The Dickey Boy
by
“I should think it was about time for him to be comin’,” said Mrs. Rose.
“So should I,” assented Miss Elvira Grayson. She peered around the corner of the front door. Her face was thin and anxious, and her voice was so like it that it was unmistakably her own note. One would as soon expect a crow to chick-a-dee as Miss Elvira to talk in any other way. She was tall, and there was a sort of dainty angularity about her narrow shoulders. She wore an old black silk, which was a great deal of dress for afternoon. She had considerable money in the bank, and could afford to dress well. She wore also some white lace around her long neck, and it was fastened with a handsome gold-and-jet brooch. She was knitting some blue worsted, and she sat back in the front entry, out of the draft. She considered herself rather delicate.
Mrs. Rose sat boldly out in the yard in the full range of the breeze, sewing upon a blue-and-white gingham waist for her son Willy. She was a large, pretty-faced woman in a stiffly starched purple muslin, which spread widely around her.
“He’s been gone ‘most an hour,” she went on; “I hope there’s nothin’ happened.”
“I wonder if there’s snakes in that meadow?” ruminated Miss Elvira.
“I don’t know; I’m gettin’ ruther uneasy.”
“I know one thing–I shouldn’t let him go off so, without somebody older with him, if he was my boy.”
“Well, I don’t know what I can do,” returned Mrs. Rose, uneasily. “There ain’t anybody to go with him. I can’t go diggin’ sassafras-root, and you can’t, and his uncle Hiram’s too busy, and grandfather is too stiff. And he is so crazy to go after sassafras-root, it does seem a pity to tell him he sha’n’t. I never saw a child so possessed after the root and sassafras-tea, as he is, in my life. I s’pose it’s good for him. I hate to deny him when he takes so much comfort goin’. There he is now!”
Little Willy Rose crossed the road, and toiled up the stone steps. The front yard was terraced, and two flights of stone steps led up to the front door. He was quite breathless when he stood on the top step; his round, sweet face was pink, his fair hair plastered in flat locks to his wet forehead. His little trousers and his shoes were muddy, and he carried a great scraggy mass of sassafras-roots. “I see you a-settin’ out here,” he panted, softly.
“You ought not to have stayed so long. We began to be worried about you,” said his mother, in a fond voice. “Now go and take your muddy shoes right off, and put on your slippers; then you can sit down at the back door and clean your sassafras, if you want to.”
“I got lots,” said Willy, smiling sweetly, and wiping his forehead. “Look-a-there, Miss Elviry.”
“So you did,” returned Miss Elvira. “I suppose, now, you think you’ll have some sassafras-tea.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I guess I’ll steep him a little for supper, he’s so crazy for it,” said Mrs. Rose, when Willy had disappeared smilingly around the corner.
“Yes, I would. It’s real wholesome for him. Who’s that comin’?”
Mrs. Rose stared down at the road. A white horse with an open buggy was just turning into the drive-way, around the south side of the terraces. “Why, it’s brother Hiram,” said she, “and he’s got a boy with him. I wonder who ’tis.”
The buggy drew up with a grating noise in the drive-way. Presently a man appeared around the corner. After him tagged a small white-headed boy, and after the boy, Willy Rose, with a sassafras-root and an old shoe-knife in his hands.
The man, who was Mr. Hiram Fairbanks, Mrs. Rose’s brother, had a somewhat doubtful expression. When he stopped, the white-headed boy stopped, keeping a little behind him in his shadow.