As the little woman bent to take up the breakfast, Joe, intent on doing some kindness for her in the way of saving treasures, asked, “Sha’n’t I help you, Mother Moulton?”
“I reckon I am not so old that I can’t lift a mite of corn-bread,” she replied with chilling severity.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to lift that thing,” he made haste to explain, “but to carry off things and hide ’em away, as everybody else has been doing half the night. I know a first-rate place up in the woods. Used to be a honey tree, you know, and it’s just as hollow as anything. Silver spoons and things would be just as safe in it—” but Joe’s words were interrupted by unusual tumult on the street and he ran off to learn the news, intending to return and get the breakfast that had been offered to him.
Presently he rushed back to the house with cheeks aflame and eyes ablaze with excitement. “They’re coming!” he cried. “They’re in sight down by the rocks. They see ’em marching, the men on the hill do!”
“You don’t mean that it’s really true that the soldiers are coming here, right into our town!” cried Martha Moulton, rising in haste and bringing together, with rapid flourishes to right and to left, every fragment of silver on it. Divining her intent, Uncle John strove to hold fast his individual spoon, but she twitched it without ceremony out from his rheumatic old fingers, and ran next to the parlor cupboard, wherein lay her movable treasures.
“What in the world shall I do with them?” she cried, returning with her apron well filled, and borne down by the weight thereof.
“Give ’em to me,” cried Joe. “Here’s a basket. Drop ’em in, and I’ll run like a brush-fire through the town and across the old bridge, and hide ’em as safe as a weasel’s nap.”
Joe’s fingers were creamy; his mouth was half filled with Johnny-cake, and his pocket on the right bulged to its utmost capacity with the same, as he held forth the basket; but the little woman was afraid to trust him, as she had been afraid to trust her neighbors.
“No! No!” she replied, to his repeated offers. “I know what I’ll do. You, Joe Devins, stay right where you are until I come back, and, don’t you even look out of the window.”