As Ben’s chained tongue was seeking to free itself a stout, square, bald-headed, florid man, with a square-trimmed tuft of iron-gray whiskers on his chin, appeared in the doorway of a lighted room off the hall, and a healthy, hearty voice cried:
“So this is the hero! Well, well, my boy, give me your hand! I’ve heard all about it from Roger and Amy. And you actually killed old Fletcher’s big dog with a club! Remarkable! Amazing! For that alone you deserve a vote of thanks from every respectable, peaceable citizen of this town. But we owe you the heaviest debt. Our Amy would have been mangled by those miserable beasts but for your promptness and courage. Lots of boys would have hesitated about facing those dogs.”
“This is my father, Stone,” said Roger, as Urian Eliot was earnestly shaking the confused lad’s hand.
Ben managed huskily to murmur that he was glad to meet Mr. Eliot.
From the adjoining room a woman’s low, pleasant voice called:
“Why don’t you bring him in? Have you forgotten me?”
“No, mother,” answered Roger, taking Ben’s cap from his hand and hanging it on the hall tree.
“No, indeed!” declared Mr. Eliot, as he led the boy into a handsome room, where there were long shelves of books, and great comfortable leather-covered chairs, and costly Turkish rugs on the hardwood floor, with a wood fire burning cheerfully in an open fireplace, and a frail, sweet-faced woman sitting amid piled-up cushions in an invalid’s chair near a table, on which stood a shaded lamp and lay many books and magazines. “Here he is, mother.”
“Yes, here he is, mother,” said Roger, smiling that rare, slow smile of his, which illumined his face and made it seem peculiarly attractive and generous; “but I’m sure I’d never made a success of it in bringing him if I had told him what I wanted in the first place.”
“My dear boy,” said Mrs. Eliot, taking Ben’s hand in both her own thin hands, “mere words are quite incapable of expressing my feelings, but I wish I might somehow make you know how deeply grateful I am to you for your noble and heroic action in saving my helpless little girl from those cruel dogs.”