She was breathing hard, and shaking from head to foot. No one would have thought to look at her then she was reconciled to the idea that it hadn't lived. It was cruel hard on her to tear her to pieces with the news that it really had lived, but had lived away from her all these years she had been longing fur it. And no chancet fur her ever to mother it.
And no way to tell what had ever become of it. Ifelt awful sorry fur Miss Lucy then.
"But when I got ready to leave Galesburg,"
Colonel Tom goes on, "it suddenly occurred to me that there would be difficulties in the way of putting it in a home of any sort. I didn't know what to do with it--""What DID you? What DID you? WHAT DID YOU?"cries out Miss Lucy, pressing her hand to her chest, like she was smothering.
"The first thing I did," says Colonel Tom, "was to get you to another house--you remember, Lucy?""Yes, yes!" she says, excited, "and what then?""Perhaps I did a very foolish thing," says Colonel Tom.
"After I had seen you installed in the new place and had bidden you good-bye, I got a carriage and drove by the place where the nurse and her mother lived. I told the woman that I had changed my mind--that you were going to raise the baby--that I was going to permit it. I don't think she quite believed me, but she gave me the baby. What else could she do? Besides, I had paid her well, when I discharged her, to say nothing to you, and to keep the baby until I should come for it. They needed money; they were poor.
"I was determined that it should never be heard of again. It was about noon when I left Galesburg.
I drove all that afternoon, with the baby in a basket on the seat of the carriage beside me. Everybody has read in books, since books were first written--and seen in newspapers, too--about children being left on door steps. Given an infant to dispose of, that is perhaps the first thing that occurs to a per-son. There was a thick plaid shawl wrapped about the child. In the basket, beside the baby, was a nursing bottle. About dusk I had it refilled with warm milk at a farmhouse near--"My head was beginning fur to swim. I pulled my head out of that there hole, and rammed my foot into it. It banged against that grating and loosened it. It busted loose some plaster, which showered down into the room underneath. Miss Lucy, she screamed. And the doctor and Colonel Tom both yelled out to oncet:
"Who's that?"
"It's me," I yells, banging that grating agin.
"Watch out below there!" And the third lick Igive her she broke loose and clattered down right onto a centre table and spilled over some pho-tographs and a vase full of flowers, and bounced off onto the floor.
"Look out below," I yells, "I'm coming down!"I let my legs through first, and swung them so Iwould land to one side of the table, and held by my hands, and dropped. But struck the table a side-ways swipe and turned it over, and fell onto the floor. The doctor, he grabbed me by the collar and straightened me up, and give me a shake and stood me onto my feet.
"What do you mean--" he begins. But I breaks in.
"Now then," I says to Colonel Tom, "did you leave that there child sucking that there bottle on the doorstep of a blacksmith's house next to his shop at the edge of a little country town about twenty miles northeast of Galesburg wrapped up in that there plaid shawl?""I did," says Colonel Tom.
"Then," says I, turning to Miss Lucy, "I can understand why I have been feeling drawed to YOUfur quite a spell. I'm him."
