“But where are we going?”
“North. Follow the pole star. You lie by that pantry door to-night, Bennie Ben. I figure it out like x plus y.”
Calhoun settled his hat over his face and seemed to give himself genuinely to sleep. He said nothing more till we heard Mr. Todd shouting, “Hiop! Dinner!”
And in the afternoon he fell to wandering about aimlessly. I did not dare follow him, so that I was more than half unhappy with tickling curiosity, and glad when night came, and I had no longer to carry about in daylight a secret that made me nervous. If Calhoun had heard me on the point of telling Cavarly that I hoped to see him again another time, he would not have thought himself so infallible a plotter.
Mrs. Todd had learned from the men how I first fell among them—a thin woman and not very talkative. She brought me another blanket, where I lay by the pantry door, and said:
“Now, don't ye mind, don't ye mind;” which set me to swallowing lumps in my throat suddenly. It had not occurred to me those many days to be homesick, and it was a poor time to begin. She touched my hair with dry, bony fingers, and I remembered having seen a queer black and white drawing over the mantelpiece in the next room, of a medium-sized boy in a short jacket. It could not have been a good drawing, for he looked very flattened out. I sat up quickly to stop the homesickness, and asked:
“Is he your son, in the drawing?”
“He's dead,” she answered gruffly, and then in a moment repeated quite softly: “Don't ye mind, don't ye mind.”
By and by the great kitchen, or living room, was full of men, snoring and wheezing in the dark. Before the lamp was put out I saw Calhoun in a rocking-chair, with his feet under the stove. I lay still, and looked at the two windows which glimmered with the dim moonlight outdoors, and that waiting seemed to be something endless and ghostly.
I did not hear Calhoun till he lay beside me, nor did I hear him open the pantry door, so softly and slowly he moved. But we went through the door, and closed it.