Then he shouted, “Where’s that boy?”
Nobody knew. For the moment they had forgotten all about the boy in thinking of the escape from peril; and as for John Paul, so soon as he saw that the fire was out and his faith in the principle of specific gravity vindicated, his interest had ceased, and he had turned across the flooded tracks toward home.
He slipped quietly in, got to bed by half past four without disturbing anybody, and was up as usual when his mother called him to help her with the morning work. He never troubled her with his experiments, and it did not occur to him to speak of the night’s adventure.
Even the reporter of the Daily Flashlight was too much interested in the success of the experiment to interview the boy, although he made the best of him in his story in the morning paper. He was a stranger in Lavenham, and had never heard of the uncanny doings of Gravity Gregg. It was not until the next day that the whole story got out, and Fic found it necessary to go to school by the back streets to avoid public notice.
When the division superintendent reached home in the early morning, he found his wife waiting for him with a cup of hot coffee, and as he drank it he told her the story.
“I suppose I shall have to advertise for the boy,” he said. “I can’t let him go. He saved the car and the buildings, and perhaps the lives of some of us.”
“You needn’t do that,” answered Mrs. Sanderson, who knew nothing about physics but had caught two words in the story. “He lives right around the corner in the little brown house. He’s the oldest son of the Widow Gregg, and nearly blew our Ralph’s head off one day last week with one of his experiments. All the boys call him Gravity Gregg.”
While Mrs. Gregg was at breakfast the door-bell rang, and Mr. Sanderson invited himself in. It took a long while to tell the story, for Mrs. Gregg couldn’t understand that John Paul had been anywhere but safe in bed all night, and John Paul couldn’t see that there was anything to make a fuss about in so simple an expedient in practical physics.
People said that the railroad ought to make the boy a handsome present, but it did not. What it did do was to see that he got the best kind of an education and then to put him where he could climb high in their employ.
He carries a watch which Mr. Sanderson and the fire-chief gave him as soon as he was considered by them old enough to take care of it, on the case of which is engraved a name and a date. His mother is proud of him, and, luckily for her pet ambition, she is quite as proud of another son who is just such a minister as she hoped to make of John Paul Gregg.