We were almost crazed with fear, for there was a tradition of wild-cats still upon the mountain. The whole town turned out to search for her, and it was late in the night when we found her. Footsore and rain-soaked and hungry, the child’s only regret was that she had failed to find Heaven and mother. She wept for days, and would not be comforted. To this day I never hear the hymn about “The dizzy steep of Heaven” without associating it in my mind with the rugged ascent of old “Blue” and little Estelle’s weary climb. Many steep ascents lay before the little feet that climbed that day, but it seemed likely that she would take them all alike gallantly and fearlessly.
“There’s consid’able to that young one, anyhow.” That was what Loveday said. Grandpa had never taken to “the new children,” as he called them, but from the day of little Estelle’s mountain-climb he liked her better.
“She may be some like our folks,” he said, hopefully. “He’s like his father—he’ll be an alien among us always.” And he shook his fine, old gray head solemnly over little Dave.
It was out on the porch, and grandma sat near him with her knitting. Dave—he was six then—suddenly raised an impertinent little grinning face over the porch railing, as if he understood. Grandma leaned over and patted the little face playfully, tenderly, and stroked the curly-thatched head.
Grandpa’s voice grew husky with its weight of evil prophecy:
“Mark my words! he’ll bring trouble on himself and on the whole family after I’m gone. I depend on you, Cyrus, to do all you can for him.”
Cyrus, seated upon the step, as usual with a book, looked up in a kind of bewildered surprise. Except to severely rebuke them for being noisy, and to keep his treasures carefully away from their predatory fingers, I think Cyrus had been scarcely conscious of the children’s existence.
Now the blood rose slowly to his sallow face and departed, leaving it pale and set. Cyrus proverbially took things hard. Yet if grandpa had lived to give other warnings and charges, the impression that this charge had made might have faded—although Cyrus was tenacious, as well as intense. But grandpa died within a week, suddenly, of heart disease, caused by asthma, and Cyrus immediately took serious charge of little David’s education and morals, and never minded the snubbings that he brought down on his devoted head from grandma, and even from Loveday, who didn’t think much of a big boy’s ideas of domestic discipline.
These two episodes, not very important in themselves—of my receiving an impression that connected Cyrus always vaguely in my mind with the saints and of grandpa’s charge to Cyrus concerning little David—stand out in the background of my mind, because, I suppose, of their connection with crises and changes in our lives.
After grandpa was gone, Loveday recalled often his feeling about the “alien” children.