I looked at him a minute more, then hung the pendant around my neck again, and went along to see him off. I didn’t feel as sad as I’d expected at his leaving. I was sure I’d see him again sometime, and in the meanwhile there’d be the notes he sent to Professor Jeffries.
I didn’t feel sad at all when Mr. Harrison left. About two days after we’d cleared out the mirror bugs, he found a group heading back toward the river and talked them into taking him with them. None of us were sorry to see him go, though William and Lan wondered aloud whether he’d have trouble waiting for Papa and the professor when the rest of us got back. There wasn’t anything to be done about it, though, and in the end, he was the one who had the trouble. About a month after we all got back to Mill City, word came from the Frontier Management Department in Washington that they wanted Mr. Harrison to come East to answer some questions, and that was the last we saw of him.
Seems that the settlers and settlements had been complaining about the way he managed things for quite some time, and that trip he took with us was the last straw for a lot of them. What really did it, though, was the way he’d acted at Oak River.
It seems the Rationalists were pretty well-thought-of in Washington, and when Mr. Lewis told them some of the things Mr. Harrison had said and done, they demanded that the Frontier Management Department do something about him, and not just a reprimand, either.
So Mr. Harrison lost his job, and it was a while before they sent anybody new to manage the Settlement Office. Papa looked pleased when he heard, but he never said anything. Professor Jeffries harumphed and said that it’d likely be a lot easier to get the new settlement spells spread around without Harrison interfering. Lan and William whooped like loons, and I was pretty happy about it myself. But that was a lot later.
Between the new settlement spells and the trap that Wash and the professor worked out, a lot of the settlements got their fields free of beetles by summer’s end. That meant no grubs the next spring, so things could get back to normal for the settlers. Better than normal, some ways; the grubs and beetles had cleared a lot of land that would have taken the settlers years to do on their own, and they’d gotten rid of a lot of weeds, too, so crops that year were extra good. But that was later, too.
What with one thing and another, we stayed at the settlement for nearly a week after Mr. Harrison left. By the time we started back to Mill City, I was glad to get away. Lan was still grumpy, and I’d about had my fill of strangers coming up to me on the street to gush about how I’d saved them all. A simple “thank you” would have been plenty.
Leaving didn’t help as much as I’d thought. The settlement had sent messengers to all the nearby settlements as soon as they could, to spread the word about the beetles and the mirror bugs soaking up magic. Of course, they’d told the whole story, including the part about me being a heroine. And those settlements sent the word on to others. So all the way home, every settlement we passed wanted Papa to stop and teach the new spells to their settlement magicians, and while Papa was teaching, all the settlers fussed over me.
William thought it was funny.
“It’s about time you got some attention,” he told me. “And you deserve it.”
“You and Lan deserve just as much,” I said. “And I’d rather you had it than me. I don’t like it.”
“It’s good for you,” he said heartlessly. Then he grinned. “And it’s good for Lan, too.”
I sniffed. “Why does everything that’s good for you have to be unpleasant?”
William just laughed.
“At least it’s almost over,” I said as all of us rode through West Landing toward the ferry at last. “Everything will get back to normal when we get home.”
“You think so?” William said. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and gave me a sidelong look, the one that meant he was so sure you were wrong that he could just wait and let you find out for yourself the hard way.
I looked at him for a minute and then grinned. I had the feeling that “normal” had changed some after all that had happened in the past month, but I wasn’t going to let on even that much. It would just make him smug.
“I’m sure of it,” I said firmly.
