Whole book · 24 sections
There were three speckled bobwhite eggs.
by KAY LYTTLETON
THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
CLEVELAND AND NEW YORK
Falcon Books
are published by THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
2231 West 110th Street · Cleveland 2 · Ohio
W2
COPYRIGHT 1948 BY THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
“It does seem to me, kids,” said Kit in exasperation, “that when someone is trying to write, you might be a little quiet.”
The three at the end of the room paid no attention. Tommy was so absorbed in trying to see over Doris’ shoulder that he didn’t realize he was losing his balance. Perched on the back of the chair, he suddenly toppled over and landed squarely in Doris’ lap. With all the dignity of the eleven-year-old that he was, he picked himself up and resumed his perch.
“Cut it out, will you?” protested Doris. “You practically killed me.”
“Aw, I wasn’t doing anything.”
Jean was making plans for a party. The list of names lay before her, and she tapped her pencil on her nose thoughtfully as she eyed it.
“Now, listen, Jean,” Doris proposed. “I’ve got an idea. Why not roll up the living room rug and push the furniture back out of the way, so that we can play records and dance. We can ask all the kids who have records to bring a few with them. That way we won’t have to keep playing our same old records over and over. Don’t you think that would be fun?”
“OK. If we have plenty of cokes, potato chips, and pretzels on hand, we won’t need much else for refreshments, do you think? Or should we have hamburgers later, too?”
“We can get along without hamburgers, although those boys will eat all they can get their hands on,” replied Doris.
“How many do you have on your list?” asked Kit.
“Ten. With the four of us, that should be plenty for a party. I still wonder if it’s really wise to have one with Mother bringing Dad home.” The rest were silent. Kit, sitting at her mother’s desk beside the wide bay window, looked up and frowned at the falling snow that was obscuring the view of the Sound. A pearly grayness seemed to be settling around the big house as if it were being cut off from the rest of the world by a thick, soft curtain.
“Hope Dad’s feeling better by now,” Kit said suddenly, pushing her dark bangs back from her forehead restlessly. “They said they would be leaving the hospital the eighth. Wasn’t it the eighth, Jean?”
“Oh, they’ll be home in plenty of time,” Jean exclaimed. “Here we all sit, looking like small, black storm clouds when he’s better. Mother said positively in her last letter that he had improved wonderfully during the week.”
Doris stared at the long, low couch on one side of the open fireplace. It was over four weeks since her father had lain on it. Early the previous fall he had come home after two and a half years in the Army. During those years Mrs. Craig had managed to hold her family together although it hadn’t been easy with four children. When they had received word that Major Thomas Craig had been wounded in the Pacific, they had all been worried. Later, he was well enough to return to the States, and it was comforting to have him nearer home. Finally, the Army Hospital in Philadelphia had discharged him and he returned to his family at last.
Through the winter there had been a steady decline in his health until it was necessary for him to return to the Army Hospital for possible further treatment.
Somehow Doris could not help wondering whether the future would get any brighter. She rose quickly, shaking her head defiantly at the thought, as any thirteen-year-old girl would.
“Let’s not worry, kids. If we’re all blue when he comes, he’ll have a relapse.”
Then Jean spoke, anxiously, tenderly, her big dark eyes questioning Kit. “What about Mother?”
“We’re all worried about Mother, Jeannie. You’re not the only one,” Kit snapped. “But you can be aching with love inside, and still not go moping around with a long face like that!”
“Like what?” demanded Jean haughtily.
“Quit it, kids, don’t fight,” Tommy said, just as if he were the eldest instead of the youngest. “Gosh, you two argue much more than Doris and I do.”
“Well, I think,” said Doris firmly, “that we ought to remember Mom just as Jean says. She’s almost sick herself worrying over Dad, and there she is, away down in Philadelphia with nobody to share her troubles.”
Jean smiled rather forlornly. She had assumed most of the responsibility since they had been left alone. Rebecca, their cousin, had arrived only a few days before Mrs. Craig had left, and it had not been easy to assume a mother’s place suddenly and run the home.
“Everything seems to be coming at once,” she said. “The party and Kit’s minor masterpiece for Lincoln’s Birthday.”
