It was Uncle Henry—oh, goody, it was Uncle Henry come to meet them! They wouldn’t have to walk any further!
But what was the matter with Uncle Henry? He ran up to them, exclaiming, “Are ye all right? Are ye all right?” He stooped over and felt of them desperately as though he expected them to be broken somewhere. And Betsy could feel that his old hands were shaking, that he was trembling all over. When she said, “Why, yes, Uncle Henry, we’re all right. We came home on the cars,” Uncle Henry leaned up against the fence as though he couldn’t stand up. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead and he said—it didn’t seem as though it could be Uncle Henry talking, he sounded so excited—“Well, well—well, by gosh! My! Well, by thunder! Now! And so here ye are! And you’re all right! Well!”
He couldn’t seem to stop exclaiming, and you can’t imagine anything stranger than an Uncle Henry who couldn’t stop exclaiming.
After they all got into the buggy he quieted down a little and said, “Thunderation! But we’ve had a scare! When the Wendells come back with their cousins early this afternoon, they said you were coming with the Vaughans. And then when you didn’t come and didn’t come, we telephoned to the Vaughans, and they said they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of ye, and didn’t even know you were to the Fair at all! I tell you, your Aunt Abigail and I had an awful turn! Ann and I hitched up quicker’n scat and she put right out with Prince up toward Woodford and I took Jessie down this way; thought maybe I’d get trace of ye somewhere here. Well, land!” He wiped his forehead again. “Wa’n’t I glad to see you standin’ there … get along, Jess! I want to get the news to Abigail soon as I can!”
“Now tell me what in thunder did happen to you!”
Betsy began at the beginning and told straight through, interrupted at first by indignant comments from Uncle Henry, who was outraged by the Wendells’ loose wearing of their responsibility for the children. But as she went on he quieted down to a closely attentive silence, interrupting only to keep Jess at her top speed.
Now that it was all safely over, Betsy thought her story quite an interesting one, and she omitted no detail, although she wondered once or twice if perhaps Uncle Henry were listening to her, he kept so still. “And so I bought the tickets and we got home,” she ended, adding, “Oh, Uncle Henry, you ought to have seen the prize pig! He was too funny!”
They turned into the Putney yard now and saw Aunt Abigail’s bulky form on the porch.
“Got ’em, Abby! All right! No harm done!” shouted Uncle Henry.
Aunt Abigail turned without a word and went back into the house. When the little girls dragged their weary legs in they found her quietly setting out some supper for them on the table, but she was wiping away with her apron the joyful tears which ran down her cheeks, such white cheeks! It seemed so strange to see rosy Aunt Abigail with a face like paper.
“Well, I’m glad to see ye,” she told them soberly. “Sit right down and have some hot milk. I had some all ready.”
The telephone rang, she went into the next room, and they heard her saying, in an unsteady voice: “All right, Ann. They’re here. Your father just brought them in. I haven’t had time to hear about what happened yet. But they’re all right. You’d better come home.”
“That’s your Cousin Ann telephoning from the Marshalls’.”
She herself went and sat down heavily, and when Uncle Henry came in a few minutes later she asked him in a rather weak voice for the ammonia bottle. He rushed for it, got her a fan and a drink of cold water, and hung over her anxiously till the color began to come back into her pale face. “I know just how you feel, Mother,” he said sympathetically. “When I saw ’em standin’ there by the roadside I felt as though somebody had hit me a clip right in the pit of the stomach.”
The little girls ate their supper in a tired daze, not paying any attention to what the grownups were saying, until rapid hoofs clicked on the stones outside and Cousin Ann came in quickly, her black eyes snapping.
“Now, for mercy’s sake, tell me what happened,” she said, adding hotly, “and if I don’t give that Maria Wendell a piece of my mind!”
Uncle Henry broke in: “I’m going to tell what happened. I want to do it. You and Mother just listen, just sit right down and listen.” His voice was shaking with feeling, and as he went on and told of Betsy’s afternoon, her fright, her confusion, her forming the plan of coming home on the train and of earning the money for the tickets, he made, for once, no Putney pretense of casual coolness. His old eyes flashed fire as he talked.
Betsy, watching him, felt her heart swell and beat fast in incredulous joy. Why, he was proud of her! She had done something to make the Putney cousins proud of her!
When Uncle Henry came to the part where she went on asking for
