“No, not quite all!” Mr. Silburn laughed. “Here’s one fellow didn’t give me up, or I wouldn’t be taking a ride with you to-day, Silas. If he hadn’t stuck to me through thick and thin” (and he gave Kit a clap on the shoulder), “I’d still be out in New Zealand eating stewed mutton in that hospital.”
“I wasn’t the only one who didn’t give him up,” Kit protested. “We always kept his chair and slippers ready for him.”
“And you ain’t brought no baggage, Mr. Silburn?” Silas asked.
“Baggage?” Mr. Silburn repeated; “this little satchel here, that Kit got me. The rest of my baggage is pretty well scattered, Silas. Let me see; I have a chest of clothes somewhere off Hatteras, but they’ve been on the bottom of the ocean for two years, so I’m afraid they must be damp. Then there’s a quarter interest in a flag pole on some island in the Pacific, but I had to leave that behind. And there’s a suit of gray clothes in the Wellington hospital. I never want to see them again, whatever happens, though they were very kind to me out there.
“That’s a pretty good team you have there, Silas,” he went on; “look as if they could take these Fairfield County hills without losing their wind. Suppose you let them out once, and show us what they can do.”
“Ah, you’re in a hurry to see the folks!” Silas declared. “An’ no wonder, Mr. Silburn. I’ll git you out to Hunt’n’ton jist as quick as ever the trip was made, if nothin’ don’t give ’way.”
Kit had a nice little plan arranged to introduce his father as “Mr. John Doe, of New Zealand,” when they reached the gate; but it fell through most ingloriously. The truth is there was very little said at first when they reached the house. Mrs. Silburn and Vieve had hold of the wanderer before he was out of the sleigh, and in the excitement his satchel would have been carried away if Silas had not come running in with it.
There was not only the joy of seeing him sitting in his own chair again by the fire, but of seeing him almost as well as ever, only a little older and grayer. Kit had had no chance to write them from the steamer of his father’s steady improvement, so it was a fresh pleasure to find that his memory was fully restored, except that he never could quite realize that he had been months, instead of days, in the Wellington hospital.
They wanted him all to themselves that day, but that was impossible. The news soon flew through Huntington that Mr. Silburn had returned, and the neighbors began to pour in at such a rate that Vieve and Kit had to fly around and start a fire in the parlor stove, to give their mother a chance to set her grandest dinner table in the sitting-room. And every visitor had so much to say about Kit that he began to wish himself a cabin boy on the North Cape again.
“I’ll have to look out for myself here,” Mr. Silburn laughed, “or I’ll be of no account in my own house. Everything’s ‘Kit,’ ‘Kit,’ ‘Kit.’ Well, I must say there ain’t many boys—”