Then a man come running—I can see now that open collar, that face covered with stubble, those great eyes under their mass of tangled hair, the huge, rough hands that he laid about the baby's shoulders. And they both began talking to us, first one and then both, asking, looking, waiting for us to reply. Nobody replied. We all looked to Mis' Sykes to see what she could think of, as we always do in a village emergency.
But it wasn't Mis' Sykes that could help us now. It was the Flat folks. It was them that could understand. Half a dozen of them began telling us what it was they said. It seemed so wonderful to see the folks that we had never paid attention to, or thought they knew anything, take those tangled sounds and unravel them for us, easy, into regular, right-down words.
It seems the family had got to Friendship Village night before last, him to work on the sewer and his wife to cook for the men in the bunk cars. There were five other little folks with them—sure enough, there they were now, all flocking about her—and the oldest girl had somehow lost the baby. Poor souls, they had tried to ask. But he knew that he must dig and she must cook, and there was not much time for asking, and eight weeks in this country was all that they had and hardly three words of English. As for asking the law, they knew the law only as something that arrests you.
We were all there in a bunch by that time, everybody making signs to everybody, whether anybody could understand or not. There was something about those two, with our little chap in the midst of them, that sort of loosened us all up. We all of us understood so thorough that we pretty near forgot the fire.
By then it had most died down anyhow, and somebody started to move back up-town.
"The hall, the hall!" says Mis' Toplady to us. "Have 'em all go up to the Post-office Hall. Spread it, spread it!"
We did spread it, to go up there and see what we could do for the burned-out folks, and incidentally finish the peace celebration.
Up there in Post-office Hall the lights were all on, just as we'd left them, and there was kind of a cozy feel of supper in the air.
"Look here," says Mis' Toplady, "there's quarts of coffee hot on the back of the stove and a whole mountain of sandwiches—"