“Class symposium on ‘Lincoln: The Man—The President—The Liberator’—” Kit ran it off proudly. “Little classics of three hundred words each. You should see Billie Warren’s, Jean. He’s been boiling it down for a week from two thousand words, and every day Barbie King asks him how he’s getting along. And you know how Billie talks. This morning he just glowered and told her, ‘It’s still just sap!’ What a character.”
“Kit, don’t,” laughed Jean in spite of herself. “If you get ink spots on Mother’s desk, you’ll have a nice mess on your hands.”
Kit moved the inkwell farther back as a small concession, and suggested once more that the rest of the family try to keep conversation down to a roar about their old party while she finished her symposium.
“You know,” Doris began with a far-off look in her eyes, “I think we’re awfully selfish, and I mean all of us, not just Kit—”
“That’s nice. I love company,” murmured Kit.
“Here’s Dad coming back home after five weeks’ absence, and we don’t know really whether he’s better or worse—”
“Doris, don’t even let yourself think that he’s anything but better,” pleaded Jean.
“But it’s perfectly true. He needs rest above everything else, so the doctor told Mother. And here we are planning a party for the day he gets home.”
“Dad always insists that we go ahead and not upset our plans. He says he feels better knowing we’re happy,” replied Jean.
Kit stared out of the window again, thinking. At fifteen she was far more energetic than Jean at seventeen. Her agile mind easily found its way in and out of difficulty. With her curly hair cut short, she seemed more like another boy in the family. She, more than the others, even Tommy, resembled their father in many ways, lighthearted, gay, carefree.
Secretly, Kit felt far more able to take the lead than did Jean, now that the family was facing a crisis.
“Anyway, I’ve called all the kids and Mother knows we’re going to have the party because I wrote her all about it. She wrote back that she didn’t mind a bit if Becky didn’t.”
“But did you ask Becky, Jean?”
“You ask her. She’d say yes to anything you asked, Doris.”
Doris thawed at once.
It seemed as if their elderly cousin had come down from her calm and well-ordered seclusion at Elmhurst, Connecticut, just when they needed her most. Usually she contented herself with sending the family useful and proper gifts on birthdays and at Christmas, but they seldom saw her.
She was forty-seven, plump, serene, and still good-looking, with her blonde hair just beginning to look a trifle silvery, and a fine network of wrinkles showing around the corners of her eyes and mouth.
“Land alive, Margaret Ann,” she had told Mrs. Craig happily the moment she set foot inside the wide entrance hall at Sandy Cove, “didn’t I know you needed me?” And she laughed. “I didn’t plan to descend on you so sudden, but it looked as if you needed someone, Tom down sick and you worn out taking care of him. Don’t you worry at all about my being put out. I’ll stay here with the children and take care of things till you get back home.”
And Mrs. Craig had agreed thankfully. After a three months’ siege with her husband through his nervous breakdown, she was glad indeed to welcome the strong assistance of Rebecca.
“Let’s put it up to her right now,” Kit exclaimed. “I’d just as soon ask her if Doris is afraid.”
Before the others could hold her back, she had slipped out of the living room and was racing up the stairs, two at a time, into the large sunny room at the south end of the house where one could look out over Long Island Sound. But at the door Kit stopped short. Over at the window stood Becky, energetically wiping her eyes with a generous-sized plain linen handkerchief, and the end of her nose was red from weeping.
“Come in, my dear, come right in,” she said hastily, as Kit backed away. “I’m glad you happened up. Come here to your old second cousin and comfort her. I feel as if all the waves in the Sound had washed over me.”
Kit hurried over, put her hand on Becky’s arm, and squeezed it reassuringly. “What’s the matter? Anything about Dad?” demanded Kit, swift to catch the connection between her cousin’s tears and words. “Did you get a letter?”
“No,” answered Rebecca, “your mother just telephoned me from Philadelphia. Your father is worse and the doctors think he would be better off at home. They will be home in three days. You know, Kit, they’d never do that if the doctors could do anything more.” There was a break in Rebecca’s voice. “I just wish I had him up home safe in the room he used to have when he was a boy. He had measles the same time I did when my mother was alive. That’s your Aunt Charlotte, Kit, she that was Charlotte Peabody from Boston. But I always seemed to take after the Craig side instead of the Peabody, they said, and Tom was just like my own brother. I wish I had him away from doctors and trained nurses and Army hospitals, and had old Doctor Gallup tending him instead. I’ve seen him march right up to Charon’s ferryboat and haul out somebody he didn’t think was through living.”
