The story of our acquaintance with Richard Moore is too long to be told here. Four years before he had come with us from the Pawnee country. He had married Minny Adams with the full consent of her parents and the opposition of all her other friends. Contrary to all prophecies, and with that inartistic disregard of the probable which events often show, they had been very happy together.
Mr. Moore—otherwise Wyanota—was a civil engineer, and stood high in his profession.
“Look here, mamma,” he said as he drove up. “Will you take in the wife and the small child for to-night? I must go away.”
“Certainly,” said I, overjoyed. “But where are you going, to be caught in a storm?”
“Oh, they have got into a fuss with the hands over on the railroad, and have sent for me. I might have known Robinson wouldn’t manage when I left him?”
“Why not?”
“English!” said Wyn, most expressively. “No one can stand the airs he puts on.”
Now, such airs as Mr. Moore possessed—and they were neither few nor far between—were not put on, but were perfectly natural to him.
“Can’t you come in and get your tea?” I asked as he handed me the baby and helped his wife down.
“No: I must go over directly and compose matters. Good-bye, little woman: by-bye, baby! Do you know, we think she’s beginning to say ‘papa?’” said Wyn, proudly; and then he kissed his wife and child and drove away.
I carried the infant phenomenon into the house and took off its wrappings. She was my namesake, and I loved the little creature, but I can’t say she was a pretty baby. She was a soft, brown thing, with her father’s beautiful southern eyes and her mother’s mouth, but otherwise she certainly was not handsome. She was ten months old, but she had a look of experience and wisdom in her wee face that would have made her seem old at twenty years. She sat on my lap and watched me in a meditative way, as though she were reviewing her former estimate of my character, and considering whether her opinions on that subject were well founded. There was something quite weird and awful in her dignity and gravity.
“Isn’t she a wise-looking little thing?” said Minny. “She makes me think sometimes of the fairy changeling that was a hundred and fifty years old, and never saw soap made in an egg-shell.”
“This baby never would have made such a confession of ignorance, you may depend. She would not have acknowledged that anything lay out of the range of her experience. Take your chicken till I get tea, for I am my own girl to-night.”
We had a very merry time over the tea-table and in washing up the dishes. Until the boys went to bed we were in something of a frolic with them and the baby, and it was not till the little one was asleep in her crib and Ed and Charley were quiet in bed that we noticed how wild the weather was getting.
The rain, which had at first fallen in pattering drops, was now driving in sheets before a mighty wind, which roared through the woods back of the house with a noise like thunder. The branches of the huge oaks in the front yard creaked and groaned as only oak boughs can. The house shook, the rain lashed the roof, and the wind clawed and rattled the blinds like some wild creature trying to get in.