Well, it made a melancholy Thanksgiving evening for them; they ate a little of the feast which Ruth had prepared, but without real enjoyment. They talked about accidents, and Dad told of something which had happened in the first well he had drilled—they were down only thirty feet, when a baby had crawled down into the cellar and slid into the hole. It had taken a couple of able-bodied men to hold the mother back, while the rest of them tried to get the child out. They fished for it with a big hook on the end of a rope, and got the hook under the baby’s body and lifted it gently a few feet, but then the body got wedged somehow, and they were helpless. The child had hung there, not screaming, just making a low, moaning sound all the time, “U-u-u-” like that, never stopping; they could hear it plainly. They started twenty feet from the well and dug a shaft, big enough for two men to work in, breaking the ground with crow-bars, scraping it into buckets with big hoes, and the men on top hauling the buckets out with ropes. When they got below the baby, they ran in sideways, and got the baby out all right. The hook had sunk into the flesh of the thigh, but without breaking the skin; the bruise had healed, and in a few days the child was all right. A strange thing was life! If Bunny had stayed home that day, he’d have taken Rosie Taintor to the football game, and at the moment when poor Joe Gundha had plunged to his doom, Bunny would have been yelling his head off over a few yards gained by his team. And now, in the evening, he’d have been at a dance; yes, Bertie actually was at a dance, at the home of one of her fashionable friends, or at some fancy hotel where they were giving a party. Bunny could see, in his mind’s eye, her gleaming shoulders and bosom, her dress of soft shimmering stuff, her bright cheeks and vivid face; she would be sipping champagne, or gliding about the room in the arms of Ashleigh Mathews, the young fellow she was in love with just now. Aunt Emma would be all dressed up, playing at a card-party; and grandmother was painting a picture of a young lord, or duke, or somebody, in short pants and silk stockings, kissing the hand of his lady love!