Three weeks later there was a notable gathering at the railroad station at Lee. The Carsons were there, the Paces, the McBirneys, including Jim, in a new straw hat, Dick Heller, just up from the Rutherford Academy, Sam Disbrow, happy now and full of wholesome activity, Hi Kitchell and his sister, and ever so many others, some black and some white. The baggage man was oppressed with a sense of the importance of the luggage he was to put on the train, for it included, as he realized full well, the summer outfit of Miss Zillah Pace and her charges. That is, if Azalea and Carin, so important and full of business, so suddenly grown up as it seemed, and their own mistresses, could possibly be looked upon as “charges.” “Wire Mr. Summers if anything goes wrong, Carin,” Mr. Carson was commanding. “Mind you write me everything—simply everything,” warned Annie Laurie. “It’s a burning shame we’re not all going,” little Mrs. Summers sighed. “I’m sure the mountain air is just what Jonathan needs.” Jonathan, who was toddling from friend to friend, sociably offering the words: “Don’t go” as an example of his conversational powers, really did not seem to need much of anything. “If you all went,” broke in the Reverend Absalom Summers, “we’d have just as much of a town up at the Gap as we have down here in the valley, and then that would spoil it all, and we’d have to light out again. Queer, isn’t it, how we all swarm to a town and then hike out to the solitude, and fret wherever we are?” “Oh, there’s the train,” cried Azalea. “Oh, mother McBirney, dear, I’ve got to go. You’re sure you won’t mind?” “It’s pretty late in the day to be thinking about that,” said Ma McBirney with laughing tremulousness. “You take care yo’self, Zalie, and look after Miss Zillah and Miss Carson, and yo’r pa and me’ll be all right. Do yo’r level best to pass on the l’arnin’ to them pore Azalea blushed violently. “Oh, mother,” she whispered, “the people will hear you and they’ll think I’m a regular missionary!” “Shake hands, girl,” cried Pa McBirney. “Here’s the train.” So they were off. Miss Zillah had a seat to herself and her bags and boxes. Carin and Azalea sat together, and for a time said very little. Both were a bit tearful—Carin particularly, at the thought that her parents were going over-seas. But after a while they grew interested in the flowering mountain side and the little cabins tucked away on the shelves of the mountains. Azalea even caught a glimpse of the McBirney cabin lying so confidently on its high ledge—the cabin through whose hospitable door she had entered to find the only home she knew. To keep the tears from getting out beyond her lids, where they were swimming at rising flood, she turned her attention to the people with her in the car. Opposite was an old woman in a sun She kept glancing at the girls as if she would like to be acquainted with them, and finally Azalea motioned for her to come over to their seat. The little girl got up at the first crook of Azalea’s finger and crossed the aisle, smiling and coloring as she came. “You don’t like sitting all alone very well, do you?” Azalea asked. “I think it’s horrid traveling in the cars with no one to talk to. “Yes’m,” said the little girl in a very sweet voice. Then after a pause: “I couldn’t bring any of my friends with me.” She seemed to think she would have been the one to do the “bringing.” It evidently did not occur to her that she would have been “brought.” “I’ll turn over this seat if you like,” said Azalea, “and then you may sit with us. Mayn’t she, Carin?” “Why, of course,” said Carin. She got up to turn over the seat, but it stuck and rocked and acted in a singularly perverse way, as car seats sometimes will, and at that a lad who had been sitting with his nose buried in a book, arose and came quickly to her assistance. He was so slender and graceful, his dark eyes were so friendly and quick to make responses, that the girls and Miss Zillah could not help staring at him for a few seconds with surprise and admiration in their eyes. In America lads and young men often have a way of looking like grown men before their time. They are too “That seat,” he said with a sudden smile, showing two rows of teeth that could be described in no other way save as “gleaming,” “has a bad disposition.” “Yes, hasn’t it?” said Carin. “But I’m sorry to have troubled you.” “It’s no trouble,” he said, “for me to shake the cussedness out of anything that acts like that. It’s a pleasure.” He gave the seat such a shake as irritable parents give to naughty children, and got it over in place somehow, and he settled the little girl in it. “Have you anything that you’d like to have brought over here, Miss Rowantree?” he asked. “Please,” said the little girl, “my dolly and my package.” “She’s English, I’m sure,” whispered Carin to