“Hoo—hoo!” she cried. “Is any one here?”
She held a little pocket flash-light in her hand, and threw its light here and there through the interior darkness. Norwood, still busy with his engine, was not aware when she went within; he was busy with mind and fingers. But all at once he sprang into a fuller activity—the activity of the man who hears the one cry that would recall him from another world; his wife had called to him, had cried aloud a wordless message which held wonder and fear, bewilderment, and—a note of joy?
He ran around the car into the open doorway of the barn. The air of the vast space within was redolent with the scent of stored hay, the warm, sweet breath of beasts, the ghost of past summers, the promised satisfaction of many a meal-time. He could hear the movement of the animals in the stalls; the roof of the barn arched far above in cavelike darkness; in a quick flash of memory there came to him the story of another cave where patient beasts were stabled; and this was Christmas eve....
Far back in the gloom there shone a tiny light. He was curiously breathless. “Christine!” he called, a quick, foolish fear clutching at his heart, “Christine!”
She answered with another wordless call that was partly an exclamation of wonder, partly a crooning. Blundering forward, he could see the dim outline of a form—Christine’s form—kneeling in the dimness that was sparsely lighted by the pocket-light which she had dropped on the floor beside her. It was scarcely more than the space of a breath before he was at her side, yet in that space there had arisen another cry—a cry which he, the doctor, had also heard many times before. He felt as though he were living in a dream—but a dream as old as time.
“Ned, it’s a baby! Look! Here, alone, in the manger!”
It was, truly, a manger beside which she knelt; and she held gathered closely in her arms a child which was now crying lustily. Norwood spoke, she answered, and together they bent over the little form. It had been warmly wrapped in an old quilt; it was dressed in a queer little dress of brilliant pink, with strange, dark woolen underthings the like of which Christine had never seen before. Its cradle had been warm and safe, for all the gale without, and it had slept there peacefully in the manger until the honking horn and this strange woman had brought it back to a world of very cruel hunger.
Norwood laughed aloud as its little waving, seeking fists closed on one of his fingers. “Good healthy youngster,” he said; “three or four months old, I should say.” Then he added, “Hey, old man, where are your folks?”
At that Christine held the baby more closely to her breast. “Oh, I suppose it does belong to some one,” she said. “But, oh, Ned, I found it! Here in the manger—like the Christ-child! It seemed to me that I found something I had lost, something of my own!”
Norwood felt the danger of this sort of talk, as he mentally termed it, and hastened to interrupt. “Sure you found it!” he said. “That’s just what the baby is trying to tell you, among other things. He cries as if he were starved. Can’t you keep him quiet? Lord! how he yells!”