The Camerons of Highboro Part 5

Then suddenly Elliott Cameron did a strange thing. By this time she had shaken off Stannard and had betaken herself and her disgust to the edge of the woods. She was so very miserable that she didn't know herself and she knew herself less than ever in this next act. Alone in the woods, as she thought, with only moss underfoot and high green boughs overhead, Elliott lifted her foot and deliberately and with vehemence stamped it. "I don't like things!" she whispered, a little shocked at her own words. "I don't _like_ things!"

Then she looked up and met the amused eyes of Bruce Fearing.

For a minute the hot color flooded the girl's face. But she seized the bull by the horns. "I am cross," she said, "frightfully cross!" And she looked so engagingly pretty as she said it that Bruce thought he had never seen so attractive a girl.

"Anything in particular gone wrong with the universe?"

"Everything, with my part of it." What possessed her, she wondered afterward, to say what she said next? "I never wanted to come here."

"That so? We've been thinking it rather nice."

In spite of herself, she was mollified. "It isn't quite that, either,"

she explained. "I've only just discovered the real trouble, myself.

What makes me so mad isn't altogether the fact that I didn't want to come up here. It's that I hadn't any choice. I _had_ to come."

The boy's eyes twinkled. "So that's what's bothering you, is it? Cheer up! You had the choice of _how_ you'd come, didn't you?"

"How?"

"Yes. Sometimes I think that's all the choice they give us in this world. It's all I've had, anyway--how I'd do a thing."

"You mean, gracefully or--"

"I mean--"

"h.e.l.lo!" said Stannard's voice. "What are you two chinning about before the cows come home?"

CHAPTER IV

IN UNTRODDEN FIELDS

"You don't want to have much to do with that fellow," said Stannard, when Bruce Fearing had gone on about whatever business he had in hand.

"Why not?" Elliott's tone was short. She had wanted to hear what Bruce was going to say.

"Oh, he is all right, enough, I guess, but n.o.body knows where he came from. He and that Pete brother of his are no relations of ours, or of Aunt Jessica's either."

"How does he happen to be living here, then?"

"Search me. Some kind of a pick-up, I gathered. n.o.body talks much about it. They take him as a matter of course. All right enough for them, if they want to, but they really ought to warn strangers. A fellow would think he was--er--all right, you know."

Stannard's words made Elliott very uncomfortable. She thought the reason they disquieted her was that she had rather liked Bruce Fearing, and now to have him turn out a person whom she couldn't be as friendly with as she wished was disconcerting. It was only another point in her indictment of life on the Cameron farm; one couldn't tell whom one was knowing. But she determined to sound Laura, which would be easy enough, and Stannard's charge might prove unfounded.

But sounding Laura was not easy, chiefly for the reason Stannard had shrewdly deduced, that the Robert Camerons took Peter and Bruce Fearing in quite as matter-of-fact a way as they took themselves.

Laura even failed to discover that she was being sounded.

"Who is this 'Pete' you're always talking about?" Elliott asked.

"Bruce's older brother--I almost said ours." The two girls were skimming currants, Laura with the swift skill of accustomed fingers, Elliott more slowly. "He is perfectly fine. I wish you could know him."

"I gathered he was Bruce's brother."

"He's not a bit like Bruce. Pete is short and dark and as quick as a flash. You'd know he would make a splendid aviator. There was a letter in the 'Upton News' last night from an Upton doctor who is over there, attached now to our boys' camp; did you see it? He says Bob and Pete are 'the acknowledged aces' of their squadron. That shows we must have missed some of their letters. The last one from Bob was written just after he had finished his training."

"This--Pete went from here?"

"He and Bob were in Tech together, juniors. They enlisted in Boston, and they've kept pretty close tabs on each other ever since. They had their training over here in the same camps. In France, Pete got into spirals first, 'by a fluke,' as he put it; Bob was unlucky with his landings. But, some way or other, Bob seems to have beaten him to the actual fighting. Now they're in it together." And Laura smiled and then sighed, and the nimble fingers stopped work for a minute, only to speed faster than ever.

