“I took out fifteen cents, to telephone Mrs. Waring,” he carefully explained. “She will meet your train at Laurel. Now you are all right, aren’t you? You aren’t afraid to travel alone, are you? It’s less than an hour, you know.”
“But what about you, Ethan?” she wondered. “You’re coming, too, aren’t you?” and she instinctively made room for him beside her, as the train began slowly to glide out of the station.
“I can’t,” he answered, briefly. “Good night, Stella!” and next moment he had swung himself off the step and disappeared in the darkness.
It was seventeen miles through the whispering summer night to the little station where he had left his wheel. He reached it soon after the midnight freight, and found the station agent awake, mounted and rode the rest of the way home, where the first thing he did was to rummage in the pantry for the materials of a satisfactory supper, and the next, to go to bed and sleep ’round the clock.
“I couldn’t borrow from a girl, you know,” was all Ethan said, when questioned about his midnight tramp. “And besides, it was great. Such a lark!”
To himself he said: “I shall never forget the talking leaves, the wood smells, the company of the stars.”
Stella came fully to herself on the short ride home, and was all tender repentance and self-blame when she fell into the arms of her kind foster-mother, on the deserted platform, with the one arc-light shivering overhead.
“Oh, mother! I never thought you might be anxious. I never thought of people looking for me. I’m afraid I never thought of anything but the poor little sick baby—and Blue Earth in such trouble, among strange white people. I wanted to help.”
“Yes, darling; mother understands. And you are safe home, now, thanks to that dear, bright boy. We won’t say any more about it,” answered gentle Lucy Waring.
But, although nothing more was said—for Lucy had contrived somehow to silence even Miss Sophia—Stella seemed to everybody a good deal older, after her Wild West adventure. She was now nearly fifteen, and the eager, child-like wish _to belong_ was already partly obscured by the more womanly and deeper desire _to help_. She wrote to Blue Earth, in their own tongue, and received in the course of a week or two a soiled scrawl in reply, saying only that the baby was well now. There seemed nothing more to be done for them, or for any of her own people—not just now, at any rate—and the girl set herself in good earnest to be a real help to the kind people of her adoption.