“I do like to know,” said Robert Black, his eyes fiery with joy and sorrow and all the things a man may feel when a group of young patriots offer their all, unknowing half what it means, but understanding enough to make the act enormously significant of forming character, “and I’m proud and happy beyond words.”
A hulking young giant from the hills stumbled forward, and spoke diffidently from the edge of the group:
Perkins whirled. “Bully for you!” he shouted, and made a flying wedge of himself through the other fellows, to shake the giant’s brawny hand.
There came a second hill boy, younger and slighter than the first. “He’s my pardner,” he said, with an awkward gesture toward the other. “I guess if he goes, that’ll mean me too.”
There were four of these. Fathers and mothers rose in protest. The first lad turned and faced them.
“Looky here!” he called defiantly. “We ain’t goin’ to let them city fellers do our fightin’, are we? Not on your life!”
That settled it. They were not going to let anything like that happen--not on those unhappy lives of theirs.
It was over. The car got away from the last clinging young hand that would have detained it, and in the long shadows of the late afternoon swung down the hills to the plain below, and the big town, and the last hours of the day. When at length it halted in Jane’s narrow street beside her door, above which her little sign no longer hung, Black, getting out with her and Sue, said a word in Red’s ear. The other shook his head.
“We’ll wait,” he insisted. “You’ve mighty little time to spare now, if you have a bit of a snack with us before your train goes. And I vow we won’t let you off from that.”
“I don’t want to be let off. Give me five minutes here, and I’ll be with you.”
“We will come back for you at train time, Miss Ray,” said Mrs. Burns.
“You don’t think best to ask her to supper with us?” questioned Red, as the others disappeared into the now empty shop.
“I asked her and she refused. I knew she would.”
“Don’t wonder. These blamed last stunts----”
Red lapsed into a dark silence, his chin sunk upon his broad chest.
Within the shop Black turned to Sue. “Go out in the garden, and wait, will you, Sue?” he asked, with the smile which the child would have obeyed no matter what request had gone with it. Reluctantly she closed the shop door behind her. In the dismantled, empty place, where he had first met Jane nearly eighteen months before, Black said what he had come in to say.