The doctor was a kind-looking old man. I told him my brother had shot himself in the leg by accident while we were camping on an island, and we wanted him to fix it without telling anybody.
When he saw my canoe, he said it was big enough for one, but not safe for two.
“Oh, it carried the three of us easily, sir.”
“What three?”
“Why, me and Sid and, and, and the guns. That’s what I mean.”
“Oh,” he said. He took my canoe alone and told me to wait. I told him how to find the raft, and he left.
I lay down on a pile of wood to sleep, and when I woke up, the sun was high. The doctor still wasn’t back. That looked bad for Tom. I started off to find a boat and go to the island, turned a corner and almost knocked my head into Uncle Silas’s stomach.
“Why, Tom! Where have you been?”
I told him that Sid and I had followed the men and the dogs, lost them, looked for them on the river and slept until an hour ago. Sid was at the post office, I said. But of course Sid wasn’t there. Uncle Silas got a letter, and then he made me ride home with him, so Aunt Sally could see we were all right.
Aunt Sally laughed and cried and hugged me and gave me one of her beatings that don’t hurt at all. The house was full of farmers and their wives, and they were all talking at the same time.
“That slave was crazy,” said old Mrs. Hotchkiss. “Look at all those crazy words on that grindstone!”
“And how did they ever get that grindstone in there? Somebody helped him. A dozen people!”
“A dozen! Forty couldn’t have done all that. Look at that shirt, covered with secret writing in blood!”
“They stole everything,” said Aunt Sally, “and we were watching all the time. And at the last minute they got away with that slave, with sixteen men and twenty-two dogs right behind them! I was so scared last night that I crept upstairs and locked my two poor boys in their room. Because when you’re scared like that, you think, what if I was a boy up there, and the door wasn’t locked, and…”
She stopped and looked puzzled. Then she slowly turned her head, and when her eyes reached me, I got up and went for a walk.
Later I told her the shooting woke Sid and me up, and we climbed down the lightning rod to see the fun. She forgave us and said she would rather be thankful that we were alive. Then she jumped up. “Why, it’s almost night, and Sid isn’t back yet!”
I saw my chance. “I’ll run to town and get him.”
“No, you won’t. One lost boy at a time is enough.”
After supper Uncle Silas went to look for Sid and came back at ten without any news. When I went to bed, Aunt Sally came up with her candle and tucked me in like a mother, and I felt so mean that I couldn’t look her in the face. She sat on my bed and talked about Sid, and quiet tears ran down her face. I told her Sid was all right and would be home in the morning, and she squeezed my hand and asked me to say it again, because it did her good. When she was leaving, she looked down into my eyes, very gently.
“The door isn’t going to be locked, Tom, and there’s the window and the lightning rod. But you’ll be good, won’t you? You won’t go? For my sake.”
I wanted badly to go and see about Tom, and I had planned to go. But after that I wouldn’t have gone, not for a kingdom.
Twice in the night I went down the lightning rod and crept around to the front of the house. She was sitting by her candle in the window watching the road with tears in her eyes. I wished I could do something for her, but I couldn’t. The third time it was dawn. Her candle had almost burned out, her old gray head was resting on her hand, and she was asleep.