The walk to the kitchen showed signs of recent snow-shovelling.  That had been one of his tasks.  He wondered who did it now, and suddenly remembered that his own son must be twelve.  In another moment he would have knocked at the kitchen door, but the skreek of a bucksaw from the woodshed led him aside.  He looked in and saw a boy hard at work.  Evidently, this was his son.  Impelled by the wave of warm emotion that swept over him, he all but rushed in upon the lad.  He controlled himself with an effort.

“Father here?” he asked curtly, though from under the stiff brim of his John B. Stetson he studied the boy closely.

Sizable for his age, he thought.  A mite spare in the ribs maybe, and that possibly due to rapid growth.  But the face strong and pleasing and the eyes like Uncle Isaac’s.  When all was said, a darn good sample.

“No, sir,” the boy answered, resting on the saw-buck.

“Where is he?”

“At sea,” was the answer.

Josiah Childs felt a something very akin to relief and joy tingle through him.  Agatha had married again—­evidently a seafaring man.  Next, came an ominous, creepy sensation.  Agatha had committed bigamy.  He remembered Enoch Arden, read aloud to the class by the teacher in the old schoolhouse, and began to think of himself as a hero.  He would do the heroic.  By George, he would.  He would sneak away and get the first train for California.  She would never know.

But there was Agatha’s New England morality, and her New England conscience.  She received a regular remittance.  She knew he was alive.  It was impossible that she could have done this thing.  He groped wildly for a solution.  Perhaps she had sold the old home, and this boy was somebody else’s boy.

“What is your name?” Josiah asked.

“Johnnie,” came the reply.

“Last name I mean?”

“Childs, Johnnie Childs.”

“And your father’s name?—­first name?”

“Josiah Childs.”

“And he’s away at sea, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

This set Josiah wondering again.

“What kind of a man is he?”

“Oh, he’s all right—­a good provider, Mom says.  And he is.  He always sends his money home, and he works hard for it, too, Mom says.  She says he always was a good worker, and he’s better’n other men she ever saw.  He don’t smoke, or drink, or swear, or do anything he oughtn’t.  And he never did.  He was always that way, Mom says, and she knew him all her life before ever they got married.  He’s a very kind man, and never hurts anybody’s feelings.  Mom says he’s the most considerate man she ever knew.”

Josiah’s heart went weak.  Agatha had done it after all—­had taken a second husband when she knew her first was still alive.  Well, he had learned charity in the West, and he could be charitable.  He would go quietly away.  Nobody would ever know.  Though it was rather mean of her, the thought flashed through him, that she should go on cashing his remittances when she was married to so model and steady-working a seafaring husband who brought his wages home.  He cudgelled his brains in an effort to remember such a man out of all the East Falls men he had known.