The Camerons of Highboro Part 21

"Elliott did it for me. Do you like it?"

Stannard nodded. "Good work!"

Father Bob, his attention aroused, inspected the three with new interest in his sober eyes. He said nothing then, but after supper his hand fell on Elliott's shoulder approvingly.

"Well done, little girl! That's the right way. Face the music with your chin up."

Elliott felt exactly as though some one had stiffened her spine. The least little doubt had been creeping into her mind lest what she had done had been heartless. Father Bob's words put that qualm at rest.

And, of course, good news would come from Sidney in the morning.

But courage has a way of ebbing in spite of one. It was dark and very cold when a forlorn little figure appeared beside Elliott's bed.

"I can't go to sleep. Trudy's asleep. I can hear her. I think I am going to cry again."

Elliott sat up. What should she do? What would Aunt Jessica do?

"Come in here and cry on me."

Priscilla climbed in between the sheets and Elliott put both arms around the little girl. Priscilla snuggled close.

"I tried to think--the way you said, but I can't. _Is_ Sidney--"

sniffle--"going to die--" sniffle--"like Ted Gordon?"

"No," said Elliott, who a minute ago had been afraid of the very same thing. "No, I am perfectly positive he is going to get well."

Just saying the words seemed to help, somehow.

Priscilla snuggled closer. "You're awful comforting. A person gets scared at night."

"A person does, indeed."

"Not so much when you've got company," said Priscilla.

The warmth of the little body in her arms struck through to Elliott's own shivering heart. "Not half so much when you've got company," she acknowledged.

CHAPTER XI

MISSING

Sure enough, in the morning came better news. Father Bob's face, when he turned around from the telephone, told that, even before he opened his lips.

"Sidney is holding his own," he said.

You may think that wasn't much better news, but it meant a great deal to the Camerons. "Sidney is holding his own," they told every one who inquired, and their faces were hopeful. If Father Bob had any fears, he kept them to himself. The rest of the Camerons were young and it didn't seem possible to them that Sidney could do anything but get well. Last night had been a bad dream, that was all.

The next morning's message had the word "better" in it. "Little" stood before "better," but n.o.body, not even Father Bob, paid much attention to "little." Sidney was better. It was a week before Mother Jess wrote that the doctors p.r.o.nounced him out of danger and that she and Laura would soon be home. Meanwhile, many things had happened.

You might have thought that Sidney's illness was enough trouble to come to the Camerons at one time, but as Bruce quoted with a twist in his smile, "It never rains but it pours." This time Bruce himself got the message which came from the War Department and read:

You are informed that Lieutenant Peter Fearing has been reported missing since September fifteenth. Letter follows.

The Camerons felt as badly as though Peter Fearing had been their own brother.

"The telegram doesn't say that he's dead," Trudy declared, over and over again.

"Maybe he's a prisoner," Tom suggested.

"Perhaps he had to come down in a wood somewhere," Henry speculated, "and will get back to our lines."

"The government makes mistakes sometimes," Stannard said. "There was a woman in Upton--" He went on with a long story about a woman whose son was reported killed in France on the very day the boy had been in his mother's house on furlough from a cantonment. There were a great many interesting and ingenious details to the story, but n.o.body paid much attention to them. "So you never can tell," Stannard wound up.

"No, you never can tell," Bruce agreed, but he didn't look convinced.

Something, he was quite sure, was wrong with Pete.

"Don't anybody write Mother Jess," he said. "She and Laura have enough to worry about with Sid."

"What if they see it in the papers?" Elliott asked.

"They're busy. Ten to one they won't see it, since it isn't head-lined on the front page. Wait till we get the letter."

"How soon do you suppose the letter will come?" Gertrude wished to know.

"'Letter follows,'" Henry read from the yellow slip which the postman delivered from the telegraph office. "That means right away, I should say."

"Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't," said Tom and then _he_ had a story to tell. It didn't take Tom long, for he was a boy of fewer words than Stannard.

Morning, noon, and night the Camerons speculated about that telegram.

They combed its words with a fine-toothed comb, but they couldn't make anything out of them except the bald fact that Pete was missing.

If you think they let it go at that, you are very much mistaken. Where the fact stopped the Cameron imaginations began, and imaginations never know where to stop. The less actual information an imagination has to work on, the busier it is. The Camerons hadn't any more imagination than most people, but what they had grew very busy. It fairly amazed them with its activity. If you think that this was silly and that they ought to have chained up their imaginations until the promised letter arrived, it only shows that you have never received any such telegram.

After all, the letter, when it came, didn't tell them much. The letter said that Lieutenant Peter Fearing had gone out with his squadron on a bombing-expedition well within the enemy lines. The formation had successfully accomplished its raid and was returning when it was taken by surprise and surrounded by a greatly superior force of enemy planes, which gave the Americans a running fight of thirty-nine minutes to their lines. Lieutenant Fearing's was one of two planes which failed to return to the aerodrome. When last seen, his machine was in combat with four Hun planes over enemy territory.

"What did I tell you?" interrupted Tom. "He's a prisoner."

An airplane had been reported as falling in flames near this spot, but whether it was Lieutenant Fearing's machine or another, no data was as yet at hand to prove. The writer begged to remain, etc.

No, that letter only opened up fresh fields for Cameron imaginations to torment Cameron hearts. n.o.body had happened to think before of Pete's machine catching fire.

"Gee!" said Henry, "if that plane was his--"

"There's no certainty that it was," said Bruce, quickly.

All the Camerons, you see, knew perfectly well what happens to an aviator whose machine catches fire.