Big Brother | Page 6

face and energy into his movements. Mr. Dearborn and his wife were not exacting in their demands, although they found plenty for him to do. The work was all new and pleasant, and Robin was with him everywhere. When he fed the turkeys, when he picked up chips, when he drove the cows to pasture, or gathered the vegetables for market, Robin followed him everywhere, like a happy, dancing shadow.
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Then when the work was done there were the kittens in the barn and the swing in the apple-tree. A pond in the pasture sailed their shingle boats. A pile of sand, left from building the new ice-house, furnished material for innumerable forts and castles. There was a sunny field and a green, leafy orchard. How could they help but be happy? It was summer time and they were together.
Steven's was more than a brotherly devotion. It was with almost the tenderness of mother-love that he watched the shining curls dancing down the walk as Robin chased the toads through the garden or played hide-and-seek with the butterflies.
"No, the little fellow's scarcely a mite of trouble," Mrs. Dearborn would say to the neighbors sometimes when they inquired. "Steven is real handy about dressing him and taking care of him, so I just leave it mostly to him."
Mrs. Dearborn was not a very observing woman or she would have seen why he "was scarcely a mite of trouble." If there was never a crumb left on the doorstep where Robin sat to eat his lunch, it was because Big Brother's careful fingers had picked up every one. If she never found any tracks of little bare feet on the freshly scrubbed kitchen floor, it was because his watchful eyes had spied them first, and he had wiped away every trace.
He had an instinctive feeling that if he would keep Robin with him he must not let any one feel that he was a care or annoyance. So he never relaxed his watchfulness in the daytime, and slept with one arm thrown across him at night.
Sometimes, after supper, when it was too late to go outdoors again, the restless little feet kicked thoughtlessly against the furniture, or the meddlesome fingers made Mrs. Dearborn look at him warningly over her spectacles and shake her head.
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Sometimes the shrill little voice, with its unceasing questions, seemed to annoy the old farmer as he dozed over his weekly newspaper beside the lamp. Then, if it was too early to go to bed, Steven would coax him over in a corner to look at the book that Mrs. Estel had given him, explaining each picture in a low voice that could not disturb the deaf old couple.
It was at these times that the old feeling of loneliness came back so overwhelmingly. Grandpa and Grandma, as they called them, were kind in their way, but even to their own children they had been undemonstrative and cold. Often in the evenings they seemed to draw so entirely within themselves, she with her knitting and he with his paper or accounts, that Steven felt shut out, and apart. "Just the strangers within thy gates," he sometimes thought to himself. He had heard that expression a long time ago, and it often came back to him. Then he would put his arm around Robin and hug him up close, feeling that the world was so big and lonesome, and that he had no one else to care for but him.
Sometimes he took him up early to the little room under the roof, and, lying on the side of the bed, made up more marvellous stories than any the book contained.
Often they drew the big wooden rocking-chair close to the window, and, sitting with their arms around each other, looked out on the moonlit stillness of the summer night. Then, with their eyes turned starward, they talked of the far country beyond; for Steven tried to keep undimmed in Robin's baby memory a living picture of the father and mother he was so soon forgetting.
"Don't you remember," he would say, "how papa used to come home in the evening and take us both on his knees, and sing 'Kingdom Coming' to us? And how mamma laughed and called him a big boy when he got down on the floor and played circus with us?
"And don't you remember how we helped mamma make cherry pie for dinner one day? You were on the doorstep with some dough in your hands, and a greedy old hen came up and gobbled it right out of your fingers."
Robin would laugh out gleefully at each fresh reminiscence, and then say: "Tell some more r'members, Big Brother!" And so Big Brother would go on until a curly head drooped over on his shoulder and a sleepy voice yawned "Sand-man's