'He said—I could have her—if I got started right off!' he shrieked out in a high, quivering, babyish wail, 'and—I did—get started—right—off—'
'Hush—hush! You have worked—so hard! You are so tired!' She looked, with frightened eyes, at his dully burning cheeks.
'Take him up to bed—let me take him up,' came a husky voice behind them; and he was lifted in his father’s arms and carried upstairs.
As they undid the straining buttons of the well-filled little waist, some papers dropped down to the floor and the man stooped and picked them up. He looked at them and put them in his pocket.
'I’m going to call up the doctor,' he whispered.
But after the doctor had come and gone, he went upstairs again and sat down by the bed, while his shocked eyes sought the small, still upturned face. It was so characteristic of the boy that, in a high fever, he should not chatter in delirium, that he should not scream wild things about a pony, that he should only lie there quietly, with his eyes closed and his face turned upwards. For a long time the watcher by the bed looked down in the flickering half-light, and then he went downstairs to his study and shut the door. When he had read the papers, which he took from his pocket, from beginning to end, he placed a clean sheet sharply on the desk before him, and with his mouth closed into a taut, straight line which relaxed into no curve of compromise as his pen marched down the sheet, Mr. Henry Tarbell wrote a letter to the Pony Man.
He sealed and directed it—and walked out of the house, with long strides, to the post-box.
It was many days later that he hung over the bed where a child lay tired out with fever, and gently said something that he thought might bring a little light back into the white face.
'They did send you a prize, Crosby, after all! A first-class little prize that has just come this morning! Look!' And he held up a small but crisply ticking watch upon a cheaply shining chain.
Crosby reached up his hand. 'I don’t believe—it would keep the—right time—would it?' he asked slowly, with a suspiciousness quite new. And his unwavering eyes sought his father’s.