“Now don’t you give yourself no consarn ’bout that thar bar’l!” the driver exclaimed. “When Silas lashes a bar’l on behind his sleigh, you can just make up your mind it’s thar to stay. While you youngsters goes out an’ sees the world, old Silas he stays to hum an’ ’tends to business, an’ carries your letters back to Hunt’n’ton.”
The only other passenger was Henry Steele, the Huntington shoemaker, who had been down to Bridgeport to buy leather, and had it in a big roll beside his feet; and he and the driver plied Kit with so many questions about his travels that he was kept busy answering.
“What was you aboard this North Cape?” Silas asked.
Kit felt for a moment that considering the work he had been doing he was entitled to lay claim to some higher position than the one he really occupied; but he soon smothered that down.
“Cabin boy,” he answered; and added to himself, “There’s no use of a fellow being ashamed of a good honest job, and one that he likes.”
“And you got good and seasick at the start, I’ll warrant!” Mr. Steele laughed.
“No, sir, I wasn’t sick a single minute on the whole voyage,” Kit answered.
“Well, Kit,” said the shoemaker, “if some boys were to tell me that, I’d think they were drawing the long bow. But I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, and I must say I’ve never known you to speak anything but the truth.”
“Th-th-thank you!” Kit tried to say it with a laugh, but the laugh turned into a shiver. It was all very well to feel at home in the cold, but there were some holes in the horse blanket. And he was growing impatient to see the familiar faces. He had not felt so down in Yucatan, because there he knew it was impossible; but now that every minute took him nearer, the minutes became dreadfully long.
Manly young sailor as he was, his heart beat faster as the stage drew into the outskirts of Huntington—if so small a place can be said to have outskirts. He had had already a glimpse of the white church steeple from a distant hilltop. And now there was the church itself! And he could have told with his eyes shut just how the land lay opposite the church. First there was a little store, with some empty barrels and boxes always in front. Then there was Dr. Thomas’s big white house, with the white fence in front. And then came a small house a story and a half high, with a light piazza across the front, standing about thirty feet back from the street, with a weather-beaten picket fence in front, and some big trees on each side extending their thick limbs over its mossy roof. House and fence had once been brown, but both were sadly in need of paint, and one end of the cornice was coming loose. But in Kit’s eyes, that was the cosiest place of all; for that was home!