The Camerons of Highboro Part 16

"It's a shame, Johnny. I ought to know what to do, but I don't. You come too, then."

But Johnny refused to budge. He threw himself on his back on the veranda and beat the floor with his heels and wailed long heart-piercing wails that trembled into sobbing silence, only to begin all over with fresh vigor. Elliott was at her wits' end. She didn't dare go away and leave him; she was afraid he might kill himself crying. But mightn't he do so if she stayed? He pushed her away when she tried to comfort him.

There was only one thing that he wanted; he would have none of her, if she didn't give it to him.

Never in her life had Elliott Cameron felt so insignificant, so helpless and futile, as she did at that minute. "Oh, you poor baby!"

she cried, and hated herself for her ignorance. Laura would have known what to do; Harriet Gordon would have known. Would n.o.body ever come?

"What's the matter with him?" The question barked out, brusque and sharp, but never had a voice sounded more welcome in Elliott Cameron's ears. She turned around in joyful relief to encounter a pair of gimlet-like black eyes in the face of an old woman. She was an ugly little old woman in a battered straw hat and a shabby old jacket, though the day was warm, and a faded print skirt that was draggled with mud at the hem. Her hair strayed untidily about her face and unfathomable scorn looked out of her snapping black eyes.

"It's a--a bee sting," stammered the girl, shrinking under the scorn.

"Hee-hee-hee!" The old woman's laughter was cracked and high. "What kind of a lummux are you? Don't know what to do for a bee sting!

Hee-hee! Mud, you gawk you, mud!"

She bent down and slapped up a handful of wet soil from the edge of the fern bed below the veranda. "Put that on him," she said and went away giggling a girl's shrill giggle and muttering between her giggles: "Don't know what to do for a bee sting. Hee-hee!"

For a whole minute after the queer old woman had gone Elliott stood there, staring down at the spatter of mud on the steps, dismay and wrath in her heart. Then, because she didn't know anything else to do and because Johnny's screams had redoubled, she stooped, and with gingerly care picked up the lump of black mud and went over to the boy. Mud couldn't hurt him, she thought, put on outside; it certainly couldn't hurt him, but could it help?

She sat down on the floor and lifted the little swollen fist and held the cool mud on it, neither noticing nor caring that some trickled down on her own skirt. She sat there a long time, or so it seemed, while Johnny's yells sank to long-drawn sobs and then ceased altogether as he snuggled forgivingly against her arm. And in her heart was a great shame and an aching feeling of inadequacy and failure. Elliott Cameron had never known so bitter a five minutes. All her pride and self-sufficiency were gone. What was she good for in a practical emergency? Just nothing at all. She didn't know even the commonest things, not the commonest.

"It must have been Witless Sue," said Aunt Jessica, late that afternoon, when Elliott told her the story. "She is a half-witted old soul who wanders about digging herbs in summer and lives on the town farm in winter. There's no harm in her."

"Half-witted!" said Elliott. "She knew more than I did."

"You have not had the opportunity to learn."

"That didn't make it any better for Johnny. Laura knows all those things, doesn't she? And Trudy, too?"

"I think they know what to do in the simpler emergencies of life."

"I wish I did. I took a first-aid course, but it didn't have stings in it, not as far as we'd gone when I came away. We were taught bandaging and using splints and things like that."

"Very useful knowledge."

"But Johnny got stung," said Elliott, as though nothing mattered beyond that fact. "Do you think you could teach me things, now and then, Aunt Jessica? the things Laura and Trudy know?"

"Surely," said Aunt Jessica, "and very gladly. There are things that you could teach Laura and Trudy, too. Don't forget that entirely."

"Could I? Useful things?" She asked the question with humility.

"Very useful things in certain kinds of emergency. What did Mrs.

Gordon do for Johnny when she got home?"

"Oh, she washed his hand and soaked it in strong soda and water, baking-soda, and then she bound some soda right on, for good measure, she said."

"There!" said Aunt Jessica. "Now you know two things to do for a bee sting."

