Jerome, A Poor Man | Page 8

ketch up with him, fur's I can see," said
another.
"Mebbe his mother's took worse, an' he's a-runnin' fur the doctor," said
a third, who was Henry Judd, a distant cousin of Jerome's.
The boys stood staring even when Jerome was quite out of sight.
Jerome had about three-quarters of a mile to run to Doctor Prescott's
house. He was almost there when he caught sight of a team coming.

"There's father, now," he thought, and stood still, breathing hard.
Although Jerome's scanty food made him a swift runner, it did not
make him a strong one.
The team came rattling slowly on. The old white horse which drew it
planted his great hoofs lumberingly in the tracks, nodding at every step.
As it came nearer, Jerome, watching, gave a quick gasp. The wagon
contained wood nicely packed; the reins were wound carefully around
one of the stakes; and there was no driver. Jerome tried to call out, tried
to run forward, but he could not. He could only stand still, watching,
his boyish face deadly white, his eyes dilating. The old white horse
came on, dragging his load faithfully and steadily towards his home.
He never swerved from his tracks except once, when he turned out
carefully for a bad place in the road, where the ground seemed to be
caving in, which Abel Edwards had always avoided with a loaded team.
There was something awful about this old animal, with patient and
laborious stupidity in every line of his plodding body, obeying still that
higher intelligence which was no longer visible at his guiding-reins,
and perhaps had gone out of sight forever. It had all the uncanny horror
of a headless spectre advancing down the road.
Jerome collected himself when the white horse came alongside. "Whoa!
Whoa, Peter!" he gasped out. The horse stopped and stood still, his
great forefeet flung stiffly forward, his head and ears and neck hanging
as inertly as a broken tree-bough with all its leaves drooping.
The boy stumbled weakly to the side of the wagon and stretched
himself up on tiptoe. There was nothing there but the wood. He stood a
minute, thinking. Then he began searching for the hitching-rope in the
front of the wagon, but he could not find it. Finally he led the horse to
the side of the road, unwound the reins from the stake, and fastened
him as well as he could to a tree.
Then he went on down the road. His knees felt weak under him, but
still he kept up a good pace. When he reached the Prescott place he
paused and looked irresolutely a moment through the trees at the great
square mansion-house, with its green, glancing window-panes.

Then he ran straight on. The ten-acre wood-lot which belonged to his
father was about a half-mile farther. It was a birch and chestnut wood,
and was full of the green shimmer of new leaves and the silvery
glistening of white boughs as delicate as maidens' arms. There was a
broad cart-path leading through it. Jerome entered this directly when he
reached the wood. Then he began calling. "Father!" he called. "Father!
father!" over and over again, stopping between to listen. There was no
sound in response; there was no sound in the wood except the soft and
elusive rustling of the new foliage, like the rustling of the silken
garments of some one in hiding or some one passing out of sight. It
brought also at this early season a strange sense of a presence in the
wood. Jerome felt it, and called with greater importunity: "Father!
father! father, where be you? Father!"
Jerome looked very small among the trees--no more than a little pale
child. His voice rang out shrill and piteous. It seemed as much a natural
sound of the wood as a bird's, and was indeed one of the primitive
notes of nature: the call of that most helpless human young for its
parent and its shield.
Jerome pushed on, calling, until he came to the open space where his
father had toiled felling trees all winter. Cords of wood were there, all
neatly piled and stacked. The stumps between them were sending out
shoots of tender green. "Father! father!" Jerome called, but this time
more cautiously, hushing his voice a little. He thought that his father
might be lying there among the stumps, injured in some way. He
remembered how a log had once fallen on Samuel Lapham's leg and
broken it when he was out alone in the woods, and he had lain there a
whole day before anybody found him. He thought something like that
might have happened to his father. He searched everywhere, peering
with his sharp young eyes among the stumps and between the piles of
wood. "Mebbe