Children -- Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction; Girls -- Juvenile fiction; Time travel -- Juvenile fiction
"Who are you?" whispered Letitia to the boy.
"I am Josephus Peabody, but I was always called Joe till I came
here," the boy whispered back.
Letitia pondered. The name sounded very familiar to her, just as the
boy's face had looked. Then suddenly she remembered. "When I was a
little girl," she whispered, "not more than seven--I am going on ten
now--I knew a little boy named Joe Peabody, and he was visiting his
grandmother, Mrs. Joe Peabody. She lives about half a mile from my
Aunt Peggy's around the corner of the road. It is a big white house
next to the graveyard."
"That was me," said the boy. "At least," he added in rather a dazed
and hopeless tone, "I suppose it was, and I guess I remember you too.
You had curls, and we went coasting down that long hill near
Grandmother's together."
"Seems to me we did," said Letitia, and her own tone was dazed and
hopeless.
"Since I have been here," whispered the boy, "I haven't been exactly
sure who I was and that is the truth. The folks where I am staying
are real good. They go to meeting all day Sunday and they don't work
Saturday nights, but I can't understand it. We have to make all the
things I have seen already made, for one thing."
Letitia nodded in the dark.
"That is the way here," said she.
"And Mr. Cephas Holbrook has just the name that my
great-great-great-uncle on my mother's side had," said the boy, in a
whisper so puzzled that it was fairly agonized. "Grandmother has told
me about him. He had a battle with six Injuns and killed them all
himself, and this Mr. Cephas Holbrook has done just that same thing.
And he killed ten wolves and nailed their heads to the meeting-house.
Say," the boy continued confidentially, "those were the heads I
meant, you know."
"Of course I know," whispered Letitia. "I wouldn't speak to you if
you had done such awful things."
"I didn't, honestly," said Josephus Peabody. "Where did you come from
to-night?" asked Letitia.
"Why, I came from Mr. Cephas Holbrook's. It's about ten miles away on
that side." The boy pointed in the dark.
"You came all that way?"
"I had to if I came at all. I don't get any time to see my traps
day-times. I have to work. I have to chop wood, and make wooden pegs.
I never saw wooden pegs, till--till I came here. I have to work all
day. Eliphalet Holbrook, he's a boy about my size, got out of the
window one night, when it was moonlight, and we set traps, and we
haven't either of us had a chance to look at them and see if we've
caught anything; but to-night, I had a cold and they sent me to bed
early and I whispered to Eliphalet, that I'd see those traps; and I
had a pine knot, and I run and run, but I couldn't find the traps."
"You didn't run ten miles?"
"No, the traps were set only about three miles from where we live and
I rather think I lost my way. Then I heard the Injuns--say, I used to
call them Indians."
"So did I," said Letitia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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