Jap Herron Part 9

One Thursday when the air was full of snow, the little office registered its capacity crowd. Ellis was at home with a heavy cold, and j.a.p and Bill were getting out the paper. The ink congealed on the rollers and needed constant warming to lubricate the items reposing on the bosom of the Washington press. This warming was Bill's job, and j.a.p was exasperated to fighting pitch by the dilatory method of Bill's peregrinations around the circle of rosy-faced girls, hanging admiringly on his efforts.

"Chase those girls out," he growled. "No use for them to hang around.

We won't get this paper out in a week if they stick around after you."

"Old Crabby!" sniffed one of the girls. "You're just mad because n.o.body wants to hang after you."

"j.a.p is particular," chaffed Bill, half apologetically. Since they had a.s.sumed the responsibility for the right uplift of Flossy's boy, there had been growing a new, shy pride in themselves. "Better wait and come back in the morning," he suggested.

The girls filed slowly out. As they pa.s.sed the table, where j.a.p was piling the papers to fold, Isabel Granger, doubtless inspired by the demon of mischief, leaned forward suddenly and kissed him full on the mouth. Then she fled, shrieking with glee. j.a.p stood as if stricken to stone. Bill looked at him in fright. There was no color in his freckled face. His gray eyes were staring, as if some wonderful vision had blasted his sight.

"Gee, j.a.p," said Bill uneasily, "are you sick?"

j.a.p aroused himself and turned toward the press.

"No," he said slowly, "but I don't like for folks to be familiar like that. If I wanted to be a fool like you----" He stopped and stared a moment from the window.

"The next time she kisses me," he said shortly, "she will mean it."

CHAPTER VII

What a wonderful thing is a baby! Babies were not new to either Bill or j.a.p. In Bill's memory lingered the shrill duet of his twin half-sisters, a continuous performance that had lasted more than a year. And j.a.p had never fully corrected a lurch to the left side, due to carrying his sister, Agnesia, when he was little more than a baby himself. Yet the little visitor from the Land of Yesterday was a never failing miracle to them. His cry filled them with fear for his well-being, and his laugh intoxicated them with its glee.

"Wait till he can talk," smiled Flossy, "Then you will see how wise he is."

In her heart she was beginning to combat the fear that he would never talk. Other children of his age were already chattering like magpies.

"Ma said that I said 'papa' when I was eight months old," declared j.a.p.

"But I don't know why I should 'a' said that."

Bill grinned fatuously as the baby pulled at his hair.

"Bill won't get his hair cut," said j.a.p. "He knows that J. W. would hang after me, if it wasn't for his curly hair."

The little fellow, who for obvious reasons could be neither Jasper nor William, had learned to respond with amiable toleration to the soothing abbreviation, "J. W." Kicking his stubby legs gleefully, he tangled his fingers more mercilessly in Bill's brown locks. Flossy loosed the fingers gently, as she cooed:

"Naughty, naughty! Mamma said baby mustn't."

Flinging his fingers aloft in protest, he gurgled: "Ja--Bi!"

Flossy's eyes shone with sudden joy. It was her son's first attempt at articulate speech. The boys lunged forward with one impulse.

"He said 'j.a.ppie,'" j.a.p cried, his chest swelling with the importance of it. Bill glared.

"Why, j.a.p!" Pain and indignation were in his tone. "He tried to say 'Bill.'"

Flossy smiled on them both. It was a wonderful little kingdom, of which she had a.s.sumed the place of absolute monarch, a monarch so gentle and so just that her sway was never questioned.

"Ellis puts in half his time trying to teach baby to say the two names all in one mouthful, so that you boys won't fight about his first word," she vouchsafed. "It would have to be either j.a.p or Bill, because you never tell him anything but your names."

When they waved their caps in farewell, they were still discussing the mooted question vehemently. Was it "j.a.ppie," or a combination of j.a.p and Bill? To both of them the question was vital. j.a.p had the better of the argument, when Bill blurted:

"Anyhow, he's my cousin, and he ain't no relation of yours." Then he remembered that significant remark of Ellis's: "A little patch of the old farm is quite good enough for Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Hinton and their two sons, j.a.p and Jasper William," and he was silent the rest of the way back to the office.

