Chapter X: “My Name Is Danny”

“Horace! Horace! What happened?” cried Judy as her brother’s head appeared above the surface of the water. “Who was that talking? Are you all right?”

“If you call being half drowned in a muddy pond all right, I guess I am,” he replied, answering her last question first. The others weren’t so easy to answer.

“I—I’m sorry,” she faltered, not knowing what else to say.

“You should be,” he spluttered. “When did you learn how to throw your voice?”

“I didn’t. That wasn’t—”

“Who was it then?” he interrupted.

“I don’t know. It sounded like a small boy.”

“A wood sprite, no doubt. Don’t think up any more fairy stories. Just get me the car blanket before I catch my death—”

Judy burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. When Horace was out on the bank draped in the car blanket he looked even funnier. But someone else was laughing, too! Judy whirled around just as a small figure let himself down from one of the trees.

“You!” she exclaimed, grabbing the “wood sprite” by the arm before he could elude her again. “It was you who called to my brother and made him fall. Who are you, anyway?”

“My name is Danny,” he replied in the same voice that had startled them from the tree.

Judy and Horace looked at each other as much as to say, “We might have known it.” What they really said was, “What are you doing here?”

“Watching the beavers,” he replied. “I always watch the beavers. I had to stop you from taking that lady stick. You’d bust up the whole dam.”

“That lady stick,” Horace said sternly, “is a leg off our table. I’d like to know where the beavers got it.”

“They dragged it here. They drag lots of stuff here and build their dam real solid. I’m not going to let anyone bust it up,” declared Danny.

“What are you, a watchman for the beavers?” asked Judy. “The people at the orphanage were worried about you. Have you been watching the beavers all night?”

“Sort of,” he replied, hanging his head.

His face was so dirty Judy could hardly tell what sort of complexion he had, but his eyes were blue. His hair, like her own, was full of the prickly stuff the evergreens shed. She looked from him to Horace wrapped in his blanket and trying to sound fierce as he scolded the boy. He kept his eyes to the ground most of the time, not answering Horace’s questions.

“It’s no use,” Judy told her brother. “We may as well take him home.”

“No,” the boy protested, “not to the orphanage. Home’s over there.” He waved a grubby hand in the direction of the boarded-up house. “We used to live there when my mother was alive, and my father said we’d go back and live there again. He p-promised.”

“Where is your father?” Judy asked gently. She had supposed both the boy’s parents were dead.

“I d-don’t know.” Danny gulped. “He went away and left me at the orphanage, but he said he’d come back. He promised me he’d come back before the summer was over so I have to be at the house waiting for him.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Horace told him. “You have to be at the orphanage waiting for him because that’s where he left you, and that’s where we’re taking you right now.”

Danny gave in at last. He was willing to ride back to the orphanage with Judy and Horace if they would promise not to touch the lady in the beaver dam. Horace hesitated.

“We may as well promise. Danny is right,” declared Judy. “It might break up the dam if we removed it, and what good is the table leg, anyway, without the table?”

At the orphans’ home, a square brick building that looked more like an institution than a home, Horace waited in the car while Judy went in with Danny.

“We found him at the beaver dam. He was there all night,” she explained to the worried matron. “He said he had to watch the beavers.”

“But we were there looking for him,” Meta Hanley protested. “I called the police, and they searched all around with flashlights. I can’t understand it, but thank you, anyway. You don’t know how you worried us,” she added, turning to Danny. “I called the FBI this morning.”

“But I wasn’t kidnapped,” the boy protested.

“I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t know what to think. I know you like to watch the beavers, but you never did anything like this before. I still can’t understand why you stayed out all night.”

“I had to,” Danny insisted.

“But why?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. I hope—the FBI, they’ll ask a lot of questions.”

“And you don’t want to answer them? Is that it, Danny?”

The matron’s voice was gentle. Her love for this boy, no matter what he did, was apparent.

“I’ll tell them everything is all right now. Just leave it to me,” Judy began. “If I see their car on the way here I’ll stop it and tell them—”

“Will you _know_ an FBI car?” the matron asked anxiously.

Judy smiled. “Yes, I’ll know it.”

She didn’t say that her husband might be one of the agents in it. Usually they worked in pairs and rode in an official car equipped with a two-way radio.

Looking back, as she left the orphanage, Judy could see a group of children who had stopped their play to watch her. She called out a brief greeting and hurried on. A strange feeling had taken possession of her. She felt she had cheated Peter out of an interesting assignment. Was that his official car pulling up to the side of the road? It was. He and another agent stepped out.

“Oh, Peter! I’ve gone and done it again,” she told him penitently. “We just brought Danny home.”

“That’s great!” he exclaimed. “Where was he all night?”

“At the beaver dam.”

Judy would have said more, but the other agent broke in with, “We’d better question him, anyway,” and Peter agreed.

“I hope he tells you more than he did us,” Judy called after them as they started up the walk toward the orphanage.

Afterwards she wondered why Peter hadn’t asked her about the lady table leg. Neither of the two agents had questioned Horace. It was probably just as well. He was in a hurry to get home and let her drive while he sat and shivered.

“Peter can have those beavers for all I care. One dip in their pond was enough for me,” he complained from within the folds of his blanket.

“It’s a funny thing,” Judy told him, “but the matron says the police helped her look for Danny at the beaver dam. I told Peter he was there all night, but maybe he wasn’t.”

“His answer, as I remember it, was ‘sort of,’” Horace reported.

“If that house weren’t all boarded up I’d think he stayed there. He says he used to live there, and Miss Hanley says she knew the man who lived there years ago. Could it be Danny’s father?” Judy wondered. “Could that be why she’s so fond of Danny?”

“Sounds reasonable,” Horace commented.

But, to Judy, it was more than reasonable, it was romantic. She looked forward to discussing it with Peter. He had a way with small boys. Perhaps Danny would confide in him. Judy wondered about Danny’s mother. Why had his father deserted Meta Hanley to marry her? And where was he now?

Judy was still puzzling over these questions when she and Horace arrived in Farringdon. She drove straight to the Bolton home on Grove Street. They had gone back to the beaver dam, she told her mother, and Horace had accidentally fallen in the pond. Nothing was said about the leg of the lady table.

After a hot lunch, with Mrs. Bolton hovering over both of them, Judy left for her home in Dry Brook Hollow, and Horace returned to the newspaper office.

“There’s a story there,” he insisted as they parted. “That boy wasn’t telling us everything he knew.”