--everything. This disquieting apparition was stretching out its arms toward the west, as if in supplication for the evening star, which, certainly, was an alluring object, though obviously out of reach. As they all sat silent (so the story goes) every member of that party of merrymakers--they had merrymade on coffee and lemonade only--distinctly heard that ghost call the name 'Joey, Joey!' A mo-ment later nothing was there. Of course one does not have to believe all that.
Now, at that moment, as was afterward ascer-tained, Joey was wandering about in the sagebrush on the opposite side of the continent, near Winne-mucca, in the State of Nevada. He had been taken to that town by some good persons distantly related to his dead father, and by them adopted and ten-derly cared for. But on that evening the poor child had strayed from home and was lost in the desert.
His after history is involved in obscurity and has gaps which conjecture alone can fill. It is known that he was found by a family of Piute Indians, who kept the little wretch with them for a time and then sold him--actually sold him for money to a woman on one of the east-bound trains, at a station a long way from Winnemucca. The woman professed to have made all manner of inquiries, but all in vain:
so, being childless and a widow, she adopted him herself. At this point of his career Jo seemed to be getting a long way from the condition of orphanage;the interposition of a multitude of parents between himself and that woeful state promised him a long immunity from its disadvantages.
Mrs. Darnell, his newest mother, lived in Cleve-land, Ohio. But her adopted son did not long remain with her. He was seen one afternoon by a police-man, new to that beat, deliberately toddling away from her house, and being questioned answered that he was 'a doin' home.' He must have travelled by rail, somehow, for three days later he was in the town of Whiteville, which, as you know, is a long way from Blackburg. His clothing was in pretty fair condition, but he was sinfully dirty. Unable to give any account of himself he was arrested as a vagrant and sentenced to imprisonment in the Infants' Shel-tering Home--where he was washed.
Jo ran away from the Infants' Sheltering Home at Whiteville--just took to the woods one day, and the Home knew him no more for ever.
We find him next, or rather get back to him, stand-ing forlorn in the cold autumn rain at a suburban street corner in Blackburg; and it seems right to explain now that the raindrops falling upon him there were really not dark and gummy; they only failed to make his face and hands less so. Jo was indeed fearfully and wonderfully besmirched, as by the hand of an artist. And the forlorn little tramp had no shoes; his feet were bare, red, and swollen, and when he walked he limped with both legs. As to clothing--ah, you would hardly have had the skill to name any single garment that he wore, or say by what magic he kept it upon him. That he was cold all over and all through did not admit of a doubt; he knew it himself. Anyone would have been cold there that evening; but, for that reason, no one else was there. How Jo came to be there himself, he could not for the flickering little life of him have told, even if gifted with a vocabulary exceeding a hundred words. From the way he stared about him one could have seen that he had not the faintest no-tion of where (nor why) he was.
Yet he was not altogether a fool in his day and generation; being cold and hungry, and still able to walk a little by bending his knees very much indeed and putting his feet down toes first, he decided to enter one of the houses which flanked the street at long intervals and looked so bright and warm. But when he attempted to act upon that very sensible de-cision a burly dog came browsing out and disputed his right. Inexpressibly frightened, and believing, no doubt (with some reason, too), that brutes with-out meant brutality within, he hobbled away from all the houses, and with grey, wet fields to right of him and grey, wet fields to left of him--with the rain half blinding him and the night coming in mist and darkness, held his way along the road that leads to Greenton. That is to say, the road leads those to Greenton who succeed in passing the Oak Hill Cemetery. A considerable number every year do not.
Jo did not.
They found him there the next morning, very wet, very cold, but no longer hungry. He had apparently entered the cemetery gate--hoping, perhaps, that it led to a house where there was no dog--and gone blundering about in the darkness, falling over many a grave, no doubt, until he had tired of it all and given up. The little body lay upon one side, with one soiled cheek upon one soiled hand, the other hand tucked away among the rags to make it warm, the other cheek washed clean and white at last, as for a kiss from one of God's great angels. It was ob-served--though nothing was thought of it at the time, the body being as yet unidentified--that the little fellow was lying upon the grave of Hetty Par-low. The grave, however, had not opened to re-ceive him. That is a circumstance which, without actual irreverence, one may wish had been ordered otherwise.
