“I’ll come right over and see her, soon as I’ve got Billy down,” said Rodney. “I want to find out how he got into my room.”
“I’ll wait,” said Millie. “Mother said she wanted to see you—” but he had already darted into the house.
In a moment more the door of his bedroom was opened and out sprang Billy. Without stopping to explain how he got in, or in what freak of goat-mind he butted that door shut, he showed Rod that he could at least go downstairs. Rod followed him out and Millie shouted:
“There he goes!—Now you come right along with me!”
She was a short, thin, dark haired girl, with eyes and a face that seemed all one flush and sparkle of go and energy. Her very voice had in it something peremptory and Rod stepped off as obediently as if she had been a school-teacher. He knew the way through the gap in the fence and through the Kirby back-yard, and he knew that they had a hall running through the house to the street door. That opened on an old avenue that was all built up and almost all the lower stories of the houses were used for business purposes. Mr. Kirby was a printer and his ground floor was his shop, with a steam engine in the rear room. There were two stories above for the family to live in and the hall went all the way through.
“Thank you ever so much,” said Rodney to Mrs. Kirby, when she came downstairs, “but we’re going to have a door put in and then we won’t have to climb through the window——”
“You can use our hall till then,” said Mrs. Kirby, with a voice and manner precisely like Millie’s, “but I can’t have you bringing any other boys to tramp through. Mr. Kirby’s workmen are bad enough——”
Something else called her and she was gone before Rodney could think what to say to her, but she had used one word that fitted closely to all he had been thinking about while he was looking at the walls and the land and the house.
“Workmen?” he said. “Tell you what, Millie, don’t I wish I had a trade! I’m afraid I ain’t going to get one. They say there isn’t any chance for boys, nowadays——”
“I can set type,” said Millie, “when there’s any to set, but father says it’s awful dull times. I want to do something else.”