There was still a brakeman needed, it appeared,—­a good brakeman.  The Sullivans consulted importantly, wondering if “a good man” could by any chance be found “around here.”  They named and rejected several possible candidates—­other boys that we knew.  And they wondered again.  No—­probably every one around here was afraid to leave home, or wouldn’t be strong enough.

I held my breath, perceiving at once, the villany on foot.  They were trying to lure one of us into a trap.  They wished one of us to leap forward with a glad, eager, artless shout—­“I’ll be the other brakeman!” At once they would jeer coarsely, slapping one another’s backs and affecting the utmost merriment that this one of us should have been equal to so monstrous a pretension.  This would last a long time.  They would take up other matters only for the sake of coming back to it with sudden explosions of contemptuous mirth.

Happily, the one of us most liable to this ignominy remained unbelieving to the bitter end; even did he pretend to a yawning sort of interest in a book carelessly picked up.  The Sullivans had been foiled at every turn, and now we were relieved from the covert but not less pointed insult of their presence.

Mrs. Delia, her morning’s work done, came out dressed for church, bidding me a briskly sad little “Good marnin’, Major!” I responded pleasantly, for in a way I liked Mrs. Sullivan, who came each day from her bare little house under the hill to make a home for Solon and our children.  At least she was kind to them and kept them plump.  That she remained dismal under circumstances that seemed to me not to warrant it was a detail of minor consequence.  Terry Sullivan had been no good husband to her.  Beating her and the lesser Sullivans had been his serious aim when in liquor and his diversion when out.  But he fell from a gracious scaffolding with a. bucket of azure paint one day and fractured his stout neck, a thing which in the general opinion of Little Arcady Heaven had meant to be consummated under more formal auspices.

But when they took Terry home and laid him on her bed, she had wailed absurdly for the lost lover in him.  Through the night her cry had been, “Ah, Terry, Terry,—­ye gev me manny a haird blow, darlin’, but ye kep’ th’ hairdest til th’ last!”

It was not possible to avoid being irritated a little by such a woman, but I always tried to conceal this from her.  I suppose she had a right to her own play-world.  She was dressed now in a limp black of many rusty ruffles that sagged close to her and glistened in spots through its rust.  Both the dress and the spiritless silk bonnet that circled her keen little face seemed to have been cried over a long time—­to be always damp with her tears.

With parting injunctions to my namesake to let the cat alone, not to “track up” the kitchen, and not to play with matches, the little woman lovingly cuffed the conspiring lesser Sullivans into a decorous line behind her and marched them off to church.  There, I knew, she would give from her poor wage that the soul of dead Terry should be the sooner prayed out of a place, which, it would seem, might have been created with an eye single to his just needs.