Little J. W. was three years old before he could speak distinctly. The child was born with other afflictions than the serious impediment to his speech, and the four who hung with anguished love on his every gesture were never free from a certain unnamed anxiety. He loved Bill, but he worshipped j.a.p. Both were his willing slaves.

One rainy, dismal night in early fall, when Bill's step-mother lay seriously ill, Flossy left her baby to the care of the small but usually capable maid who a.s.sisted her with the work of the cottage, while she and Ellis went to the home of Judge Bowers to relieve the trained nurse who had come up from the city. At the supper table, Ellis had remarked that j.a.p and Bill would be working late that night, in order to get out a job that had come in when all the resources of the office were needed for the weekly edition of the _Herald_. He had added that he would go over and help them, if his presence could be spared from the sick-room.

The remark must have lodged in the baby's mind, for he slipped out of bed, while the maid was employed in the kitchen, and toddled through the cold rain almost all the way to Main street. Jim Blanke found him lying exhausted in the road, a little way from the drug store, the rain beating pitilessly on his unconscious head and his scantily clad body.

After a night of anxious care, the little fellow relapsed into a state of coma, and lay for hours, white and still, save for the rasping of his breath. The office was closed. Both boys, frantic with fear, stood with Ellis as the child lay in his mother's arms, the four dreading that each hoa.r.s.e breath would be his last. Flossy sat erect in the wide rocking chair, her brave eyes watching every sigh that tore the little bosom. Dr. Hall, whose dictum was life and death, was silent. And this silence was the last straw for j.a.p. He crept nearer.

In fear, he turned from the face of the beloved sufferer. Ellis caught the look in the boy's anguished eyes, and a spasm crossed his tightly compressed lips. The physician rallied himself from the torpor of despair that had laid hold on him.

"Try to arouse him," he commanded. "Try again." The resources of his experience and his prescription blank had long since been exhausted.

Flossy bent over her child and called softly:

"Baby, dearest, mamma loves you. Won't you speak?"

Ellis leaned forward. His face blanched. The rasping had ceased! j.a.p caught the look of horror, and dragged himself up to look into the baby's face.

"He isn't dead! He's all right!" he shrieked, not knowing that he spoke. "He's still breathing. I can hear him." His hands grasped the cold body and lifted it, unconscious of the thing he was doing.

"Oh, J. W.! Oh, J. W.!" he screamed, "don't go away from us!"

He pressed the child to his breast convulsively, and the miracle happened. The solemn black eyes opened and a husky voice said, "j.a.ppie."

After the excitement was over, and the exhausted mother slept beside her sleeping child. Bill said humbly:

"He did say 'j.a.p' first."

"But he tried to say 'Bill,' too," j.a.p said loyally.

The next morning, when the office had resumed its normal routine, a routine that was destined to be only partially interrupted by the death of Bill's second stepmother, a few days later, Ellis called j.a.p into the little back room where, in the dismal days before Flossy's coming, they had performed all the functions of housekeeping. He closed the door, as he laid his hand on j.a.p's shoulders.

"You saved J. W.'s life," he said solemnly. "Doc Hall said that you stopped him, on the threshold, when you gave that dreadful cry."

The baby did not rally, and Ellis worried about this incessantly. One day, some weeks after another mound had been added to the group in Judge Bowers's family lot, and Bill had gone with his father to appraise the merits of a prospective housekeeper from Birdtown, Ellis looked up from the proof he was correcting. j.a.p noted the anxiety in his face, and the gray eyes, that could so often render speech unnecessary, put the question. Ellis sighed.

"He's not getting along the way he ought to," he mused. "Doc Hall prescribed a tonic for him a month ago; but it doesn't seem to take hold. He has no const.i.tution to begin with. His father, exhausted by privation and ill-health, has handicapped him in the start.

"j.a.p," he said, as he arose and laid one arm confidingly around the boy's shoulder, "you must remember that, in the years to come. I didn't give the baby a fair chance. He may need all the help he can get to carry him through. If you should live longer than I, you must be his father and big brother, both."

j.a.p's gray eyes opened in astonishment. The idea that there could ever be a time when Ellis would not be there had never entered his mind. He looked into the dark, thin face with its pallor and its unnaturally bright eyes, and a joyous smile took the place of the momentary shock.

"Doc Hall said that you had grit enough to outlive any disease that ever lurked in the brush of Bloomtown," he declared eagerly.