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The outmost of these homegoers, Tom McMertrie and Jim Rafferty, who lived at the other extreme of the village, came upon a crippled car, coughing and crawling toward them in front of the Graveyard. Its driver, much sobered by lack of stimulant, and frequent necessity for getting out and pushing his car over hard bits of road, called to them noisily.
Down the green lane between the bean poles they hurried through the picket gate, pushing aside the big gray Duncannon cat who basked in the sun under a pink hollyhock with a Duncannon smile on its gray whiskers like the rest of the family. "Jane! Jane Duncannon!" called Christie McMertrie.
Then the Littles heard of it and called in a few friends. One night when both sufferers were at the crisis and there seemed little hope for the minister, Christie McMertrie called in the Raffertys and they were just on the point of kneeling down when Mrs. Harricutt came to the door. She had been crying.
She kept a watch over the road at all times and very little ever got by her unnoticed. In wholesome contrast next door was the trim little white cottage where Tom McMertrie and his mother Christie lived, smothered in vines and ablaze with geraniums all down the front walk. And below that, almost facing the graveyard was a little green shingled bungalow.
Even before Mary Rafferty had turned from her Nottingham laced parlor window and gone with swift steps to her kitchen door Christie McMertrie stood on her back step with her sunbonnet on and a glass of jelly wrapped in tissue paper in her hand: "She's glimpsed 'em," she whispered briefly, with a nod toward the holland shades, "an' she's up in her side bedroom puttin' on her Sunday bunnit.
So, walking and talking almost as in the old days, they passed into Sabbath Valley and down the street, and Christie McMertrie listening perhaps for this very thing, crept from her bed in her long flannel night gown, and big ruffled night cap, and looked out the window to see them go by. "Bless them!" she breathed and crept back to her bed again.
They carried Mark to the Saxon cottage and laid him on Billy's bed. There was no lack of nurses. Aunt Saxon and Christie McMertrie, the Duncannons and Mary Rafferty, Jim too, and Tom. It seemed that everybody claimed the honors. The minister was across the street in the Little House. They dared not move him farther. Of the two the case of the minister was the most hopeless.
He lay listening to the evening noises of the village. He heard Jim Rafferty's voice going by to the night shift, and Tom McMertrie. They were laughing softly and once he thought he heard the name "Old Hair-Cut." The Tully baby across the street had colic and cried like murder. Murder! Murder! Now why did he have to think of that word of all words? Murder?
Harricutt with satisfaction as she walked home after the funeral with Christie McMertrie, "I'm glad to see that Mark Carter has a little proper feeling at last. If he'd showed it sooner his Ma mighta ben in the land of the living yet." Christie's stern face grew sterner as she set her teeth and bit her tongue before replying.
Three minutes later Mark and Billy were flying down the street, with Tom McMertrie and Jim Rafferty close after and a host of other tried and true, with the minister on the other side of the street. The Fire Company of Sabbath Valley held a proud record, and the minister was an active member of it.
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