"There! If there isn't that troublesome pipe right under your nose, Ella Anne!" cried Miss Weir, pouncing upon it where it lay on the window-sill. "Your head is so full of the new doctor you can't see straight. Here, Jake!"
She started for the door, but before she reached it a great many things happened. First, Mrs. Sawyer, gowned, bonneted and shawled, though the sun promised to be blazing hot before it set, came down the stairs at a reckless pace. She was followed by Miss Arabella Winters, half hidden beneath a bundle of coats and wraps suited for children of all ages. As the two ran for the door, Mrs. Winters with a bottle of milk, Miss Long with a forgotten pie, and Mrs. Munn, who had snatched up a basket of newly laundered clothes, under the mistaken idea that they, too, were for the orphan, all rushed at the same instant for the same portal, and jammed together between the door-posts. The Duke of Wellington, still grasping the rescued pipe, threw herself upon the human wedge and drove it, helter-skelter, down the steps; and simultaneously there arose, loud and clear, not from Cameron's Crossing, some miles distant, but just from the ravine bridge, scarcely a quarter of a mile away, the shrill whistle of the train.
The six women turned and looked at each other in an instant's paralyzed dismay. Jake Sawyer opened his mouth and gave forth a slight variation of his despairing motto, "We've missed that train, as sure as blazes!"
No one had courage to deny the assertion. When the Lakeview & Simcoe Railroad Company laid a line across the township of Oro they had treated Elmbrook in a shabby fashion by placing the station a mile from the village. The inconvenience of this arrangement was largely obviated, however, by the obliging ways of Conductor Lauchie McKitterick. For if any one in the village was late in starting for the station, all one had to do was to wave a towel at the back door as the train slowed up over the ravine bridge, and Lauchie would wait at the station. Of course, it was understood that the belated traveler was already on the way thither, taking the path across McQuarry's fields. But of what use to wave all the bed-sheets in Elmbrook this morning? For though a delay of half an hour or so was neither here nor there to the Lakeview & Simcoe Limited Express, it was impossible to expect even so neighborly a body as Lauchie to wait until the big, heavy buggy and Cameron's farm team should be driven along the cross-road and down the concession. And as for Hannah Sawyer's 185 pounds being transported across the fields and over the fences in less time—not to speak of all the orphan's clothes and the pies and the pound cake and the crock of butter—well, there was no use thinking about it!
But Mrs. Winters, the indomitable, rose to even this emergency. She sprang to the buggy and began dragging out the baskets. "We'll stop him at the bridge!" she screamed. "We can run down the back lane! Davy Munn, you jump out of that rig an' run ahead! No—Miss Weir, you go! Lauchie'll have to stop if you tell him!"
It was the first time in her life Mrs. Winters had ever paid a tribute to the Duke of Wellington's power. Though it was wrung from her by the exigencies of the case, the schoolmistress accepted it. She snatched a white garment off the clothes-line, darted through the barnyard, and ran at top speed down the back lane toward the track, waving it on high, all unconscious that it was Jake's white mill overalls. Close upon her flying footsteps came the orphan-adopting expedition: Mrs. Winters, the bottle of milk leaving a white-sprinkled trail behind her; Jake, dragging the heaps of wraps and the basket of provisions, with which little Miss Arabella was vainly trying to assist him; Ella Anne Long, the basket of pies on her arm, the forgotten one in her other hand; Mrs. Munn, with the crock of butter; poor Hannah herself far behind; and lastly, Isaac and Rebekah, their necks outthrust, their wings wide, streaming along like a pair of comets, with a long, spreading tail of hens, all noisily hopeful that this unusual commotion meant an unusual meal.
Down the lane zigzagged the swift procession, Hannah floundering farther and farther in the rear. She raised her voice once in a despairing protest: "Oh, Jake! Jake!" she wailed, "I've forgot my false teeth!"
Her husband, desperately intent on his destination, did not hear the appeal, but the little woman who was generaling the flying column did, and realized that this sign of giving way must be peremptorily crushed.
"You'll jist have to gum it, Hannah!" she shrieked relentlessly over her shoulder. "Come on, come on!"
Master Davy Munn, still enthroned calmly upon the front seat of the useless vehicle, contemplated the tumultuous line with supreme contempt. Mr. Munn never hurried. Should all Elmbrook have risen up one morning and gone hurtling down to Lake Simcoe, it would have left him seated alone, undisturbed, on its vacated ridge.