The four Aldens went to the airport to meet Rory. Their grandfather and Mrs. McGregor went along, too. Everyone was excited, wondering what Rory would be like.
“There he is!” exclaimed Benny, waving. “He sees us!”
“My, he’s bigger than I thought he would be,” Mrs. McGregor said.
Rory proved to be a sturdy boy of about ten and also a great talker.
Henry drove, and Rory sat beside him. Rory said, “You’re a good driver, Henry. I’m too young to drive a car, but I drive the tractor on our farm.”
Benny leaned over the front seat. He said, “How can you drive if you are only ten?”
“It’s only at home I drive. Just in the fields. I can’t drive a car. I. can drive and pull the power-disc harrow and the seeder. But I can’t drive a plain car.”
Benny laughed. He said, “I should think a plain car would be easy for you.”
“Likely it would,” agreed Rory. “But I could not run it on the highway. I don’t know how to drive in traffic.”
The Aldens did not ask about Rory’s Canadian speech. It was the other way around. Almost the first thing Rory said was, “Benny, you talk funny. You say ‘about the house,’ and I say ‘aboot the hoose.’”
The Aldens laughed. It was true they and Rory said some words differently. But that just made it more interesting to have a Canadian friend.
“What else do you do on the farm?” asked Benny.
“I help Dad when he has to cut down a tree. After the tree has fallen, I chop off small branches. Then I work with Dad to get the stump out.”
“Why?” Benny asked.
“Well, we cut the tree down to make our garden bigger. The stump is in the way. We have a flower garden and a grand vegetable garden, too.”
Henry said, “That sounds like hard work.”
“Aye, it is,” replied Rory. “I mean yes,” he added. “My dad is Scottish, you know.”
“Like Mrs. McGregor,” said Jessie. “She used to call Violet a wee bit of a girl.”
“Here we are!” Benny said. “This is where we live, Rory. Everybody out!”
Grandfather said, “Have a good time, Rory. I’ll see you at dinner.”
Henry and Benny carried Rory’s things upstairs.
Benny said, “Want me to help you hang up your clothes?”
“Aye, that I do,” replied Rory. He sat down in a big rocking chair and began to rock. He looked around his new room.
“Nice wallpaper,” he said. “I like roses. And I like that red bedspread. That is a jolly big closet for one boy. And what’s the picture of the house and that pretty little girl?”
Benny laughed. “Rory, you’re interested in everything, aren’t you? Probably Grandfather can tell you the answers. I don’t know.”
“Really, I am interested in almost everything,” Rory said thoughtfully. He didn’t mind having Benny laugh. “I like to know about things,” he added.
“Yes, that’s what Mrs. McGregor said,” Benny replied. Benny took one of Rory’s jackets and hung it in the closet. He took a coat and put it in the closet, too.
“That closet looks funny to me,” Rory said. “I don’t understand it.”
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Henry, who was going down the hall.
“Well,” Rory said, “I thought that closet would be long and go way back. But it doesn’t. It’s almost square inside.”
Benny knocked on the back wall of the closet. It was a wooden wall, not a plastered one.
“I can tell you about that myself,” Benny said. “You see my room is next door. My closet backs up to yours. This wooden wall divides the space. Here, I’ll draw you a little map.”
“I see,” said Rory. “The R is for my room and the B is for your room.”
Benny said, “Come in my room and I’ll show you.”
The two boys ran into Benny’s room. Benny opened the closet door and pushed his clothes out of the way.
“See? It’s the same wall,” Benny said. He knocked on it.
Rory said, “Let me run back to my room. I’ll knock on my side.”
“OK,” Benny said. Soon he heard Rory knocking. But it wasn’t as loud as he had thought it would be. He knocked, and in a minute Rory was back.
“Benny, did you hear me?” he asked. “I could hear you knock, but it wasn’t very loud.”
“Too bad,” Benny said. “I was thinking we could signal to each other in the morning.”
Rory looked thoughtful. Then he asked, “Do you think we could make a telegraph between our rooms?”
“A telegraph?” Benny asked, and began to see that having Rory around was going to be fun. “You mean run heavy cord from one room to the other?”
“Well, the back walls of the closets are just wood. Maybe there’s a crack or a hole we could run a cord through,” Rory said.
“And we could hang something heavy that would knock against the wall,” Benny said. “Or even a bell.”
“That’s it,” Rory said. “If I pull the rope on my side, it would make a noise on your side.”
