“No. 3 twenty minutes late,” he said, as he came back. “Take keer o’ things till I git back. I’ll not be gone long.”
“You ain’t that there thirsty for a drink this mornin’ are you, Tim? You don’t drink to speak of, and I never knowed you to leave old 496 befo’.”
Tim said nothing, but climbed up and opened his big box. The fireman smelt something sweet, and very tenderly Tim took out a longer pasteboard box.
“Flowers,” said the fireman. “Say, Tim, old man,” he laughed, “I’ve caught on—it’s a gal.”
“She was a gal,” said Tim, quietly, “and the pretties’ and sweetes’ one that ever hit the soil o’ this wurl. An’ the little boy wa’nt no fluke.” He brushed at his eyes as he spoke, and left another grimy smear there.
“I’m a-goin’ over to the little cemetery a bit, Jim—yes, you stay with 496. They’re buried over there. We lived—her an’ the little ’un—we lived here after we was married. She was allers sweet on Easter, and for flowers and sech, an’ I love to do this for her an’ the boy. Been doin’ it twenty year’. We don’t know nothin’, an’ maybe it’s all so—an’ if anybody’ll rise again it’ll be her—with her faith—for I tell you, Jim it was as a little child. Yes, they was both my children.”
He was taking the flowers out, lilies and roses and carnations and cultivated violets, big and blue and beautiful. In his big, grimy, black hands, and amid the soot and dust of 496 they lay beautified and glorified, and the sweet odor went through the rough fireman until he saw pictures of a far-away home.
Silently Tim trudged across the hill to the little cemetery. The village was asleep, the unkept streets empty, the cold, gray mist hung low over everything, and finally Tim disappeared in it. But twenty minutes later, when the sun had risen and 496 was butting through the gray, her throttles open, the smoke belching from her stack, Tim stood at his post, a smile lighting up his grimy face, his eyes fixed on two graves amid pines, far up on the hill upon which shone lilies and roses and violets.
They thundered past, and the old engineer took off his cap and, turning to the fireman, said, above the roar of wheels and steam:
“She used to say it this-a-way, Jim—I’ve heard her so often, an’ fer five years she taught it to the little boy befo’ he left.” He looked toward the sun rising through the mist, and said slowly: