Indeed, no one looking at Mr. Carr would have suspected him of an “ailment.” He was tall and broad-shouldered and well set up, with clear grey eyes and a rosy, smooth-shaven, boyish face which had given him the nickname of “The Cherub” all along Newspaper Row. In his bearing there was a suggestion of boundless energy, which needed only proper direction to accomplish wonders.
“You can’t never tell,” continued the driver, shifting his quid. “Now, I’ve took folks up there goin’ on ten year now, an’ some I’ve took up looked considerable more healthy than I be when I took ’em up. Comin’ back, howsumever, it was different. One young feller rode up with me in the rain one night, a-singin’ an’ a-whistlin’ to beat the band, an’ when I took him back, a month or so arterward, he had a striped nurse on one side of him an’ a doctor on t’ other, an’ was wearin’ a shawl. Couldn’t hardly set up, but he was a-tryin’ to joke just the same. ‘Hank,’ says he, when we got a little way off from the place, ‘my book of life has been edited by the librarians an’ the entire appendix removed.’ Them’s his very words. ‘An’,’ says he, ‘the time to have the appendix took out is before it does much of anythin’ to your table of contents.’
“The doctor shut him up then, an’ I didn’t hear no more, but I remembered the language, an’ arterwards, when I got a chanst, I looked in the school-teacher’s dictionary. It said as how the appendix was sunthin’ appended or added to, but I couldn’t get no more about it. I’ve hearn tell of a ‘devil child’ with a tail to it what was travellin’ with the circus one year, an’ I’ve surmised as how mebbe a tail had begun to grow on this young feller an’ it was took off.”
“You don’t say!” ejaculated the blacksmith.
By reason of his professional connection with the sanitarium, Mr. Henry Blake was, in a sense, the oracle of Judson Centre, and he enjoyed his proud distinction to the full. Ordinarily, he was taciturn, but the present hour found him in a conversational mood.
“He’s married,” he went on, returning to the original subject. “I took him an’ his wife up to the Jack-o’-Lantern last night. Come in on the nine forty-seven from the Junction. Reckon they’re goin’ to stay a spell, ’cause they’ve got trunks—one of a reasonable size, an’ ’nother that looks like a dog-house. Box, too, that’s got lead in it.”
“Books, maybe,” suggested the blacksmith, with unexpected discernment. “Schoolteacher boarded to our house wunst an’ she had most a car-load of ’em. Educated folks has to have books to keep from losin’ their education.”
“Don’t take much stock in it myself,” remarked the driver. “It spiles most folks. As soon as they get some, they begin to pine an’ hanker for more. I knowed a feller wunst that begun with one book dropped on the road near the sanitarium, an’ he never stopped till he was plum through college. An’ a woman up there sent my darter a book wunst, an’ I took it right back to her. ‘My darter’s got a book,’ says I, ‘an’ she ain’t a-needin’ of no duplicates. Keep it,’ says I, ‘fer somebody that ain’t got no book.”
“Do you reckon,” asked the blacksmith, after a long silence, “that they’re goin’ to live in the Jack-o’-Lantern?”
“I ain’t a-sayin’,” answered Mr. Blake, cautiously. “They’re educated, an’ there’s no tellin’ what educated folks is goin’ to do. This young lady, now, that come up with him last night, she said it was ‘a dear old place an’ she loved it a’ready.’ Them’s her very words!”