“An’ you an’ me help him fasten it together,” said Mick Otter, in tones of reverence and satisfaction.
Gaspard returned to the house, and Mick went to the barn in which he had shut the people from Tinder Brook and unlocked the door. The man and the woman were in a tremor of fear. The fierce song of the birdman’s flight, striking down at them through the roof, had chilled them with a nameless dread. Mick gave them provisions, blankets, a kettle and frying-pan, and told them to get out and travel quick. They obeyed with alacrity. He told them that if they ever mentioned the great sound they had heard that morning a terrible fate would overtake them swiftly, no matter how far they traveled or where they hid; and they believed him, for truth gleamed in his eyes.
Gaspard found Catherine sitting straight up in a tumbled bed, staring at the window.
“Has he gone?” she cried. “Was it Tom? Has he flown away?”
“Now don’t ye worry, Cathie,” returned the old man, with an unsuccessful attempt to speak calmly. “Yes, it was Tom. An’ he flew—ay, he surely flew. He’ll fetch in a doctor for ye, girl, if thar be a doctor in the world to fetch. I’ve saw eagles an’ hawks fly in my day, an’ wild geese an’ ducks an’ crows, but nary a bird o’ the lot could fly like Tom. The sight of it shook me to the vitals. If I was a young man only a few years younger, nor what I be, I’d sure git him to larn me how to do it. It was the shiverin’est sight I ever see—shiverin’er nor the swash an’ wollop an’ windy roar o’ fifty gray geese gittin’ up all of a suddent out o’ the mist at yer very feet; an’ ye mind how that sets yer heart a gulpin’, girl.”
Catherine lay back heavily on her pillow.
“Yes, I mind,” she said. “All the great wings beating the air. I wish I had seen Tom fly. Now that my head feels so queer it all seems like a dream to me—all about Tom—how he flew down to us that night, to the light of our open door—and how brave and strong he is. I wonder if it is true.... I wish I had a drink, Grandad. My throat is burning—and it aches.”
Gaspard hastened away, pottered about the stove and the dairy, and soon returned with milk hot and cold, cold spring water and hot tea. She drank thirstily of the cold milk and water, talked for a few minutes in a vague and flighty vein that terrified the old man, and then drifted off into a restless doze.
Tom Akerley flew straight and swift, high up in the spring sunshine, into the clean bright blue of the northern sky. He held his course by compass and sun, and read his progress on the ever unrolling expanse of hill and vale and timbered level beneath him—so far below him that the mightiest pines looked smaller than shrubs in a window-box and forests through which he and Mick Otter had toiled for weary hours were scanned from edge to edge at a glance. He saw the silver shine of lakes and ponds like scattered coins and bits of broken glass; black and purple vasts of pine and spruce and fir; gray dead-lands and brown barrens; and here and there his exploring eyes caught a flush of red-budded maples, a pale green wave of poplars in new leaf, and a smudge of yellow where crowded willows hung out their powdery blooms. A flock of geese flying northward with him at the same altitude, swerved from their course by a few points as they came abreast of him and drew slowly ahead and away. His machine was not the swiftest in the world, by any means, but it slid along those free tracks of air at an unvarying rate of sixty miles an hour; its taut sinews humming against the wind of its flight and its trusty engines singing full and strong and smooth with a voice of loyalty and power.