Page 64 - The Adventures of a Freshman

CHAPTER XIV

"HOME FROM COLLEGE"

She was standing beside the neatly painted horse-block, waiting to welcome her boy. Will had spied her from
the road.

As the buggy turned in through the gate he began to brace himself for meeting her. This was going to be
harder, he knew, than had been the meeting at the railroad station a little while before, with his father, whose
honest old eyes had looked at him so searchingly.

He was coming nearer and nearer. She was smiling. It was the same motherly smile he had known he would
see. Now she was speaking his name. The next moment he was out of the buggy, and she was kissing him just
as when he was an innocent little boy. She was frightened at her son's pale, haggard face, but she did not want
him to know it, and only said, patting his cheek laughingly, "Why didn't you take better care of yourself,
child?"

[Illustration: THE MEETING "I don't know, mother," he said slowly, "I don't know...."]

They were walking up the path. Will looked down at her. The tears were forming in the little mother's eyes.
He looked away again. "I don't know, mother," he said, slowly, "I don't know why I didn't take better care of
myself."

"There, don't talk. You must rest after your long journey. Keep still now. You can tell me all about everything
later on." They opened the screen door and went in.

Even Mr. Young had been alarmed when he saw his son step off the train. At least he treated him very
considerately and said, as he shook his hand: "I guess you've been studying too hard there at school, ain't you?
'All work and no play'--you know the rest of it."

Will dropped his eyes as he thought of the kind of playing he had been doing. Then he said, abruptly: "Well,
I'll have plenty of time to get well in," looked up the street and remarked that everything seemed the same.

"Yes, everything's the same with us," his father replied, unhitching the horse.

"Hello, Molly," Will said to the mare, "do you remember me?"

He was embarrassed in his father's presence, and Mr. Young seemed to notice it, for as they got into the buggy
he said, in an uneasy manner: "Mother got your telegram, but I had to come to town anyway, so I thought I
might just as well drive you out home myself. Had a pleasant trip?"

Indeed, his father, who had never once written him a letter during the nine months' absence, was the last one
Will expected to meet at the station, but that was not what caused Will's constraint. It was the queer searching
way he looked at him every now and then.

"Could he have heard about it!" Will kept asking himself. "No, he can't know. If he knew--if he knew, he
would be taking me to jail instead of home. He would say it served me right for going against his wishes."

At supper-time his father and his brother Charlie came in from the cornfields together. "Hope you'll bring us
rain," said Mr. Young. "We need it." Charlie was brown and big, and he gave Will's hand a hearty grip and
said, "Glad to see you back, Will, blamed if I ain't."