Grandma Padgett, who had been giving the full strength of her spectacles to the failing light and her knitting, beheld this excitement with disapproval.
“You'll have my needles out,” she objected. “What pig-headed folks are after what? Robert, have you hurt Sissy?”
“Why, Grandma Padgett, didn't you see the doorkeeper looking into the room?”
“Some person just looked in--person they appear to object to,” said the strange man, giving keen attention to what was going forward. “Are these your own children, ma'am?”
Grandma Padgett rolled up her knitting, and tipped her head slightly back to bring the stranger well under her view.
“This girl and the boy belong to my family,” she replied.
“But whose is the little girl on the lounge?”
“I don't know,” replied Grandma Padgett, somewhat despondently. “I wish I did. She's a child that seems to be lost from her friends.”
“But you can't take her away and give her to the show people again,” exclaimed aunt Corinne, turning on this stranger with nervous defiance. “She's more ours than she is yours, and that ugly man scared her so she couldn't do anything but cry or go to sleep. If brother Tip was here he wouldn't let them have her.”
“That man that just went out, is a showman,” explained Robert Day, relying somewhat on the stranger for aid and re-inforcement. “She was in the show that he tended door for. They were awful people. Aunt Krin and I slipped her off with us.”
“That's kidnapping. Stealing, you know,” commented the stranger.
“Look how 'fraid she was! I peeped into their wagon in the woods, and as soon as she opened her eyes and saw the man with the pig's head, she began to scream, and they smothered her up.”
Grandma Padgett was now sitting on the lounge with Carrie lifted into her lap. Her voice was steady, but rather sharp. “This child's in a fit! Robert Day, run to the woman of the house and tell her to bring hot water as soon as she can.”
During the confusion which followed, and while Carrie was partially undressed, rubbed, dipped, and dosed between her set teeth, the stranger himself went out to the log steps and stood looking from one end of the street to the other. The dissipated young man appeared nowhere in the twilight.
Returning, the lawyer found Grandma Padgett holding her patient wrapped in shawls. The landlady stood by, much concerned, and talking about a great many remedies beside such as she held in her hands. Aunt Corinne and Robert Day maintained the attitude of guards, one on each side of the door.