Then in a moment Flutters was gone, fairly flying home along the road, and when he reached the house not stopping so much as to say good-morning to old Dinah, who was opening the kitchen windows, and started back as though she had seen a ghost; but straight past her, and straight up to Captain Boniface's room. Mrs. Boniface slept on a little cot in the corner of the room nearest the door, and Flutters thought, and, as it proved, thought rightly, that he could give a gentle knock, and waken her without disturbing the Captain.
“Who is there?” asked a sweet, low voice, a voice whose every intonation Flutters had grown to love.
“It's only me—Flutters,” came the ungrammatical whisper, “but I wanted you to know that I'm home all right. Nothing happened to me, but I came across an old friend of mine, and I had to stop and take care of him.”
“Wait a moment, dear,” Mrs. Boniface answered, not caring in the least that it was by no means customary to address little mulatto servant-boys in that familiar fashion. Like dear old Janet, in McDonald's beautiful story, Mrs. Boniface was “one of God's mothers,” with a mother-love broad enough and deep enough to shelter every little creature who, like Flutters, needed and longed for the protection of a brooding wing.
Flutters sat down on the wood-box in the hall and waited, and in a moment Mrs. Boniface in her soft, blue wrapper, was seated beside him and he was outpouring with breathless eagerness the night's experiences, winding up, when all was told, with, “and I promised to go back as soon as ever I could.”
And Flutters did go back as soon as he could, and Josephine and Hazel went with him; and food and clothing, and blankets and towels went too, and a dozen other things, such as any one would know would add greatly to the comfort of a sick old man who had lain down, as he thought, to die, in an empty and wretched dwelling. Later in the day, when some of the nearer neighbors had heard Bobbin's sad story, they were anxious, too, to do something for him, and before nightfall you would hardly have known the poor little shanty. One of them had sent a cot, and Bobbin had been lifted on to it; another, two or three chairs, one of which was a comfortable old rocker, and a third a table and some necessary cooking utensils. Indeed, Bobbin's story, as he narrated it to the little group gathered around him that morning after Flutters had found him, was sad enough to touch anybody's heart.
“I kept on with the troupe,” he told them, “till we got almost to Albany, but I was getting weaker almost every day, and I missed Flutters dreadfully. I never knew till the boy was gone how much hard work he had saved me in one way and another. So at last, and just as I knowed it would be, the manager came to me one day and said, 'We ain't got no use for you any more, Bobbin. Ye can stay behind when we move on to-night.' An' I just looked him the eye an' said: 'All right, sir; but I'm wondering if you'll not be left behind when the Lord's own troupe moves on to the many mansions.' I knowed I ought not to have spoke like that, but there isn't a harder heart in the world than his, and that's the truth.”
“And what did you do then, Bobbin?” Josephine asked, as she sat beside him with tears of indignation standing in her eyes.
“Why, right away I began to make my way back to Flutters; somehow I knew I should find him, only when I crawled into this hut last night after three weeks of being on the road, I thought it might not happen in this world.”
And so it came about that Bobbin was made perfectly comfortable in the old shanty, for in those days there were no well-ordered Homes and Hospitals, for sick and homeless people, and Flutters, greatly to his heart's delight, was established as attendant-in-chief to his old friend.