Kit stood with her hands clasped behind her head, looking down at the pines, their branches lightly crystalled with snow and ice. Somehow it didn’t seem as if God could let her father slip out of the world after He had allowed him to come home from the war. And just when they all needed him so much. During all the months of illness, the girls and Tommy had not grasped the seriousness of it. He only seemed weak and not himself. They knew he had not gone back to work in his office in New York after he left the Army, but they had taken these things lightly.
Perhaps only Jean had really gleaned the meaning of her mother’s anxious face, the steady daily visits of the nerve specialist, and, last of all, the decision to return to the Army Hospital in Philadelphia.
Kit closed her eyes and wrinkled her face as if with a twinge of sharp pain. “It’s going to be awful,” she said softly, “just awful for Mom.”
Rebecca squared her ample shoulders unconsciously, and lifted her double chin in challenge to the worry that the next few days might hold.
“It’s worse for you children and Tom. We women are given special strength to bear just such trials. We’ve got to be strong,” she said.
But the tears came slowly, miserably to Kit’s brown eyes. She pulled the curtains back, and looked out as the blue waters of the Sound were turning purple and violet in the gathering gloom of the late afternoon. The land looked desolate, and yet it was but a light snowfall. Down close to the water some gulls rose and swept in a big half circle toward the other side of the inlet. Bob Phelps, running along the sidewalk toward home, waved a big bunch of pussy willows at her.
“Spring’s coming, Kit,” he yelled. “Just found some and they’re ’most out!”
Kit waved back mechanically. Of course she must not break down and cry. Even Tommy wouldn’t, and she and Jean must be strong and brace up the two younger ones so they all could help their mother. Still the tears came. What was the use of spring if—
“Kit, aren’t you ever coming down?” called Jean from the foot of the stairs.
“Right now,” Kit answered. “You come too, please, Becky. We need you awfully. To tell us what to do next.”
“No, you don’t,” said Rebecca calmly. “You don’t need me anymore than the earth needs me to tell it this snow’s going away and the flowers will soon be blossoming. The first thing you must do is learn how to meet your father with a smile.”
The next three days were anxious ones. All plans for the party had been cancelled, and after school the girls and Tommy hung around Rebecca feeling that she alone could help them bear the suspense. Jean occasionally stole away to her mother’s room and looked around to be sure that everything was as she liked it best, and when she came out into the wide upper hall she usually met Kit and Doris stealing from their father’s room, their eyes red from crying.
Tommy hid himself in dark corners, rather like a small puppy trying to run away from his fears. Kit declared there wasn’t a dry pillow in the house.
“How about your own self?” Doris asked.
“I cry too, but not all the time. I said before that I don’t intend to mope around. We’ve got to keep a stiff upper lip if we don’t want to go to pieces. We must represent the beyondness in feminine efficiency.”
“What does that mean, Kit?” asked Tommy.
Kit gave Tommy a good-natured shove. “Means that we’ve got to keep calm no matter what happens.”
Jean said little. Ever since she could remember, her mother had said to her, “You know I rely on you most, dear. You give me reassurance when I need it most.”
It was a thought that always gave her fresh strength, to know how much her mother needed her. She was smaller than Kit, slender and with dark eyes, with a soft look about them.
“Jeannie, you’ve got such sympathetic, interested, mellow eyes.”
“Eyes can’t be mellow, Dorrie, try something else.”
“Well, they are mellow just the same—tender and nice, aren’t they, Tommy?”
And Tommy would always agree that they were. But they were full of trouble now, as Jean hurried around the house, following Rebecca’s direction. Rebecca really did herself proud as chief of operations. Mr. Craig’s rooms were immaculate and as clear of nonessentials as the deck of a battleship. Under her orders the girls worked hard, Tommy ran all the errands she demanded, while Lydia, the Hungarian maid who came in by the day, regarded her with silent, wide-eyed admiration.
