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This evening she was at the sewing-machine busy with Hughie's Sunday clothes, with the baby asleep in the cradle beside her in spite of the din of the flying wheels, and little Robbie helping to pull through the long seam.
Thomas looked gravely down upon Hughie's passionate face for a few moments, and then said, "You will do what your mother wants you, I guess." Hughie said nothing in reply, while Thomas sat pondering. Finally he said, with a sudden inspiration, "Hughie, come along with me, and help me with the potatoes." "They won't let me," grumbled Hughie. "At least father won't. I don't like to ask mother."
Hughie had a gasoline engine and it did everything, Hughie said, but get the hired man up in the morning, and he was going to have it fixed so it would do that. The captain paused, pleased to see that Hughie's wit was appreciated. They had the engine fixed to run the churn and the washer, and Hughie's woman hadn't anything to do but sit and play the organ or drive herself to town.
It took the united persuasions of Billy Jack and Jessac and Hughie to get the fiddle into Thomas' hands, but after a few tuning scrapes all shyness and moodiness vanished, and soon the reels and strathspeys were dropping from Thomas' flying fingers in a way that set Hughie's blood tingling.
The minister had come out intending, as he said, "to teach that boy a lesson that he would remember," but as he listened to Hughie's story, his anger gave place to a great thankfulness. "It was a great mercy, my boy," he said at length, when he was quite sure of his voice, "that you had Fido with you." "Yes, indeed, father," said Hughie. "It was Fido saved me."
How much it means to a boy at Hughie's time of life! But so few are willing to come away into the backwoods here for so small a salary." Suddenly her husband laid down his pipe. "I have it!" he exclaimed. "The very thing! Wouldn't this be the very thing for young Craven. You remember, the young man that Professor MacLauchlan was writing about." His wife shook her head very decidedly.
I "dunched" my brother, who lay beside me, with my elbow. "Go an' see if oul Hughie's livin' or dead," I said. "Ye cudn't kill 'im," he said. "How d'ye know?" "I heerd a quare story about 'im last night!" "Where?" "In th' barber's shop." "Is he a feerie?" "No." "What is he?" "Close yer thrap an' lie still!" Somebody opened the door and walked in. I slid into my clothes and climbed down.
To all those eager, watching people Pearl seemed truly the incarnation of May in all its glory and shimmer, and Hughie's music was like the silver, fluting notes of her insistent heralds proclaiming the south wind, and bird calls and murmuring rivulets of melting snow.
As for her music, he quite agreed with her that she would find it better in every way to abandon thoughts of a public career; and the fact of Hughie's going to school for two or three hours a day would in no wise interfere with her wish to see more of him. What her precise meaning was in saying that she had some 'right' to make this request, he declared himself unable to discover.
He had been intensely interested and appreciative and admiring; but emotionally unmoved; but now, as this troubling music of Hughie's seemed to express the dominion of unsuspected but potent earth-forces, primitive, savage and forever irreclaimable, his calm became strangely disturbed.
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