"Joel." It was all David could say, as he pointed off where he thought the cow-pasture was. "Somethin's happened to that other boy. Didn't you say his name was--Joel?" said the other woman, fastening very small but sharp eyes on David.
"Mercy me! you don't think it!" exclaimed the tavern-keeper's wife, her ruddy face taking a scared expression. "Dear me! I must call Mr. Tisbett. Mr. Tisbett!" she screamed, running, if the speed she now exercised could be called by that name, for it was more like waddling, out to the porch.
"He isn't there," gasped David, following her. "Oh, dear Mrs. Green, please hurry and find him," he implored.
"I don't know no more'n the dead where he is, child," said Mrs. Green, turning a perplexed face to David, after the old farmer had said the same thing over again. "Mr. Tisbett's got the run o' the place, an' likely as not, he's stepped to one o' the neighbors," pointing to a small cluster of houses a quarter of a mile away.
Little David groaned and clasped his small hands in distress.
"Then nothing can stop their fighting?" he exclaimed in despair.
"Fighting? Who's fighting?" demanded Mrs. Green, sharply.
"Joel and Jim," said David, glad to think he'd remembered what Mr. Tisbett called the boy, yet sorry, as it flashed over him, that the tavern-keeper's wife was his "a'nt."
"He pushed me down," and his face turned more scarlet yet. But it was necessary to tell the dreadful thing, else Mrs. Green would think Joel was to blame in beginning the fight.
But the tavern-keeper's wife had her own reasons for believing differently. And without wasting her breath on words, except to ask David, "Where?" she flung her dish-towel, which she had been carrying in her hand, across her arm, and picking up her skirts, she made remarkably good time across the barnyard by a shorter cut, which she was familiar with, to the cow-pasture.