Suddenly he bethought him of the errand that had taken the boy away from the store. Not at once was the hardware merchant startled by the thought; but he cast a critical glance skyward, trying to measure the downfall of snow.
“He’ll be coming back—with Hannah’s Car’lyn. Of course, he isn’t rattle-brained enough to take her out on the ice when it’s snowing like this.”
“Hey, Stagg!” shouted a shopkeeper from over the way, who had likewise come to the door, “did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” asked Joseph Stagg, puzzled.
“There she goes again! That’s ice, old man. She’s breaking up. We’ll have spring with us in no time now. I told Scofield this morning he could begin to load that schooner of his. The ice is going out of the cove.”
The reverberating crash that had startled Chet Gormley had startled Joseph Stagg as well.
“My goodness!” gasped the hardware dealer, and he started instantly away from the store, bareheaded as he was, without locking the door behind him—something he had never done before, since he had established himself in business on the main street of Sunrise Cove.
Just why he ran he could scarcely have explained. Of course, the children had not gone out in this snowstorm! Mrs. Gormley—little sense as he believed the seamstress possessed—would not have allowed them to venture.
Yet, why had Chet not returned? Mr. Stagg knew very well that the ungainly boy was no shirk. Having been sent home for the particular purpose of taking Carolyn May out on her sled, he would have done that, or returned immediately to the store. Although prone to find fault with Chet Gormley, the hardware dealer recognised his good qualities as certainly as anybody did.
He quickened his pace. He was running—slipping and sliding over the wet snow—when he turned into the street on which his store boy and his widowed mother lived.