Elliott opened her eyes wide. "Why, so I do, don't I? I truly do."

"That's the way people learn," said Mother Jess, "by emergencies. It is the only way they are sure to remember. Laura is helping Henry milk. Suppose you make us some biscuit for supper, Elliott."

Elliott started to say, "I've never made biscuit," but shut her lips tight before the words slipped out.

"I will tell you the rule. You'd better double it for our family.

Everything is plainly marked in the pantry. Perhaps the fire needs another stick before you begin."

Carefully the girl selected a stick from the wood-box. "Just let me get my ap.r.o.n, Aunt Jessica," she said.

CHAPTER IX

ELLIOTT ACTS ON AN IDEA

Six weeks later a girl was busy in the sunny white kitchen of the Cameron farm. The girl wore a big blue ap.r.o.n that covered her gown completely from neck to hem, and she hummed a little song as she moved from sink to range and range to table. There was about her a delicate air of importance, almost of elation. You know as well as I where Elliott Cameron ought to have been by this time. Six weeks plus how many other weeks was it since she left home? The quarantine must have been lifted from her Uncle James's house for at least a month. But the girl in the kitchen looked surprisingly like Elliott Cameron. If it wasn't she, it must have been her twin, and I have never heard that Elliott had a twin.

Though she was all alone in the kitchen--was.h.i.+ng potatoes, too--she didn't appear in the least unhappy. She went over to the stove, lifted a lid, glanced in, and added two or three sticks of wood to the fire.

Then she brought out a pan of apples and went down cellar after a roll of pie crust. Some one else may have made that pie crust. Elliott took it into the pantry, turned the board on the flour barrel, shook flour evenly over it from the sifter, and, cutting off one end of the pie crust, began to roll it out thin on the board. She arranged the lower crust on three pie-plates, and, going into the kitchen again, began to peel the apples and cut them up into the pies. Perhaps she wasn't so quick about it as Laura might have been, but she did very well. The skin fell from her knife in long, thin, curly strips. After that she finished the pies off in the pantry and tucked all three into the oven. Squatting on her feet in front of the door, she studied the dial intently for a moment and hesitatingly pushed the draft just a crack open. If it hadn't been for that momentary indecision, you might have thought that she had been baking pies all her life. Then she began to peel the potatoes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I'm getting dinner all by myself"]

So it was that Stannard found her. "h.e.l.lo!" he said, with a grin.

"Busy?"

"Indeed, I am! I'm getting dinner all by myself."

He went through a pantomime of dodging a blow. "Whew-ee! Guess I'll take to the woods."

"Better not. If you do, you will miss a good dinner. Mother Jess said I might try it. Boiled potatoes and baked fish--she showed me how to fix that--and corn and things. There's one other dish on my menu that I'm not going to tell you." And all her dimples came into play.

"H'm!" said Stannard, "we feel pretty smart, don't we? Well, maybe I'll stay and see how it pans out. A fellow can always tighten his belt, you know."

"Aren't you horrid!" She made up a face at him, a captivating little grimace that wrinkled her nose and set imps of mischief dancing in her eyes.

Stannard watched her as with firm motions she stripped the husks from the corn, picking off the clinging strands of silk daintily.

"Gee, Elliott!" he exclaimed. "Do you know, you're prettier than ever!"

She dropped him a courtesy. "I must be, with a smooch of flour on my nose and my hair every which way."

He grinned. "That's a story. Your hair looks as though Madame What-'s-her-name, that you and Mater and the girls go to so much, had just got through with you. I've never seen you when you didn't look as though you had come out of a bandbox."

"Haven't you? Think again, Stan, think again! What about your Cousin Elliott in a corn-field?"

Stannard slapped his thigh. "That's so, too! I forgot that. But your hair's all to the good, even then."

"Stan," warned Elliott, "you'd better be careful. You will get in too deep to wade out, if you don't watch your step. What are you getting at, anyway? Why all these compliments?"