Azalea. The doll, a battered but evidently well-loved affair, was brought, and a box held in a shawl strap, which no doubt contained the small person’s wearing apparel. “But how did you know her name was Miss Rowantree?” Azalea asked, or started to ask. Before she had finished her question she saw on the child’s dark blue reefer a piece of cloth, neatly sewn in place, and with these words on it in indelible ink: “Constance Rowantree. Please see that she leaves the train at Rowantree Road.” “You’re terrible young to be traveling alone, child,” said Aunt Zillah seriously. “How ever could they let you do it?” “I got so homesick they had to,” explained the child with equal gravity. “Nobody could come with me, so I had to come alone. I don’t mind,” she added valiantly. “I hope you reach your home before dark,” went on Aunt Zillah, quite at ease now that she had somebody to worry about. “That’s all right then,” said Azalea cheerfully, who was afraid the little girl was having some fears manufactured for her. “Now, please tell me the name of your doll.” “It’s Mary Cecily Rowantree, after my mamma,” said the little girl. “Isn’t that a pretty name?” “Pretty as a song,” said the youth, who was still standing by them. “I wish it was my name,” the little girl added. “I’m only named Constance.” “But that’s a lovely name,” Carin told her. “It means that you will always have to be true to those you love.” “I love ever so many people,” said the child. “And I’m going to keep right on loving them as long as I live.” They chatted on for a while, as congenial folk will on the train. No doubt if Azalea had been left to herself she would frankly have told her new acquaintances just where she and her friends “This country’s new to me,” he told them. “But I’ve heard a lot about it, so I came up to see what it was like. You see, I’m a painter. At least if I keep on working for the next twenty years maybe I’ll become one. I’ve been sketching on the islands off the Carolina coast, and now I’m going to see what I can do with the mountains. I painted some pictures of the sea that were so bad the tide didn’t come in for three days and maybe I can make the mountains so enraged that they’ll skip like lambs. Anyway, it will be fun.” “Where do you get off?” asked Azalea cheerfully. “Hanged if I know,” the youth replied, turning on them again the radiance of his beautiful “It’s wild at Rowantree Road,” said the little Constance gravely, looking up from under her long lashes with almost the expression of some woods creature. “We never see anybody hardly. You can’t think how wild it is!” Time went on and in spite of Miss Zillah’s reserved manner, all of the young people were beginning to enjoy themselves and each other when the train came to a sudden stop. It was so sudden that it threw Constance forward on Carin’s lap and hurled the contents of the overhead carry-alls down on the heads of the travelers. “Oh!” cried Constance, righting herself, “I hope Mary Cecily isn’t broken!” “What is it?” asked Miss Zillah anxiously, addressing herself to the only man in the party. But the young man was already out of the car, making investigations, and he was followed by four traveling men who plunged out of the smoking room. “Oh, let’s go see—” began Azalea. But Miss Zillah’s hand was on her arm. “Of course they will,” protested Azalea, half-vexed and half-laughing. “They’ll have all the fun of seeing to it. I want some of the fun myself.” “No doubt the engine has broken down,” said Carin calmly, “and you couldn’t do anything about that, could you, Azalea?” Constance wriggled out of her seat and started for the door, but Miss Zillah caught and held her gently. “You are much better in here, my dear,” she said. The child, rebuked, turned her attention to picking up the articles that had fallen from their racks. There were, in the seat where their new acquaintance had been sitting, a knapsack and an artist’s kit, marked K. O’C. in large black letters on the canvas. “K stands for Kitty,” said Miss Constance. “O stands for Oliver. C stands for Constance.” The young man came rushing back into the car, and he overheard. “Just as I thought,” murmured Carin. “And we’re likely to be tied up here for hours.” “It is a single track, I think,” said Miss Zillah with forced calm. “Are we not in danger of a collision? Would you advise me, sir, to take the young ladies out into the open air?” “Why not?” asked Keefe O’Connor, packing articles back in the racks and generally settling the car. “We may as well break up the time a little.” He happened to look at Constance and caught a look of dismay on the face that until now had been so cheerful. “Well, Miss Rowantree, what is it?” he asked. “If we stay here for hours,” said the wise little girl, “it will be jet dark when I get to my place.” Her lips quivered a