Women, like Mrs. Nelson, who go out to work for other people, have to get up early, but her first thought, and Rodney’s, was more about the door she was to go out by than even about breakfast.
“I’m going right off to find Pat,” said Rodney, as he helped her through the upper side-window.
Nevertheless, before setting out on that errand, he went down into the garden and took a long look at all the land which had been walled in. It might be as good as ever, for a garden, but it had a queer, shut-up appearance.
“Where’s Billy?” he inquired, aloud. “Hullo. There he is, out on the avenue. How did the old rascal foot it up that wall?”
There was Billy, indeed, with his toes on the very edge, and with a wisp of something green sticking out at one side of his mouth.
“Greens!” exclaimed Rodney. “He can steal from a grocer’s wagon better than any other goat I know of.—We used to have a garden. Tell you what, we can make garden of our lots and all the others, too, if we can only have it ploughed. But how would a horse and plough ever get down here?”
It was a pretty deep question and he gave it up, for that time. In a minute more he was upstairs and out through the window, on his errand to Pat. So far as he knew, he left the house without a living soul in it, but before he reached the next corner, the door of the little back bedroom, at the head of the stairs, went to with a sharp slam. It must have been a strong draft of air that did it, or else the door shut itself.
Pat was found and a bargain was made but Rodney did not see the new door. That is, the old door that was to take the place of the window. In fact, he felt like being satisfied with almost anything.
When he reached home again, he closed the window carefully behind him and went down and out for another look around at his vacant land. Hardly was he beyond the back doorstep, however, before he was hailed with:
“Rodney!—Do look up there!—Doesn’t he look funny! How did he ever manage to get there?”
“Why!—Millie!” exclaimed Rodney.
“Ba-a-a-beh!” came almost piteously down from the upper back window, on the left. It Was Rodney’s own room and the window had been left open, to air it, and there was Billy.
“I don’t care so much how he got in,” said Rodney, “but there he is and we must get him out, somehow.”
At that very hour, the breakfast room at the House of Refuge was full of hungry boys but it was wonderfully quiet. There was a slight rattle of crockery, and now and then a low-spoken word from one of the officers, but the eyes of those watchful guardians were everywhere and the rules of order were thoroughly enforced. Beyond a doubt, this also was a valuable part of the schooling the boys were getting but it was a kind of restraint and was in danger of being mistaken for oppression. It is one of the traditions of the House that all of the half-way rebellions among the young fellows have broken out in the dining-room or in the schoolroom, where the discipline is so complete, and never in any manner out of doors, no matter how severe might be the drill of the parade-ground.
Jim, at his own table, was willing enough to be silent, then and there, but he was ready to burst with his great secret and was anxious to find somebody, the right boy, to tell it to. He thought them over, one by one, for he knew them all, but it was not easy to decide among them. He was compelled, at all events, to wait for a proper opportunity, and that could not come for hours, yet. His next experiences must necessarily come to him at his type-setting work, at his “case” in the printing room.
This was a light and pleasant place to be in. It had altogether an air of regular business and not at all of restriction, unless it might be in the clock work precision of whatever was going on and in the fact that there was no talking, no communication, among the many busy “typos.”
Jim had a slip of printed “copy” put before him, on his case, and the moment he saw it he remarked to himself:
“Star Spangled Banner?—If I haven’t had to set that up four times! I know where that comes from. The Superintendent is always telling us we are Americans. Going to be citizens. So is the Military Instructor. They’re both naval officers—I’m an American, but loads of the other fellows are not. It’s my flag—I’ll set it up——”
There was something in it. A great deal more teaching than he or any of the others knew was in the flag, the starry flag of freedom, that was carried at the head of the parade-ground battalion; that was displayed in the larger rooms of the House; that hung over the principal’s platform in the schoolroom; and that so finely ornamented the handsome lecture room in the main building. It had something to do with the other teachings and with some of the traditions that passed around among the boys. How some had gone out from that place to be sailors in the navy; others to be soldiers and even officers in the army; and how that and everything else, to them and all other boys, depended on good behavior.
Jim was thinking about it, now, but his uppermost thought was that sailors went all over the world, into far off seas, into foreign lands, in freedom; and that soldiers, especially cavalry soldiers, rode across the plains and among the mountains, seeing and doing wonderful things, in freedom. O, how he longed for something wild and dashing and adventurous,—something like the very dash for freedom that he was even now looking forward to and trying to plan!
He naturally supposed that his undertaking, if he should make it, would have to do with the various kinds of persons near him, and would as soon have thought of China, as of a boy and girl who were looking at a goat, in a second story window, over in the city. He was not in their thoughts either, and Millie’s next remark was:
“Mother says you can go through our house as much as you want to. She won’t look the back door——”
“I’ll come right over and see her, soon as I’ve got Billy down,” said Rodney. “I want to find out how he got into my room.”
“I’ll wait,” said Millie. “Mother said she wanted to see you—” but he had already darted into the house.
In a moment more the door of his bedroom was opened and out sprang Billy. Without stopping to explain how he got in, or in what freak of goat-mind he butted that door shut, he showed Rod that he could at least go downstairs. Rod followed him out and Millie shouted:
“There he goes!—Now you come right along with me!”
She was a short, thin, dark haired girl, with eyes and a face that seemed all one flush and sparkle of go and energy. Her very voice had in it something peremptory and Rod stepped off as obediently as if she had been a school-teacher. He knew the way through the gap in the fence and through the Kirby back-yard, and he knew that they had a hall running through the house to the street door. That opened on an old avenue that was all built up and almost all the lower stories of the houses were used for business purposes. Mr. Kirby was a printer and his ground floor was his shop, with a steam engine in the rear room. There were two stories above for the family to live in and the hall went all the way through.
“Thank you ever so much,” said Rodney to Mrs. Kirby, when she came downstairs, “but we’re going to have a door put in and then we won’t have to climb through the window——”
“You can use our hall till then,” said Mrs. Kirby, with a voice and manner precisely like Millie’s, “but I can’t have you bringing any other boys to tramp through. Mr. Kirby’s workmen are bad enough——”
Something else called her and she was gone before Rodney could think what to say to her, but she had used one word that fitted closely to all he had been thinking about while he was looking at the walls and the land and the house.
“Workmen?” he said. “Tell you what, Millie, don’t I wish I had a trade! I’m afraid I ain’t going to get one. They say there isn’t any chance for boys, nowadays——”
“I can set type,” said Millie, “when there’s any to set, but father says it’s awful dull times. I want to do something else.”
“I’m going to!” exclaimed Rodney. “You see if I don’t. I won’t let my mother work to support me. I’m going to get out, somehow.”
So he too had a feeling that he was somehow penned in. Circumstances were against him and he must climb over them or get around them. Billy the goat had somehow or other circumvented the walls created by the streets and avenues. What a goat could do, a boy could do, but then Rodney did not as yet quite understand how Billy had managed to perform his feat.