“We’d never have managed without you, Rebecca,” Jean declared when the final day arrived, and they all gathered in the long living room, listening for the hum of the car up the drive. Doris and Tommy were curled up on the wide window seat. Kit paced back and forth restlessly, and Jean sat with her legs dangling over the arm of her father’s lounge chair before the open fireplace. She was watching the curling flames.
“Land, child, I don’t see what you want to burn open fires for when you run a good furnace,” Rebecca had demurred.
“I know it isn’t necessary,” Jean answered, getting up from the chair to poke at the fire already blazing steadily, “but it’s consoling to watch an open fire. Don’t you think so, Becky?”
Rebecca sat in the old-fashioned pine rocker, placidly knitting on a sweater she was making for Tommy.
“We must all hope for the best,” she said, beaming at the anxious faces. “Doris, for pity’s sake stop that silent drizzling. If your father were to walk in now, he’d certainly be discouraged to look at you. I feel just as badly as any of you.” She took off her glasses, that were always balanced halfway down her nose, and reminisced, “Land, didn’t I live with him for years after his mother died? That was your own grandmother, Doris Craig. I’ve still got her spinning wheel up home in the attic. But I always did say we made too much woe of the passing over of our dear ones. And for heaven’s sake, your father not gone yet. Smile, even if your hearts do ache, and cheer him up. Don’t meet him with tears and fears. Jean, run and tell Lydia to keep an eye on that beef tea while I’m here. It has to keep simmering. Kit, can’t you keep still for a minute, or does it ease your mind to keep pacing?”
So she encouraged and cheered them, and when the car came up the driveway to the porch steps with Mr. and Mrs. Craig, the four children did their best to look happy. Mr. Craig, wrapped well in the automobile robe, waved to them, his lean, handsome face showing an eagerness to be with them once more.
“Hello, my dears,” he called to them. “Becky, God bless you, give me a hand. I’m still rather shaky.”
They were all trying to kiss him at once, and Tommy held one of his thin white hands in his strong ones. It did not require the look in their mother’s eyes to warn them about being careful. Slender and tall, she stood behind him smiling at them all.
“Why, he doesn’t look nearly so bad as I expected,” Rebecca told her, kissing her in a motherly way. Somehow it seemed quite natural for all to pet and comfort Mom. It had been the same when their father had been in the service; now, more than ever, when the past three months had shown them the possibilities of trouble and sorrow.
“You mustn’t tire him, girls,” she told them. “Tommy, help your father upstairs.” He and Becky between them helped Mr. Craig go up, one step at a time, then a rest before the next. “He must have a chance to recover from the trip.”
“Land,” Rebecca called back, “I’m so relieved that you didn’t have to bring him back on a stretcher I can hardly catch my breath.”
“I’m hopeful since he stood the trip so well,” answered Mrs. Craig. She leaned her head against the back of the big, cushioned chair. Jean slipped off her coat and Doris took her gloves. Tommy came downstairs and put a fresh log on the fire and Kit hurried out to the kitchen after a cup of tea. They all hovered over her, each eager to make her comfortable. Then suddenly, unable to hold back any longer, she burst into tears. Jean rushed to her side and pulled her close into her arms.
“Mother darling,” she begged. “Don’t, don’t cry so. Why, you’re home, and we’re all going to look after him, and help you as much as we can.”
Doris raced out of the room and up the stairs after Rebecca, and presently she came bustling downstairs, flushed and efficient.
“Why, Margaret Ann,” she cried, smoothing back her hair just as if she had been one of the children. “Don’t give way just when your strength is needed most.”
“Please call me Margie,” protested Mrs. Craig, smiling a little. “It sounds so formal for you to call me Margaret Ann. It always makes me feel like squaring my shoulders, Becky.”
“So you should, child,” Rebecca declared cheerily. “Margie’s so sort of gay to my way of thinking and there’s stability to Margaret Ann. Lord knows, you’re going to need a lot of stability before you find the way out of this.”
“I know I am.” As she spoke she held her family close to her, Doris and Tommy kneeling beside her and Jean and Kit on each side. She leaned back and smiled at them.