little. “Come dark, come light,” said the young man, “you’ll be all right, Constance Rowantree. Just you trust to me. Anyway, worry never yet mended anything.” But plenty of worrying was done on that train “Mr. Summers said that Mr. McEvoy would meet us no matter what happened,” said Miss Zillah, “and I take it that what Mr. Summers says is so.” “Of course it’s so,” Azalea assured her. “We’ll certainly be met, Miss Zillah. But even if we shouldn’t be, there’d be some place for us to stay. There are houses at Bee Tree, aren’t there? Or do you think there is only a tree?” “Oh, there are houses,” put in Constance. “Daddy goes there to get his letters and the groceries.” “Why don’t you get off at Bee Tree with us?” asked Azalea. “Then we can look after you.” “Oh, no,” said the child. “Daddy wrote that I was to get off at Rowantree Road. It’s ever so much nearer our house. I must do just what papa said. If he was there waiting for me She made a very long word of “dreadfully,” separating the syllables in her queer way. The conductor of the train overheard what was being said. “I tell you what it is, Miss Constance,” he said: “I’ll have to see your father standing right there before me ready to take you in charge before I’ll let you off in those woods alone. It will be plumb night before we get to your place.” “Now, see here, conductor,” said one of the traveling men, “let one of us boys get off with the little girl. It won’t do at all for her to be dropped in the woods.” “Draw lots to see who does it,” proposed another of the traveling men, and began tearing up pieces of paper. “Here, you fellows!” But Keefe O’Connor objected. “Not a bit of it,” he cried. “You men are on business, and it throws you out of your whole week’s schedule if you miss a town. I’m out gunning for scenery. Want to paint it, you understand. I have no destination—only a mileage ticket. Let me get off with the little girl. If her father is on hand, I can swing back “It’s a terribly long way,” said Constance dolefully. “It’s right through the woods. You haven’t a lantern with you, have you?” “No,” admitted Keefe, “I’ve no lantern, but I’m sure we’d make our way. Didn’t you promise me you wouldn’t worry?” “No, sir,” said the child seriously, “I don’t think I promised.” There really was only one person on the train who could be said to refrain, and that was the mountain woman with the snuff stick. “I’ve been a-studying nigh on three months about going to see my son Jake,” she said, “and now it don’t seem to matter much when I do git thar. I’ve got shet of the work to home for a spell, anyhow. I’ve kep’ at it twelve year without a let-up, and setting by a while won’t trouble me none.” No one had anything to eat, for all had counted on reaching their destination by supper time, so that sundown saw a group of hungry people with only Miss Zillah Pace’s generous supply of cookies to comfort them. But at last There was silence in the car. The traveling men no longer told their stories; Aunt Zillah nodded but dared not doze for fear of missing her station; the mountain woman brooded patiently, caring little, it seemed, as to what fate might have in store for her; and little Constance slept in Azalea’s arms. Carin was supremely patient and quiet; and the bright eyes of Keefe O’Connor gleamed now and then from under the rim of his cap, which was pulled low over his face, and behind which he was occupied in thinking his own thoughts. But he was alert enough when the conductor came to warn him that they were approaching Rowantree Road. He and Azalea between them got the little girl awake, and with his packages and hers, the friends saw him swing off the train in the black murk. The conductor’s lantern threw a little glow around him where he “Mighty good thing you’re here, sir,” they heard the conductor say. “I certainly would have been put out if I’d had to leave the little one in the dark by herself.” “Oh, my daddy is somewhere,” Constance reassured him in her high ringing tones; and as they pulled out they heard her voice calling “Daddy! Daddy!” “There’s a light!” cried Aunt Zillah excitedly. “See, it’s just up the track a way. Her father must be there after all. Really, it’s the greatest relief to me.” The traveling men seemed to be relieved, too. So was the conductor; so, no doubt, were the brakemen. No one knows what the engineer felt. He probably was praying that his repairs would hold out. The mountain woman took out her snuff stick again. Just then the conductor called: “All out for Bee Tree.” Azalea caught at her parcels; Carin gathered up hers more deliberately; Aunt Zillah arose in a flutter, dropping things here and there which the conductor and the youngest of the traveling “Be you the ladies Mr. Summers writ about?” a cordial voice inquired. “I’m McEvoy. Step along this way, please.” |