he had made up his mind to go back and get his Aunt Lucy Davis to come
and help him coax. He was only waiting fur his sister to get well enough
so he could leave her. She got better, and she never ast fur the kid,
nor said nothing about it. Which was probable because she seen he hated
it so. He had made up his mind, before he went back after their Aunt
Lucy Davis, to take the baby himself and put it into some kind of an
institution.

"I thought," he says to Miss Lucy, telling of the story, "that you
yourself were almost reconciled to the thought that it hadn't lived."

Miss Lucy interrupted him with a little sound. She was breathing hard,
and shaking from head to foot. No one would have thought to look at her
then she was reconciled to the idea that it hadn't lived. It was cruel
hard on her to tear her to pieces with the news that it really had
lived, but had lived away from her all these years she had been longing
fur it. And no chancet fur her ever to mother it. And no way to tell
what had ever become of it. I felt awful sorry fur Miss Lucy then.

"But when I got ready to leave Galesburg," Colonel Tom goes on, "it
suddenly occurred to me that there would be difficulties in the way of
putting it in a home of any sort. I didn't know what to do with it--"

"What DID you? What DID you? WHAT DID YOU?" cries out Miss Lucy,
pressing her hand to her chest, like she was smothering.

"The first thing I did," says Colonel Tom, "was to get you to another
house--you remember, Lucy?"

"Yes, yes!" she says, excited, "and what then?"

"Perhaps I did a very foolish thing," says Colonel Tom.

"After I had seen you installed in the new place and had bidden you
good-bye, I got a carriage and drove by the place where the nurse and
her mother lived. I told the woman that I had changed my mind--that you
were going to raise the baby--that I was going to permit it. I don't
think she quite believed me, but she gave me the baby. What else could
she do? Besides, I had paid her well, when I discharged her, to say
nothing to you, and to keep the baby until I should come for it. They
needed money; they were poor.

"I was determined that it should never be heard of again. It was about
noon when I left Galesburg. I drove all that afternoon, with the baby
in a basket on the seat of the carriage beside me. Everybody has read
in books, since books were first written--and seen in newspapers,
too--about children being left on door steps. Given a