Benny got his flashlight and the two boys looked at the wooden wall from top to bottom. There was no hole or crack on Benny’s side.
The boys ran back to Rory’s closet. They found a small crack and a loose board, but no room to run any rope through.
“Do you suppose we could make a hole?” Rory asked. “Would Granda Alden mind?”
Benny laughed and said, “No, he won’t mind. But why do you say Granda Alden?”
“Well,” answered Rory, “we say Granda in the part of Canada I come from. It’s natural for me to say Granda, just as you say Grandfather.”
The two boys raced down to the cellar and raced back with a saw, a hammer, and other tools. They made so much noise that Henry came up to see what was going on.
“We’re going to rig a telegraph,” Benny explained. “But we will have to cut out a piece of the closet to get the rope through.”
“How will you work this, Ben?” Henry asked.
Benny said, “Well, this is how we think it will work. We will hang something like a piece of iron on each end of the rope. If I pull the rope on my side, there will be a knock on Rory’s side.”
Rory added, “It will be a telegraph because we will have signals. One knock means, ‘Are you awake?’ Then the answer can be two knocks for yes.”
“We don’t need a signal for no,” Benny said. “If there’s no answer, Rory is asleep.”
Henry laughed. He said, “I’ll ask Grandfather if he is willing to have you cut that hole. If I don’t come right back and let you know, you can go ahead.”
No one came to stop them. The boys succeeded in cutting a very rough round hole through the double wood. It was a bigger hole than they needed, big enough to poke a finger or almost a hand through.
Next, the boys hunted for a rope to run through the hole. They found two old iron hooks in the tool chest. Rory tied one to the end of a rope in his room. Benny did the same thing with the other in his room.
Before the boys knew it, several hours had passed.
“There!” said Rory. “There is a fine telegraph to use tomorrow morning.”
The boys called Mrs. McGregor to come up to see their new invention. She had heard the noise and was worried that Rory was doing some damage to the house.
She said, “Rory, I thought you were pounding this house down. You must remember this is not your house.” Then she admired the new telegraph with its loud bangs. But soon she said, “Benny, Rory has not seen the rest of the house yet, or the yard.”
So Benny and Rory walked all around the house and tried out the bicycles. Rory knew how to ride because at home he had to ride a bike to school.
Jeffrey and Sammy Beach, who lived next door to the Aldens, were gone for the summer. But Benny and Rory went up the ladder to see the tree house the Aldens had built with some help from their neighbors.
At dinner, Rory said, “Granda Alden, there seems to be a picture of this house in my room. It looks like a photograph.”
“That is just what it is, Rory,” replied Mr. Alden. “It is a photograph.”
“And there’s a family coming down the front walk,” continued Rory. “It looks like a father and mother and their little girl.”
“Just right again, my boy,” said Mr. Alden, smiling. “You seem to want to know everything.”
“That I do!” agreed Rory. “Do you know who the people are?”
“Yes, I do,” answered Mr. Alden. “That is the family who lived here before I bought the house. You see I lived on this same street, not far away. I didn’t know the people in this house very well. Their name was Shaw, and the child’s name was Stephanie. Mr. Shaw sold me this house, and they all went to France to live. I have never heard from them since. Maybe someone else has, but I haven’t. I paid them for the house, and that’s all there was to it.”
“Then the picture of the pretty little girl is Stephanie Shaw?” insisted Rory.
“That’s right,” said Mr. Alden again.
“But our house looks so funny,” Benny objected. “The front door and the porch are the same, though.”
Grandfather nodded. “That is because I had rooms added to the house to make it bigger. The work took a long time. It was nearly a year before the house was ready and I could move in.”
“Was there any trouble?” asked Rory. “I mean between you and the Shaw family?”
Grandfather thought a minute. Then he said, “No, not exactly trouble. I did think the Shaws could have written to me from France.”
“That is a little sad,” Jessie said.
“It was almost as if the Shaws had never lived here at all,” Mr. Alden said. “After a time everyone forgot that this had been the Shaw house once. It seemed as if it was always the Alden house.”
Mrs. McGregor brought the dessert in. “That’s right,” she said. “It’s been the Alden house for years now.”
“And yet,” Violet said, “little Stephanie called it home. I do wonder what happened to her.”
“I suppose it will always be a mystery,” Rory said.
“Maybe,” Benny added. “With us you never know.” |