll put you out of suspense right away. The Captain’s boy was not dead, only lost, and he is Sherm or Sherm is he, whichever way is right–I’m sure I don’t know. You see the Captain went off on a long voyage and got shipwrecked and was gone ages and ages. And Juanita’s father and mother were way off in California–they used to be Spanish. That’s what made them so foreign-looking in the locket picture. Well, nobody knows exactly what happened. When the Captain got back to New York and hunted up the boarding house where she had lived, they said she had left six months before to go to her parents in California. Captain Clarke wrote to California and found that her father was dead and her mother hadn’t heard from Juanita for months, and didn’t know anything about her coming home. Wasn’t it dreadful? He paid detectives to hunt her up, but they never found the slightest clue. The Captain thought she’d gone off and left him on purpose–that’s 384 what made him such a woman-hater–and so sad all the time. You wouldn’t know him now. He looks like Merry Christmas all the year round. You should see him gaze at Sherm. Marian says it makes her want to cry, and Mother says it is the most wonderful manifestation of Providence she has ever known. It seems to me Providence would show more sense not to muddle things up so in the first place. Sherm is as pleased as can be to find he really is somebody, and he’s awfully fond of the Captain, but you see he’d got so used to loving the Darts as his own folks that he can’t get unused to it all of a sudden. He choked all up when he tried to call Captain Clarke ‘Father,’ and the Captain told him not to. There’s heaps more to tell, but Mother has been calling me for the past three minutes.”
“No wonder Sherm feels dazed,” said Dr. Morton two evenings later, watching the boy, who was making a vain pretense of playing checkers with Chicken Little.
He was so heedless that she swept his men off the board at each move, to Chicken Little’s disgust. Sherm usually beat her when he gave his mind to the game. Presently, she picked up the board and dumped the checkers off into her lap.
“A penny for your thoughts, Sherm.”
385“I was just wondering if Captain–Father–would find out anything more in New York.”
“How long will he be gone?”