“Said like a true man,” said one.
“You was a stranger to me a minute ago, but
you ain’t now,” said another.
“It’s bread cast upon the waters—it’ll
return after many days,” said the old lady whom
we have heard speak before.
“You got to camp in my house as long as you
hang out here,” said one. “If tha
hain’t room for you and yourn my tribe’ll
turn out and camp in the hay loft.”
A few minutes afterward, while the preparations for
the funeral were being concluded, Mr. Hawkins arrived
at his wagon leading his little waif by the hand,
and told his wife all that had happened, and asked
her if he had done right in giving to her and to himself
this new care? She said:
“If you’ve done wrong, Si Hawkins, it’s
a wrong that will shine brighter at the judgment day
than the rights that many’ a man has done before
you. And there isn’t any compliment you
can pay me equal to doing a thing like this and finishing
it up, just taking it for granted that I’ll be
willing to it. Willing? Come to me; you
poor motherless boy, and let me take your grief and
help you carry it.”
When the child awoke in the morning, it was as if
from a troubled dream. But slowly the confusion
in his mind took form, and he remembered his great
loss; the beloved form in the coffin; his talk with
a generous stranger who offered him a home; the funeral,
where the stranger’s wife held him by the hand
at the grave, and cried with him and comforted him;
and he remembered how this, new mother tucked him in
his bed in the neighboring farm house, and coaxed
him to talk about his troubles, and then heard him
say his prayers and kissed him good night, and left
him with the soreness in his heart almost healed and
his bruised spirit at rest.
And now the new mother came again, and helped him
to dress, and combed his hair, and drew his mind away
by degrees from the dismal yesterday, by telling him
about the wonderful journey he was going to take and
the strange things he was going to see. And
after breakfast they two went alone to the grave,
and his heart went out to his new friend and his untaught
eloquence poured the praises of his buried idol into
her ears without let or hindrance. Together
they planted roses by the headboard and strewed wild
flowers upon the grave; and then together they went
away, hand in hand, and left the dead to the long sleep
that heals all heart-aches and ends all sorrows.
Whatever the lagging dragging journey may have been
to the rest of the emigrants, it was a wonder and
delight to the children, a world of enchantment; and
they believed it to be peopled with the mysterious
dwarfs and giants and goblins that figured in the tales
the negro slaves were in the habit of telling them
nightly by the shuddering light of the kitchen fire.
At the end of nearly a week of travel, the party went
into camp near a shabby village which was caving,
house by house, into the hungry Mississippi.
The river astonished the children beyond measure.
Its mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them,
in the shadowy twilight, and the vague riband of trees
on the further shore, the verge of a continent which
surely none but they had ever seen before.
