The mother wiped the suds from her hands and dried them on her overall.
“It’s an hour an’ more to food,” she said, with a sharp inquiry in her tone and look. “Wot’s got ’em beatin’ it to home now? Alg should be along up at the corrals with the Kid.”
She hurried to the door and looked out. Sure enough there was a tailing procession of children racing for the house. But all four of them were there. Perse was running last, behind the toddling figure of Jane Constance.
It was a breathless crew that broke into the steaming kitchen. From the sixteen-year-old Alg down to the round, grubby-faced Janey, with her mass of curling brown hair and dark eyes, excitement was a-riot, and they hurled their amazing news at the busy mother in a chorus that set her flourishing a half-wrung garment at them in protest.
“Say, quit it, all of you!” she cried. “I haven’t ears all over my head if you think I have. Outfit? What outfit? Here, quit right away, the whole bunch. An’ you Alg, tell your crazy yarn while I get right on with the wash. You ‘shoo’ the others right out into the open, Mary Justicia, while Alg hands me his fairy tale. They’ll be takin’ pneumonia in this steam else.”
The elder girl obediently “shooed” the rest of the children from the room, and stood guard in the doorway lest the avalanche returned. But she was all eyes and ears for Alg who was simply bursting with his astonishing news.
“It’s an outfit come right up the river,” he began at once, his eyes alight and dilating with an excitement he could scarcely contain sufficiently to leave him coherent. “It’s a swell outfit of white folk, ever so many of ’em. I guess they must ha’ come through in the night an’ passed right up to the gravel flats along up beyond the corrals. Guess they pitched camp three miles up, an’ they got five big canoes, an’ all sorts of camp stuff. Ther’s a feller with bright red hair, an’ two fellers who’re sort of bosses. The rest are just river folk, an’ the like. It was Perse located ’em, an’ I guess he come along and tell us, and we went right up, an’—”
“Did you tell the Kid?”
Hesther’s sharp demand was the natural impulse which the boy’s news stirred in her. The arrival of a strange outfit of white folk on the river was a matter of serious enough importance in their lives, but it was outside her province. Her real concern was for her washing and all that that implied. The Kid, in the absence of Usak, was her resource in such a situation. The boy shook his rough head.