A Busy Year at the Old Squire's Part 26

"That watch hasn't stopped, has it?" I said; for night was plainly falling.

Addison hastily looked again.

"No, it's ticking all right," he said. "Theodora's watch never stops, you know." It was a fine watch that her father had left to her.

By that time it was so dark that we could hardly see the hands on the watch; and although the day had been warm, I noticed a distinct change in the temperature--a chill. Somewhere in the woods an owl began to hoot dismally, as owls do at night; and from a ledge a little distance from the one on which we stood a whippoorwill began to chant.

Night was evidently descending on the earth--at four o'clock of an August afternoon! We stared round and then looked at each other, bewildered.

"Addison, what do you make of this!" I cried.

Thoughts of that rainbow in the morning had flashed through my mind; and with it came a cold touch of superst.i.tious fear, such as I had never felt in my life before. In that moment I realized what the fears of the ignorant must have been through all the past ages of the world. It is a fear that takes away your reason. I could have cried out, or run, or done any other foolish thing.

Without saying a word, Addison put the tourmaline crystal into his pocket and picked up the drill and the little bundle of silver-ore specimens, which to carry the more easily he had tied up in his handkerchief.

"Come on," he said in a queer, low tone. "Let's go find Theodora and Nell. I guess we'd better go home--if it's coming on night in the middle of the afternoon."

He tried to laugh, for Addison had always prided himself on being free from all superst.i.tion. But I saw that he was startled; and he admitted afterwards that he, too, had remembered about that rainbow in the morning, and had also thought of the comet that had appeared a few years before and that many people believed to presage the end of the world.

We started to run back, but it had already grown so dark that we had to pay special heed to our steps. We could not walk fast. To this day I remember how strange and solemn the chanting of the whippoorwills and the hoa.r.s.e _skook_! of the nighthawks sounded to me. No doubt I was frightened. It was exactly like evening; the same chill was in the air.

At last we reached the place where we had left the others, but they were not there. Addison called to Theodora and Ellen several times in low, suppressed tones; I, too, felt a great disinclination to shout or speak aloud.

"I guess they've all gone back where we left the wagon," Addison said at last.

We made our way through the tangled bushes, brush and woods, down to Otter Brook. In the darkness we went a little astray from the place where we had unharnessed the horse; but presently, as we were moving about in the brushwood, we heard a low voice say:

"Is that you, Ad?"

It was Theodora; and immediately we came upon them all, sitting together forlornly there in the wagon. They had hitched up Old Sol and were anxiously waiting for us in order to start for home. The strange phenomenon seemed to have dazed them; they sat there in the dark as silent as so many mice.

"h.e.l.lo, girls!" Addison exclaimed. "Are you all there? Quite dark, isn't it?"

"Oh, Ad, what do you think this is?" Theodora asked, still in the same hushed voice.

"Well, I think it is _dark_," replied Addison, trying to appear unconcerned.

"Don't laugh, Ad," said Theodora solemnly. "Something awful has happened."

"And where have you two been so long?" asked Catherine. "We thought you were lost. We thought you would never come. What time is it?"

We struck a match and looked. It was nearly half past four.

"Oh, get in, Ad, and take the reins! Let's go home!" Ellen pleaded.

"Yes, Ad, let's go home, if we can get there," said Tom Edwards. "What d'ye suppose it is, anyhow?"

"_Dark!_" exclaimed Addison hardily. "Just plain dark!"

"Oh, Addison!" exclaimed Theodora reprovingly. "Don't try to joke about a thing like this."

"It may be the end of the world," Ellen murmured.

"The world has had a good many ends to it," said Addison. "Which end do you think this is, Nell?"

But neither Ellen nor Theodora cared to reply to him. Their low, frightened voices increased my uneasiness. I could think of nothing except that rainbow in the morning; "morning," "warning," seemed to ring in my ears.

We climbed into the wagon and started homeward, but it was so dark that we had to plod along slowly. Old Sol was unusually torpid, as if the ominous obscurity had dazed him, too. After a time he stopped short and snorted; we heard the brush crackle and caught a glimpse of a large animal crossing the road ahead of us.

"That's a bear," Thomas said. "Bears are out, just as if it were night."

Some minutes pa.s.sed before we could make Old Sol go on; and again we heard owls hooting in the woods.

Long before we got down to the cleared land, however, the sky began gradually to grow lighter. We all noticed it, and a feeling of relief stole over us. In the course of twenty minutes it became so light that we could discern objects round us quite plainly. The night chill, too, seemed to go from the air.

Suddenly, as we rattled along, Addison jumped up from his seat and turned to us. "I know now what this is!" he cried. "Why didn't I think of it before?"

"What is it--if you know?" cried Catherine and Theodora at once.

"The eclipse! The total eclipse of the sun!" exclaimed Addison. "I remember now reading something about it in the _Maine Farmer_ a fortnight ago. It was to be on the 7th--and this is it!"

At that time advance notices of such phenomena were not so widely published as they are now; at the old farm, too, we did not take a daily newspaper. So one of the great astronomical events of the last century had come and gone, and we had not known what it was until it was over.

Except for the dun canopy of smoke and clouds over the sun we should have guessed at once, of course, the cause of the darkness; but as it was, the eclipse had given us an anxious afternoon; and although the rainbow in the morning had probably not the slightest connection with the eclipse,--indeed, could not have had,--it had greatly heightened the feeling of awe and superst.i.tious dread with which we had beheld night fall in the middle of the afternoon!

By the time we got home it was light again. As we drove into the yard, the old Squire came out, smiling. "Was it a little dark up where you were blackberrying a while ago?" he asked.

"Well, _just_ a little dark, sir," Addison replied, with a smile as droll as his own. "But I suppose it was all because of that rainbow in the morning that you told us to look out for."

CHAPTER XXIII

WHEN I WENT AFTER THE EYESTONE

A few evenings ago, I read in a Boston newspaper that, as the result of a close contest, Isaac Kane Woodbridge had been elected mayor of one of the largest and most progressive cities of the Northwest.

Little Ike Woodbridge! Yes, it was surely he. How strangely events work round in this world of ours! Memories of a strange adventure that befell him years ago when he was a little fellow came to my mind, and I thought of the slender thread by which his life hung that afternoon.

The selectmen of our town had taken Ike Woodbridge from the poor-house and "bound him out" to a farmer named Darius Dole. He was to have food, such as Dole and his wife ate, ten weeks' schooling a year, and if he did well and remained with the Doles until he was of legal age, a "liberty suit" of new clothes and fifty dollars.

That was the written agreement; and Farmer Dole, who was a severe, hard-working man, began early to see to it that little Ike earned all that came to him. The boy, who was a little over seven years old, had to be up and dressed at five o'clock in the morning, fetch wood and water to the kitchen, help do ch.o.r.es at the barn, run on errands, pull weeds in the garden, spread the hay swathes in the field with a little fork, and do a hundred other things, up to the full measure of his strength.

The neighbors soon began to say that little Ike was being worked too hard. When the old Squire was one of the selectmen, he remonstrated with Dole, and wrung a promise from him that the boy should have more hours for sleep, warmer clothes for winter, and three playdays a year; but Dole did not keep his promise very strictly.

The fall that little Ike was in his eighth year, the threshers, as we called the men who journeyed from farm to farm to thresh the grain, came to the old Squire's as usual. While my cousin Halstead was helping to tend the machine, he got a bit of wheat beard in his right eye.