Lizzie cheerfully went to Mary Beth and giggled as Mary Beth nuzzled her neck, murmuring, “Don’t you, Lizzie-Lizzie? Don’t you?”
A tall, large-boned girl with a badly cropped fuzz of red hair scowled at Miss Hunter. “You should have asked me to take care of her. I’m the oldest.”
Miss Hunter’s hands fluttered in distress. “I know you are, Aggie, but I thought—”
Frances interrupted, smiling at Aggie. “I’m sure you’re very capable, Aggie. A three-year-old takes even more watching than a two-year-old. Suppose we assign Nelly Babcock to you?”
“No!” A boy, who firmly held his baby sister’s hand, stepped forward. “I’m George, Nelly’s brother. No one takes care of her but me!”
“And me!” A younger boy, with the same pale hair and red cheeks as Nelly and George, squeezed close to the pair.
This must be Earl Babcock, Frances thought.
“A little girl takes special care—” Frances began, but George interrupted.
“When she does, you can help me.”
“Yes, I can,” Frances said. She put an arm around Aggie’s shoulders, surprised when the girl stiffened. “Aggie,” she said, “I hereby make you my official first assistant. I’ll need you to help me with all the little ones.”
“She can’t tell us what to do,” someone said.
“Of course not,” Frances said reassuringly. “She won’t even try. She’ll be helping me feed everyone during the day, make them comfortable at night, count noses at depot stops.… There’s a great deal Aggie and I will have to do together.”
Frances could feel Aggie relax, but the look the girl gave her was wary, as though she didn’t know whether to trust what she had heard.
“I was an orphan train rider,” Frances told the children. “When I was Aggie’s age I traveled to St. Joseph, Missouri, with my brothers, Mike, Danny, and Pete, and my sisters, Megan and Peg.”
George Babcock sucked in his breath and held his little sister so tightly that she squirmed to get free. His words were barely more than a whisper as he stared up at Frances and asked, “Did you stay together, miss? Were you all taken by the same family?”
Seeing the raw hope in George’s eyes, Frances desperately searched for the right answer. “No, we weren’t,” she said. “But we all found good people to love us. And we loved them in return.”
Her answer hadn’t been enough, she realized. Despair replaced the hope in George’s eyes, and he stepped back.
An insistent tug on Frances’s skirt nearly pulled her off balance. She looked down to see Adam Stowe and smiled at him.
But Adam didn’t smile back. His face was pale as he said, “My brother, Harry, and I have to stay together, miss. Our father said Harry was to take care of me. Doesn’t anybody ever take two children?”
Frances squatted so that she could be at Adam’s eye level. “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes they do.”
As Adam smiled, the color returned to his cheeks. Frances looked up at Harry, Adam’s older brother. “You have to understand that many of the people who take in the children from the orphan trains can’t afford to feed and clothe more than one child. Raising even one child is costly.”
Harry nodded bleakly, but Adam said, “It’s all right, Harry. She said sometimes people take two. We’ll look for those people. We’ll stick together.”
Frances slowly got to her feet. Her chest ached with the hurt of what she and her brothers and sisters had gone through and what these frightened children had in store for them. With all her heart she wished that Adam and Harry would be adopted together and that the Babcocks wouldn’t be separated, but she knew the chances of this wish’s coming true would be very slim.
Frances went from child to child, getting acquainted. She could see fear in some of their eyes, a despairing acceptance in others. Three boys, however, had the jaunty, quick-witted good humor that had always been Mike’s trademark, and she was drawn to them.
Small, wiry, redheaded Eddie Marsh—with a look of mischief on his face—grinned up at Frances. His arms rested on the shoulders of Marcus Melo and Samuel Meyer. “Me and my chums are all for this train ride to the West, miss,” he said. “We heard those trains can go fast as a galloping horse.”
“That they can,” Frances agreed.
“Do the horses and trains ever race?” Marcus asked. “If I had a horse, I know I could beat any train, anywhere, anytime!”
“Quit your braggin’!” Eddie said, and elbowed his friend in the ribs. “You never rode a horse.”