The Green Door | Page 8

bravely, "and I will guard the path."
"You!" returned Great-great-grandmother Letitia scornfully. "You are naught but a child."
"I can handle a musket as well as a man," said Josephus Peabody with such a straightening of his small back that it seemed positively alarming, and another glance at Letitia, who returned it. She thought him a very pretty boy, and quite brave, offering to guard the path all alone, although he was so young, not much older than she was.
Great-great-grandmother Letitia took up a musket decidedly. "Very well," said she, "if you can handle a musket like a man, here be the chance. Take this musket, and I will take one, and Letitia will take one, and we will leave the door ajar, so we can dash in if hard-pressed, and we will keep watch lest father and mother be attacked unawares at the threshold."
Letitia was horribly afraid, but she had learned in the Spartan household of her ancestors, to be more afraid of fear than of anything else, so she pulled a blanket over her head and shouldered a musket, and, after the elder Letitia had unbarred and unbolted the door, they all stepped out into the night, armed and ready to guard the house.
"Candace can handle a musket and so can little Phyllis at a pinch," said the elder Letitia thoughtfully, "but I for one am thinking that your Injuns are catamounts, Josephus Peabody."
"They are Injuns," said the boy stoutly, peering out into the gloom.
They were in perfect darkness, for it was a cloudy night, and not a ray came from the house-door.
"For what reason were you abroad to-night?" inquired the elder in what Letitia considered a disagreeably patronizing tone as addressed to such a pretty brave little boy.
"I went to visit my rabbit traps," replied the boy, but his voice was slightly hesitant.
"In this darkness?"
"I had a pine knot, but I flung it away when I heard the noises."
"A pine knot, and Injuns around, and you with naught but a scalping knife? 'Tis not bravery but tomfoolery," said the elder Letitia. "I'll warrant you stole out without the knowledge of Goodman Cephas Holbrook and Mistress Holbrook, and they having taken you in as they did and given you food and shelter, with nine of their own to care for, and not knowing of a certainty who you might be."
Letitia felt sure that the boy hung his head in the darkness. He mumbled something incoherent.
"It was out of the window in the lean-to you got, and ran away," declared the elder Letitia severely. "You are not a boy to be trusted. You can remain here with Letitia, and I will stand guard a little way down the path; and do not speak above a whisper, although I be sure there be none but catamounts to hear."
With that, Great-great-grandmother Letitia, musket over shoulder, moved down the path and stood quite concealed as if by a vast cloak of night, an alert vigilant young figure with the hot blood of her time leaping in her veins, and the shrewd brain of her time alive to everything which might stir that darkness with sound or light.
"Who are you?" whispered Letitia to the boy.
"I am Josephus Peabody, but I was always called Joe till I came here," the boy whispered back.
Letitia pondered. The name sounded very familiar to her, just as the boy's face had looked. Then suddenly she remembered. "When I was a little girl," she whispered, "not more than seven--I am going on ten now--I knew a little boy named Joe Peabody, and he was visiting his grandmother, Mrs. Joe Peabody. She lives about half a mile from my Aunt Peggy's around the corner of the road. It is a big white house next to the graveyard."
"That was me," said the boy. "At least," he added in rather a dazed and hopeless tone, "I suppose it was, and I guess I remember you too. You had curls, and we went coasting down that long hill near Grandmother's together."
"Seems to me we did," said Letitia, and her own tone was dazed and hopeless.
"Since I have been here," whispered the boy, "I haven't been exactly sure who I was and that is the truth. The folks where I am staying are real good. They go to meeting all day Sunday and they don't work Saturday nights, but I can't understand it. We have to make all the things I have seen already made, for one thing."
Letitia nodded in the dark.
"That is the way here," said she.
"And Mr. Cephas Holbrook has just the name that my great-great-great-uncle on my mother's side had," said the boy, in a whisper so puzzled that it was fairly agonized. "Grandmother has told me about him. He had a battle with six Injuns and killed them all himself, and this