“I—I guess I’ll keep it by me,” said the old lady, with a timid smile.
Dorothy was able to make the old lady comfortable, and she found out several things about her while the porter arranged their berths. She was a Mrs. Petterby, and had lived all her life long (she was over sixty) in the little mill town of Rand’s Falls, in Massachusetts.
This was the very first time the old lady had ever been ten miles from the house where she was born. She had lived alone in her own house for the last few years, her husband and all her children but one being dead.
“My baby, he’s out West. I’m a-going to see him,” declared Mrs. Petterby. “He sent me money for ticket and all, long ago; he told me to put it in the bottom of the old teapot, where I’d be sure to know where it was, and then I could start for Colorado any time the fit tuk me.
“Did seem day b’fore yisterday, as though I’d got to see my baby again. He was dif’rent from the other children—sort o’ wild and hard to manage. He had a flare-up with his dad and went West.
“But there ain’t a mite o’ harm in my baby—no, Ma’am! An’ so I tell ’em. His father said so himself b’fore he died. He warn’t like the rest o’ the children, so his father didn’t understand him.
“He’s doin’ well, he writes. Gets his forty-five dollars ev’ry month, and sends me part. Of course, I don’t need it; I got it all in the Rand’s Falls Bank. But I kep’ out this ticket money, like he said; and—here I be!” and she cackled a soft little laugh, and smiled a transfiguring smile as she thought of the surprise she was going to give “her baby.”
She was going to Dugonne, the very town where Dorothy and her friends were to leave the train. So the girls sort of adopted the little old lady. But they could not find out what was in her basket.
Tavia was enormously curious. “I saw her dropping something through a crack into the basket,” she whispered to Dorothy. “She was feeding it.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed her chum.