Jeremy banged away at the door. There was no answer.
At last he heard the lifting of a sash, a head, muffled carefully, appeared from the highest window in the house, and a voice (the lad knew whose it was) said: “Go, Jeremy! Go away out of Boston as fast as you can. I’ll come to you as soon as it is safe.”
“Why, mother, what’s the matter?” cried the boy.
“Small pox! I’ve had it. Everybody has it. Go!”
“Good-by,” cried Jeremy, running out of Boston as fast as any British soldier of them all and a good deal more frightened. He burst into Aunt Hannah’s house with the news that he had been to Boston, that the soldiers were all gone, that he had seen his mother, that she had the small-pox and sent him off in a hurry.
“Tut! tut!” she cried. “It’s wicked to tell lies, Jeremy Jagger.”
“I’m not telling lies. Every word is true. Please give me something to eat.”
But Aunt Hannah did not wait to give the lad food, nor even to speak the prayer of thanksgiving that went like incense from her heart. She went into the barn-yard and threw corn on the barn-floor, to which the hens and turkeys made haste. Closing the door, she summoned Jeremy to kill the largest and best of them.
That Sunday afternoon the brick oven glowed 64 with fervent heat, the white, fat offerings went in, and the golden-brown turkeys and chickens came out; and as each, in turn, was pronounced “done,” Aunt Hannah repeated the words: “Hungry! hungry! hungry! Hungry all winter!”