THE RETURN OF ALICE
THE storm ended before dawn. Ted was the first to awaken, feeling cramped and still tired. By the time he had moved around a little Nelson was also awake, denying that he had even been asleep.
“Oh, I may have closed my eyes a little,” he admitted. Then he got up, grimacing at his stiff muscles.
It seemed a shame to wake the children, but Ted felt they should be on their way as soon as possible. If the search for the children had been called off during the storm, it would be renewed with the return of daylight.
Nelson agreed it was a good idea, especially as there was nothing for breakfast and they had all missed last night’s dinner.
So the children were aroused and led down the hillside toward the car. The clay footing was treacherous after the rain, but they were able to pick their way around the worst spots, and reached the car safely.
“Now for home,” said Nelson, starting the car, “but which way is home?”
Joyce indicated the road ahead, and Nelson followed it until she told him to turn off. She pointed out their house just ahead of them. They had driven perhaps a mile altogether, but Nelson figured that it was probably more than that over the hills, the way the children had apparently come.
The Llewellyn place wasn’t exactly a farm. It had been a farm at one time, but probably proved unprofitable, and had been divided into several portions, while the men turned to mining instead. The house was quite a way from its closest neighbor, and, though old, looked as though an attempt had been made to keep up appearances.
As the car turned in, a woman came to the door. The children jumped from the car and ran to their mother; their first questions were about Alice. Mrs. Llewellyn shook her head.
“No, Alice hasn’t come back yet. I thought perhaps she was with you. But I’m sure she’ll be coming home today.”
Joyce and Johnny accepted this optimistic prediction, and were satisfied for the time being. Then, holding her children’s hands, Mrs. Llewellyn came toward the car. Ted and Nelson got out of the car, and Ted made the introductions.
“I’m surely grateful to you two young men,” said Mrs. Llewellyn. “I was worried, of course, but perhaps not quite as worried as I might have been. My children are unusually self-reliant for their age, and I felt sure they’d have sense enough to find some shelter when they saw the storm approaching.”
“The storm was no problem,” Ted returned. “The mine was a good enough shelter from that.” On the way home Johnny had tried to make Ted agree to say nothing about the mine to his mother, but Ted had made no such promise.
“The mine?” said Mrs. Llewellyn questioningly, turning to her children. “You know you’ve been forbidden to go there, but I suppose with the storm it couldn’t be helped. You stayed right by the entrance?”
The children hung their heads, and Nelson felt she might as well know the worst. “They were quite a way in, down to the first branch anyway.”
“Children!” Mrs. Llewellyn exclaimed in alarm. Obviously, Joyce and Johnny would hear about this later. “Well, I know everyone’s hungry. Come on into the house and I’ll make pancakes.”
Feeling that it would be rude to refuse her offer, her guests followed her inside. After phoning the police to call off the search, Mrs. Llewellyn set to work in the kitchen. Ted and Nelson were invited to wash up and did their best to clean up, knowing they would have to do something more about their clothes later. Then they all sat down to the table and made short work of the huge pile of pancakes. When Joyce and Johnny had swallowed the last bite, they asked to be excused.
“But don’t go off the property,” Mrs. Llewellyn instructed them, and they promised, then ran outside.
“That mule!” said their mother with a sigh. “That’s what they’re after, of course. They won’t be satisfied until Alice comes back, and I must admit that I miss her, too. We think Alice is unusually intelligent, and of course the children like to ride on her.”
“I don’t see how she could be very intelligent,” Nelson objected, “if she’s still anxious to go back to work in the mines after all these years.”
“Oh, I don’t think that Alice is at all anxious to return to work. It’s simply curiosity. She wants to put her nose into everything that’s going on. And I admit she has a mule’s stubborn streak. There’s nothing you could do to make her change her mind about anything. You might prevent her a dozen times from going somewhere, and that would still be the first place she’d head when she got a chance.”
“I know some people just like that,” said Nelson with a laugh.
“Well, I’m not at all sure that Alice doesn’t think she’s a human being,” Mrs. Llewellyn remarked, “and the children certainly treat her like one.”
“Aren’t mules just a little old-fashioned, as far as mining operations go?” Ted inquired.
“It’s true there are fewer and fewer mules in the mines today, but they were very useful in the past. They’re quite sure-footed, and can handle grades that would perhaps be too steep for the ordinary car on wheels. They’re good at negotiating turns, too. If electric power is not available in some portions of the mine, you could use a mule, for gas engines are expensive and smelly and sometimes dangerous inside a mine. And they do have some intelligence. A mule doesn’t go plowing blindly into a car up ahead, the way an electric car will.”
Ted had previously explained to Mrs. Llewellyn that he was a reporter, and now he told her something about what he was trying to do. She said she would be glad to help him.
“I don’t want to appear unnecessarily nosy,” Ted assured her, “and I promise not to use your name. We’re just trying to get a picture of what is going on here.”
