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One day Lloyd came into the room with a newspaper in her hand. Eugenia and Joyce followed softly. Lloyd tried to speak calmly, but there was a suppressed excitement in her voice as she exclaimed, "Betty, I've got the loveliest thing to show you. Mothah said I might be the one to tell, 'cause I'm so glad and proud, I don't know what to do.
"I know that all these things happened after yo' left. Since then, cattle have been rustled and Mr. Thomas has been murdahed yo' know that as well as I do. That woman might be yo' mothah. She needs yo'. What's yo' verdict?" There was a long silence. The three riders looked like small boys whose hands had been caught in the cooky jar.
She had cried herself quiet in the dark corner under the piano; but there was something more pathetic in her eyes than tears. It was the expression of one who understood and sympathized. "Oh, mothah," she whispered, "we does have such lots of troubles."
"Don' you bothah 'bout de chillen," she said, and she took him by the hand and led him to where the five lay sleeping calmly across the bed. "Dey was runnin' f'om home an' dey step-mothah," said she. "Dey run hyeah f'om a step-mothah an' foun' a mothah." It was a tribute and a proposal all in one.
It was like trying to walk on a broken foot. The more you tried, the worse it got. The mischief is done now, and there is no remedy but to stop short off." Lloyd sat very still for a moment, staring out of the window in a dazed, unseeing way, as if not fully understanding all he said. Then she turned with a piteous appeal in her face to Mrs. Sherman. "Mothah, it isn't so, is it?
They are always worrying for fear something will happen to us." "Mothah would be wild" exclaimed the Little Colonel, "if she knew I had been in any dangah. Maybe she wouldn't let me out of her sight again to play all summah." "Then let's don't tell for a long, long time," proposed Keith. "It'll be our secret, just for us three." "All right," the others agreed.
"What's your name?" he asked, this time looking directly at her. "Mothah calls me her baby," was the soft-spoken reply, "but papa an' Mom Beck they calls me the Little Cun'l." "What under the sun do they call you that for?" he roared. "'Cause I'm so much like you," was the startling answer. "Like me!" fairly gasped the Colonel. "How are you like me?"
Last yeah her cousin Kate took her abroad with her, and she studied French, and she had lots of beautiful times where they spent the wintah in France. Mrs. Ware sent some of the lettahs to mothah that Joyce wrote.
"Her mothah, Miss Lida, her mothah " But even old Isaac choked up at that, and I closed the door on him. "How queer!" Lida said, looking at me. "So Isaac knew your mother? Have you lived always in Allegheny, Mrs. Pitman?" "I was born in Pittsburgh," I evaded. "I went away for a long time, but I always longed for the hurry and activity of the old home town. So here I am again."
"Just think!" she exclaimed as she climbed into the carriage again. "A cawn-cob doll! And the attic at home is full of toys that I don't care for! I'm going to pick out a basketful to-morrow and bring them down to these children. And did you see that poah little Minnie Crisp? Only eight yeahs old, and doing the work of a grown woman. She was getting suppah while her mothah tended to the sick baby.
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