"Good, Bettykin!" he said as he bent and raised me and the fierce woman to our feet. The others began to bustle and hustle the children, and men, brushing tears from faces that had begun to smile uncertainly, as if they had never smiled before. A big tear fell off Sam's own cheek as he roughed my hair with his chin under the edge of my perky little hat, and took the woman's baby from my arms, as well as her bag and bundle, to carry them to the car. He led the way, and we all trailed after him.
It was a strenuous hour that we spent getting them all settled in the emigrant-car the Commissioner and Judge Vandyne had ready to take them right on from the ship to Tennessee. In the midst of packing away boxes and bundles and seating and quieting babies and women, Sam told me in snatches the reason of it all. One of the great Belgian landowners had written to Judge Vandyne, who was his friend, to find some suitable place to colonize twenty of his peasant families in America. The letter had come at about the time my copy of the government's report on Sam's farming had reached him. He hadn't said anything to Sam about it, but had got hold of the Commissioner and secured options on four hundred acres back of Sam's farm in the wilderness of the Harpeth Valley. He had fixed it all up before he offered Sam the commission of settling and farming these people on shares for ten years. It was a little fortune poured into Sam's hands, but he didn't seem to think about that at all. His mind was entirely occupied by the hungry, big-eyed babies and their sadly smiling, clinging mothers. He had a whole bunch of ripe bananas, with other fruit and food in proportion, packed in the train for the long trip to Tennessee.
"Why didn't you write me all about it, Sam?" I asked as I patted a sleeping infant over my shoulder while the mother jolted a big-eyed twin of the same variety. Sam was undoing a strap from a large bundle for the fierce woman, whose eyes now followed him like those of a great, faithful dog--or my eyes.
"It was all settled less than a week ago, Bettykin, and I--I wanted to surprise you and Pete at 'The Emergence' first night. This ship wasn't due until to-morrow, and I was to have had a frolic. I asked the judge not to tell you. I wanted to break it to you myself. And I did with a brickbat, didn't I--at daylight to boot?"