“I don’t mind a bit, Ted. Though I’d prefer not to have any personal publicity, I would put up with even that, if I thought it would help the children. We’re getting along all right, for the time being. We get a monthly check from the state workmen’s compensation fund. Then we have some government bonds, which I have managed to hang on to, though I’ve often been sorely tempted to sell them. My husband was well paid, while he worked, and our living expenses here are quite low. It’s the children I am thinking of: how can they get a better education, where will they go, what work can they do? I don’t see any future for them in East Walton. There’s really nothing here any more.”
“Your husband was killed in the big explosion?”
“Oh, no. He died a year—almost two years—before that. I believe that Joyce can just about remember him a little, while Johnny doesn’t remember him at all. It was just a ‘small’ accident—he was the only one who was hurt, and I don’t think it ever got into the big papers. But even a ‘small’ accident can be terribly big, when it concerns the person you love.”
“Do you blame anyone for your husband’s accident?”
“How can you blame anyone? It could have happened to anyone at any time. A little lapse in judgment, or a little mistake in engineering, and then it happens. I know that’s how my husband would want me to look at it.”
The telephone rang, but it was in another room, and Ted and Nelson couldn’t hear the conversation. Soon Mrs. Llewellyn returned to the room smiling.
“They’ve found the mule. I must tell the children.” She went to the door and called, “Joyce, Johnny! Alice is coming home.”
The children were overjoyed at the good news.
“Where was she?” asked Joyce eagerly.
“She was across the river. So you see, Joyce, she was never anywhere near the mine at all.”
“No, Mother,” said Joyce.
“Across the river, imagine that,” said Mrs. Llewellyn, turning to the others. “That means she had to go way down to the bridge, and cross it and come up the other side. She could never have made it under ordinary circumstances. Someone would be sure to notice her and stop her. But I suppose that with the storm, traffic was lighter and she was able to slip across the bridge. You know what this means, Joyce. We’ll have to keep Alice tied up after this.”
“Oh, no, Mother, please don’t tie her up. She hates it so much.”
“We’ll watch her better next time,” Johnny cried.
“Well, we’ll see. I do hate to tie her,” she explained to the others, “because she resents it so. But the children can’t be relied on to close the gate.”
“We will, from now on,” Joyce pledged, and Johnny agreed.
“I suppose we ought to be going, Ted, shouldn’t we?” asked Nelson, rising from the table.
“Oh, no, you have to wait to see Alice,” Joyce protested.
“How soon will Alice be here?” Ted inquired.
“It shouldn’t be more than ten or fifteen minutes. Mr. Stevens is bringing her home in his truck. If she had to walk, it would be a good deal longer than that. She always comes back, but in her own good time.”
Ted remembered the night’s fierce storm. “I wonder what Alice did in the rain? Or wouldn’t she have minded it?”
“Oh, I don’t think Alice would like a storm. But she wouldn’t let a little thing like that interfere with whatever it was she wanted to do.”
“Across the river,” Nelson mused. “Would that be in West Walton?”
Mrs. Llewellyn laughed. “That’s a local joke. You see, West Walton is one of those places that never really existed. It was planned, and even laid out, at the same time as East Walton. I suppose that under ordinary circumstances East Walton would have expanded a little, and crossed the river. But it never did. For some reason the bridge was never built at East Walton at all. There’s one miles below, which you undoubtedly crossed, and then there’s a railroad bridge several miles upstream. I don’t know whether it was an engineering, economic, or political difficulty, but East Walton never got its bridge. So that was the end of West Walton as well.”
“Then West Walton was just a dream?”
“I suppose you’d call it a dream, Nelson, but there are still people who have big plans for West Walton. A promoter has a development all laid out.”
They were all outside when the red truck drove into the yard. Mr. Stevens got out, and led Alice, with her bell tinkling, down the ramp from the truck.
Then Mr. Stevens was introduced. He was a red-faced, good-natured farmer from across the river.
“I knew it was your mule, Mrs. Llewellyn, even if I hadn’t happened to hear that radio broadcast. I was out looking for her first thing this morning—not really looking for her, you understand, but thinking it might help find the children. There aren’t many mules left around here any more.”
“Has Alice ever been there before?” asked Ted.
“I thought I saw her once last year, and I suppose it was on her mind that the grass was greener over there and she intended to come back. Only the traffic would be too heavy for her, most times.”
“How about the railroad bridge?”
“That would be shorter, but I don’t think she could get on the right of way. It’s fenced off. I sure hope she didn’t come that way. It would be too dangerous.”
He drove off, after accepting the children’s thanks for returning their mule. Then Ted and Nelson felt it was time to leave as well. The children tried to persuade them to take a ride on the mule, but they declined, not being quite sure of Alice’s friendship at that point.
Finding they could not hold the visitors there any longer, the children made them promise to come back before leaving East Walton, and they drove off amid many shouts of thanks.
“So that was Alice,” Nelson muttered. “I thought all mules were named Maude.”
“How many mules have you ever known?”
“None, I guess. Half horse and half donkey, with ears that remind you of a rabbit besides—I wonder if Alice really knows what she is?”
“Mrs. Llewellyn seemed to think Alice considers herself human.”
“Maybe she does, maybe she does. But I still don’t think she’d win any beauty prize.”
Ted nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid Alice couldn’t win a beauty prize—even in a contest for mules.”