"I haven't read you any of their letters, have I? Or Sid's either?

(Sidney is my twin, you know. He is at Devens.) But I will. If anything, Pete's are funnier than Bob's. Both the boys have an eye to the jolly side of things. Sometimes you wouldn't think there was anything to flying but a huge lark, by the way they write. But there was one letter of Pete's (it was to Mother), written from their first training-camp in France after one of the boys' best friends had been killed. Pete was evidently feeling sober, but oh, so different from the way any one would have felt about such a thing before the war began! There was plenty of fun in the letter, too, but toward the end, Pete told about this Jim Stone's death, and he said: 'It has made us all pretty serious, but n.o.body's blue. Jim was a splendid fellow, and a chap can't think he has stopped as quick as all that. Mother Jess, do you remember my talking to you one Sunday after church, freshman vacation, about the things I didn't believe in? Why didn't you tell me I was a fool? You knew it then, and I know it now.' That's Pete all over. It made Mother and me very happy."

Elliott felt rather ashamed to continue her probing. "Have they always lived with you," she asked, "the Fearings?"

"Oh, yes, ever since I can remember. Isn't Bruce splendid? I don't know how we could have got on at all this summer without Bruce."

Then Elliott gave up. If a mystery existed, either Laura didn't know of it, or she had forgotten it, or else she considered it too negligible to mention.

The girl found that for some reason she did not care to ask Stannard the source of his information. Would Bruce himself prove communicative? There could be no harm in finding out. Besides, it would tease Stannard to see her talking with "that fellow," and Elliott rather enjoyed teasing Stannard. And didn't she owe him something for a dictatorial interruption?

The thing would require manoeuvering. You couldn't talk to Bruce Fearing, or to any one else up here, whenever you felt like it; he was far too busy. But on the hill at sunset Elliott found her chance.

"I think Aunt Jessica," she remarked, "is the most wonderful woman I've ever seen."

A glow lit up Bruce's quiet gray eyes. "Mother Jess," he said, "is a miracle."

"She is so terrifically busy, and yet she never seems to hurry; and she always has time to talk to you and she never acts tired."

"She is, though."

"I suppose she must be, sometimes. I like that name for her, 'Mother Jess.' Your--aunt, is she?"

"Oh, no," said Bruce, simply. "I've no Cameron or Fordyce blood in me, or any other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles are unregistered. She and Father Bob took Pete and me in when I was a baby and Pete was a mere toddler. I was born in the hotel down in the town there,--Am I boring you?"

"No, indeed!" Elliott had the grace to blush at the ease with which she was carrying on her investigation.

He wondered why she flushed, but went on quietly. "Our own mother died there in the hotel when I was a week old and we didn't seem to have any kin. At least, they never showed up. Mother was evidently a widow; Mother Jess got that from her belongings. She stopped overnight at Highboro, and I was born there. She hadn't told any one in the hotel where she was going. Registered from Boston, but n.o.body could be found in Boston who knew of her. The authorities were going to send Pete and me to some kind of a capitalized Home, when Mother Jess stepped in.

She hadn't enough boys, so she said. Bob and Laura and Sid were on deck. Henry and Tom came along later. Fordyce was the one that died; he'd just slipped out. Mother Jess was feeling lonely, I guess.

Anyway, she took us two; said she thought we'd be better off on the farm than in a Home and she needed us--bless her! Do you wonder Pete and I swear by the Camerons?"

"No," said Elliott. "Indeed I don't." She had what she had been angling for, in good measure, but she rather wished she hadn't got it, after all. "Haven't you had any clue in all these years as to who your people were?"

"Not the slightest. I'm willing to let things rest as they are."

"Yes, of course," thought Elliott, "but--" She let it go at "but."