Daughters of the Dominion. Bessie Marchant
years, had a bowed, broken look that Gertrude had never noticed before. Her heart gave a sudden throb of pain as she saw him, and when they stood face to face it was her eyes, and not her tongue, which asked the question she could not, from very fear, put into speech.
“He’s gone, poor lad; died this morning at the dawning,” jerked out the stricken father.
“Dead—Percy?” gasped Gertrude, turning white to the lips, and reeling as if she were about to faint.
“Get into the wagon, and let’s be off sharp; seems as if I can’t bear the neighbours coming to tell me how sorry they are,” said Abe, with an apprehensive look at a group of loungers, who had strolled up to see the cars come in.
Gertrude gathered her various belongings up in blind haste, her father lifted her trunk into the wagon, and the two were driving away from the depot before the loungers had time to make any further comment to each other than that Abe Lorimer looked pretty sick. But as he mostly had a melancholy appearance, no one paid special heed to it on this occasion.
Gertrude, struggling with her sobs, was trying to steady her voice enough to ask how it had all happened, yet she lacked the courage for her question, because there was something in her father’s face which warned her there might be still more ill news to follow.
They were out of sight of the railway track, and the two horses were going at a steady trot up the long two mile rise to the village, where the store and the saw-mills were, and then Abe broke into speech again—
“Arthur is very low down; the doctor doesn’t think there is much chance of his pulling through, but if both the boys are taken, it will be my death-blow. I’ve got a sort o’ feeling inside me, that I can’t stand up against it nohows.”
Gertrude slid her arm through her father’s, and laid her cheek against the rough sleeve of his jacket. There was no word of comfort that she could say to him, but for the time her pity for his suffering was so keen, that she had no opportunity of giving way to her own sorrow.
Mounting the rise, the horses broke into a quicker pace, went down the hill through the village—the town, some people called it—tore round the corner, and, dashing past the saw-mills, took the next rise at a gallop.
“Father, how did the boys get sick?” Gertrude asked, after a long silence. She was growing desperate now, for the line of trees right in front of them marked the boundary-line of Lorimer’s Clearing, and she must know about the trouble before she reached home and met her mother.
“There’s a sort o’ malarial fever going about; it don’t amount to much if you stay in bed and keep warm when it’s on you. The boys took it, but there was no keeping ’em in bed, and one day they went bathing in the Black Cauldron—you know how cold the water is there—and that’s what did the mischief. Patsey looks poorly this morning, and your mother is keeping him in bed. It is a good thing harvest is over; if the sickness had come two weeks ago, it would have been pretty near ruin.”
Gertrude nodded. Having been brought up on a farm, she understood very well what a frightful disaster sickness in harvest time would be.
“Lots of folks are ill round about here,” Abe went on, as if he found it a relief to talk, now that the ice was broken. “The doctor said this morning that Giles Bailey’s aunt was very bad, so sick he didn’t think she’d pull through, and there ain’t a woman to be got for love or money to sit up with her o’ nights.”
“Giles Bailey’s aunt?” echoed Gertrude. “I don’t think I know them, either nephew or aunt.”
“Very likely not. The aunt, Mrs. Munson, has got a farm about five miles the other side of the boundary, and Giles works it for her. A good sort of lad, but slow. He used to come over to singing-school last winter at Pratt’s Corner, but the boys said school was mostly half over before Giles turned up, and that he’d no more notion of singing than a raven.”
Gertrude smiled, but a sob came up in her throat, and had to be battled with. Percy and Arthur sang so beautifully themselves, and had always been regarded as the stars of the winter singing-school.
“Father, there’s Flossie coming to open the gate; poor little girl, how lame she is!” Gertrude said, five minutes later, as the horses trotted swiftly down the last stretch of cleared cornland toward the house, which stood with its back to a forest-clad hill. Her eyes had caught sight of a diminutive figure coming, with a series of bobbing jerks, over the ground to open the field gate.
“She is lame, but she is uncommon useful, poor little maid, and has taken baby off your mother’s hands entirely, ever since the boys got sick,” Abe answered, with a sigh.
Flossie was nine, and suffered from some kind of hip trouble, which prevented her from going to school, or sharing the sports and pleasures of the other children, yet she was a very happy little maiden usually, despite these drawbacks, and home owed more of its brightness to her than any one would have suspected. But Flossie was under a shadow this morning, and, seeing the mute distress on the little sister’s face, Gertrude braced herself to a great effort of self-forgetfulness, and determined to be as brave as she could, for the sake of the others.
CHAPTER VI
A Strange Welcome
NELL was very tired. Since early morning she had tramped steadily, pursuing that apparently unending trail. Sometimes the way had been up steep ascents, over high ridges, where big boulders stuck up among the trees; then it would drop to lower ground, and skirt wide swamps, in one of which Dick Bronson’s horse had come to its untimely end.
But from the open ground of the last ridge she had crossed, Nell had caught sight of what looked like a cultivated field right ahead, and she was walking on with more hope now that she might reach a house of some kind before night fell, and so be saved the weird experience of spending a night alone in the open.
Several times she had walked to Button End and back again to the Lone House in a day, which was a distance of twenty miles, so her long journey on this occasion had not been so tiring to her as it would have been to any one less accustomed to very long tramps.
It was thirty miles from Blue Bird Ridge to the nearest settlement on the long trail, Doss Umpey used to say; and Nell was beginning to wonder how near she was to that settlement, when she came to a broader cross trail, which showed recent wheel marks.
A few minutes she stood hesitating which way to take, then her quick eye caught sight of a handful of straws caught on a bush.
“A cart carrying corn to the homestead, that is what it was, and this is the way it went,” she said to herself, with the quick observation which comes to dwellers in isolated spots, who have only Nature for their companion.
Then, giving a jerk to the bundle in the canvas bag, which for greater comfort she carried on her back, she went onward again, following now the broader cross trail which showed wheel marks, and here and there fluttering pennons of corn.
For a mile she tramped wearily on—a long, long mile this was—and she would many times have yielded to her desire to sit down and rest but for her fear that night might come, finding her still without a shelter for the hours of darkness.
The trail ended suddenly in a gate that gave entrance to a fenced enclosure, in which stood a barn, some smaller sheds, and a wooden house.
A man was coming in at another gate on the lower side of the enclosure, and he had with him two horses and a cart laden with wood, while a scraggy dog of mongrel type circled round and round, barking wildly at some pigs, which tried to make a rush through the opening.
Nell stood leaning against the bars of her gate hesitating to enter. A fit of shyness had suddenly come upon her, and she was wondering what these people would say to her, or how she could account