"I'll pick 'em up," cried Joel, delighted to find something to do, and he sprang up and went scrambling around and sweeping them into a pile with his fingers, while the big tears trailed down his round cheeks.
"See, now," said Polly, trying to speak gayly, "how the old nails have to hop into the box again."
"So they do," said David, with a wan little smile. Then he shut his eyes.
"Run as fast as you can, Joe," said Polly, "and ask Grandma Bascom to come over." Then she lifted Davie and struggled with him to a pile of grain bags in the corner. "I can't get him into the bedroom till Joel helps me, and besides, I must get Phronsie out of the kitchen first," she thought. "Oh, God! please don't let Davie die," she cried deep in her heart.
Joel flew on the wings of the wind, his heart beating like a trip-hammer, over down across the lane to Grandma Bascom's little cottage. Grandma, with a tin pan full of wet corn meal, was just going out to feed her hens, when he dashed up behind her. "Please come!" he shouted, his trembling mouth close to her cap-border. "Polly wants you!"
"'PLEASE COME!' HE SHOUTED CLOSE TO HER CAP-BORDER"
"Polly's here, now that's nice!" said Grandma, well pleased. "You just wait a minute, and I'll be ready to see her. Come, Biddy-Biddy," she called, and waddling off, she gathered up a handful of the wet corn meal.
"Oh, come now!" roared Joe, and seizing her hand, he pulled her back toward the kitchen. "Dear Grandma Bascom, please come; Dave's killed, I guess," and before she knew it, she was halfway to the little brown house, and in a minute or two more there she was before Davie lying on the pile of grain bags, and Polly holding his hand, and fanning him with an old newspaper.
"He's all right," said Grandma, with a practised eye; "only just fainted a bit. Now 'tisn't anything to what my son John's Abram did one summer he spent with me. Used to tumble over most every day."