“It fits in just great,” said Stephen, also remembering who had given it. “I never had any way to play with it before. See, it carries the corn from this farm to the city. I’m going to start in on the city tomorrow, over there in that corner, as soon’s I get the track fixed. Mother is going to bring me some little houses from the ten-cent store. Mother brought me the little wagon and horses. She brings me something ’most every night. Those bags are filled with real cornmeal.”
“Oh, see the real grade-crossing with the little ‘Look out for the engine’ sign,” cried Mrs. Farnham rapturously.
They had both entirely forgotten Lester. He smiled to himself and wheeled his chair back into the house. Mattie was a fat old darling, that’s what she was.
He went on darning the little stocking and murmuring to himself,
“She wars not with the mystery
Of time and distance, night and day:
The bonds of our humanity.
Her joy is like an instinct joy
Of kitten, bird, or summer fly.
She dances, runs without an aim;
She chatters in her ecstasy.”
When Mattie came in, not dancing at all but walking rather rheumatically as though her knees creaked, she closed the door behind her and said in an impressive way, “Lester Knapp, that is a very smart thing for Stephen to do. I don’t believe you appreciate it. There’s not one five-year-old child in a hundred with the headpiece to do it.”
He answered with an impressive manner of his own, “Appreciate it! I’m the fellow who does appreciate it! Stephen Knapp is a very remarkable child, I’d have you to know, Mrs. Farnham. I bet you a nickel he will amount to more than anybody else in this whole town if he only gets the right chance.”
As she walked home, Mattie thought how funny it was to hear a man going on like a mother, standing up for the least promising of the children!
But all the same, perhaps there was more to Stephen than just his cussedness.
How cheerful Lester had seemed! It must be that his food had set better than usual today.
XV
Saturdays were great days for “the Knapp Family, Incorporated.” They were together at home all day, and always with a great variety of schemes on hand. In the morning Henry usually relapsed from his eleven-year-old dignity back into younger days and played with Stephen, especially since the sandpile settlement had been started, and since they had a brood of chickens to care for. Old Mrs. Hennessy came to give the house the weekly, thorough, cellar-to-garret cleaning which Lester had found was the best way to keep Evangeline from spending Sunday with a mop and broom. In the kitchen Helen and her father, foregathering over the cookbook, struggled fervently with cookery more ambitious than that of the usual weekday.
Helen loved these Saturday morning cooking-bees as she called them. She and Father had such a good time together. It was so funny, Father not knowing any more than she did about it all and having to study it out from the book. Lots of times she, even she, was able to give him pointers about things the cookbook didn’t tell.
For instance, at the very beginning, that historic first day, long ago, when they had first cooked together and timorously tried to have scrambled eggs for lunch, it had been Helen who conquered those bomb-like raw eggs. Lester had gingerly broken off the top of one, and was picking the shell carefully away, when Helen said informingly, “That’s not the way. Mother gives them a crack in the middle on the edge of the bowl and opens them that way.”
“How? Show me,” said her father docilely, handing her another egg. Feeling very important, Helen took it masterfully and, holding it over the edge of the bowl, lifted her hand with an imitation of Mother’s decisive gesture. But she did not bring it down. She shuddered, rolled her eyes at her father and said miserably, “Suppose I hit it too hard, and it all spurts out?”
Her father felt no impulse to cry out bitterly on her imbecile ineptitude. Rather he sympathized with her panic, “Yes, raw eggs are the dickens!” he said, understandingly.
Intimidated, they both looked at the smooth, oval enigma.
“You do it,” said Helen, with her self-distrusting impulse to shift responsibility to someone else.
Her father refused with horror to assume it. “Not on your life!” he cried. “You were the one who’d seen Mother do it.”
“Doesn’t the cookbook say how to do it anywhere?” asked Helen, trying to fall back on someone else. “There is a chapter at the end that tells you how to take out ink-stains and what to do for people who have got poisoned, and all sorts of things. Maybe it’ll say there.”
They laid down the egg to search, but found nothing in the four hundred pages of the big book that told them how to break a raw egg.
“Perhaps you could lay it down on a plate and cut it in two with a knife,” suggested Lester.
Even Helen knew better than this. She knew better than that when she was born, she thought, suppressing a pitying smile, “Gracious no! You would get the shell all mixed up with the insides,” she explained. They stared again at the egg.
To Helen came the knowledge that responsibility must be assumed.
“Somebody’s got to,” she said grimly. “I’ll try again.”
She took the egg in her hand and resolutely struck it a small blow on the edge of the bowl. The shell cracked a little.
“That sounds good,” said Lester; “give it another whack.”
She repeated the blow and, holding the egg up above her head till she could see the under side, reported that there was a perceptible crack and some wetness oozing out.
But that was not enough. She must go on and see it through. How queer not to have somebody tell her what to do and make her do it. “I’m
