Warning Hill by John P. Marquand Page B

here and hold my hand.”
    â€œJust the same,” said Tommy Michael, “when I get big—”
    â€œYou’ll have to be bigger’n me,” Jim Street replied, “before you can tackle folks on Warning Hill.”
    And then there was another face. His mother was in the door and her face too was white. She did not seem surprised to see Jim Street; she did not seem surprised at anything.
    â€œWhat is it?” she asked. Her voice was not more than a whisper. “Is Alfred—?”
    But she knew what they meant without their saying a single word. Her lips went very tight together. Neither of them cried—his mother nor Aunt Sarah.
    â€œWhere is he?” Her voice was still nothing but a whisper.
    â€œDown by the shore, Ma’am,” Jim Street said.
    â€œAnd you left him?” Her voice was louder. “You left him all alone?”
    â€œI was going back, Ma’am,” said Jim Street. “I’m goin’ to stand by.”
    Estelle Michael turned toward the door, her lips still tight. “We’ve got to bring him here,” she said. “He can’t stay out there alone.”
    â€œWe will,” said Jim Street, “just as soon as Elmer’s back with the doctor. It’ll take two, Ma’am.”
    â€œOf course it will take two,” the sharpness was back in his mother’s voice. “There’s you and me, isn’t there? And Tommy, get the lantern in the kitchen. Tell Nora she’s to light it.”
    â€œYou ain’t going to take Tom?” cried Jim Street. “It ain’t right, Ma’am, to take—”
    â€œHe’ll have harder things to do,” his mother said. “Tommy, you’re not afraid?”
    â€œNo,” said Tommy, but his heart was deathly cold.
    And Jim Street looked at him as though he was a man and not a boy.
    â€œAlf would like it,” he said. “He’s like his daddy, Ma’am. A dead game sport, and I guess that goes for everybody here.” Jim Street coughed and looked embarrassed. “Maybe, Ma’am, you might let me take Tom home to-night. He might feel better and—nothing’s going to hurt him there.”
    But Tommy scarcely heard him. He was thinking still of the shining carriage and of that man who held the reins. Some intuition which balances the helplessness of little children must have made him know that there was danger in that carriage, as deadly as the danger of Pharaoh’s chariots. Though no one told him, he could tell that it had smitten his father down and that he too might fall beneath its wheels.

VIII
    That was how he came to know the Streets, and the dooryard by the river, and to be friends with Mal and Mary. They were kind to him that night. Even Mal was kind, and Mr. Street was right; nothing ever hurt him there; nothing ever hurt him until he went to Warning Hill, and seven years went by before he did that.
    Across the harbor, Warning Hill stood mysterious and splendid. But Tommy Michael never got there until he was fourteen. Mary was the one who helped him go, for Tommy got to Warning Hill in Mal Street’s skiff, the yellow one which Jim Street used sometimes for eels, with a spritsail on her covered with blue patches. Though a long time had passed, Tommy always knew he would get there some day—a long time, for is there ever a longer gap than that strangely misty lapse between seven and fourteen?
    So much happened in that time, and yet where it went, Tommy could never tell. It always seemed to him that all in that one day the chill world first smote him, and when it happened all that had gone before was vague and blurred, a jumble of old voices and old visions that sank into the silence of the Michael house, and in the wrinkles of his mother’s face, until it all became impossible and unconvincing, like Aunt Sarah’s stories of a greatness that was past. He never knew until that day how little they had told