“That’s better,” Becky said. “Now you children let her go up to her room. I have to tend my broth and see how Tom’s coming along. Looks to me like rest and quiet will carry him through if anything will.”
“Becky!” There was a note of panic in their Mother’s voice. Nobody but the same unemotional Becky knew how she longed to put her head right down on that ample bosom and have a good old-fashioned cry. “Becky, the doctors at the hospital say he’ll never be any better.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” exclaimed Becky indignantly, with a toss of her head. “Lots they know about it. I never take any stock in those doctors at all, Margie. Give me castor oil, some quinine and calomel, and maybe a little arnica salve for emergencies, and I’ll undertake to help anybody hang on to themselves a little bit longer. They can keep their penicillin and sulfa powder and other fancy drugs.”
“But things seem so near a crisis now.”
“Let them.” Rebecca stood with her hands on her hips, as if she were hurling defiance at somebody, and the family fairly hung on her words. “Buck up, Margie Craig. As for you, Jean and Kit and Doris and Tommy, if I find any of you looking doleful, I declare I’ll stick clothespins on your noses and fasten a smile to your lips with adhesive tape.”
Even without this advice the children were determined to look cheerful and to keep their father carefree and happy.
Saturday came and went without the party. Once, and sometimes twice a day the doctor’s car turned into the broad pebbled driveway and the children went around with subdued voices and anxious faces. Even Lydia, down in her kitchen domain, looked foreboding, and told Rebecca that she had dreamed three times of three blackbirds perching on the chimneys, which was a sure sign of death, anyone could tell you, in her own country.
“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” Becky laughed back. “If I were you, Lydia, I’d take something for my liver and go to bed a little earlier at night.”
All the same, her own face looked worried when she entered the sick room and looked down at Mr. Craig’s face on the pillows.
“It seems ridiculous for me to be lying here, Becky,” he would say to her, with the whimsical boyish smile she loved. “Why, there isn’t anything the matter with me only I’m tired out. Machinery’s out of whack is all.”
“No, nothing special only that you can’t eat or walk or sit up without keeling over.” Her keen hazel eyes were amused as she looked at him. “You know, Tom Craig, if it wasn’t for Margie, the girls, and Tommy, I’d take you straight home with me.”
He looked from her to the window. Jean had just brought in a bunch of daffodils in a slender glass vase and had set them in the sunlight.
“You’re not going soon, are you, Becky?”
Rebecca seated herself in the chair beside his bed. As she would have put it, there was a time for all things, and this seemed an opportune one for her to get something off her mind.
“I’ll have to pretty soon. It looks like an early spring, Tom, and there’s a heap of work waiting for me up there. Of course Matt knows how things go as well as I do, but I’ve been away over a month now, and I like to have the oversight of things. Men are only boys, after all, and you can’t expect too much from them. I want to get the barn shingled, and some more hen runs set out before the chicks begin to hatch, and all my berry patches need clearing out. You know that mass of blackberries along the stone wall in the clover patch below the lane—what’s the matter, Tom?” She glanced at him in alarm.
He had closed his eyes as if in pain, and his hand closed suddenly over her own as it lay on the blanket.
“It makes me homesick to hear you talk, Becky.”
Their glances met in a long look of sympathetic remembrance of the old days at Maple Grove.
“If it were not for the children,” he went on slowly. “They are all at an age now when they need the advantages of being near the city.”
“Well, I’m not so sure of that,” answered Becky dubiously. “I suppose you feel that you can do more for them down here, Tom, and it is a beautiful place to live, but you did pretty well yourself up at the old Green District, didn’t you?”
He smiled and nodded his head.
“I wonder what Margie would say to the Green District schoolhouse?” he asked. A vision of it arose out of the memories of the past, the little red schoolhouse that stood at the crossroads, with rocky pastures rising high behind it, and the long white dusty road curving before it. He had been just a country boy, born and bred within a few miles of Maple Grove at the old Craig homestead. He knew every cow path through the woods around Elmhurst, every big chestnut and hickory tree for five miles around, every fork and bend in the course of the wild little river that cut through the valley meadows. Somehow, in these days of weakness and fear that he was losing his grip on life, there had grown a great yearning to be home again, to find himself back in the shelter of the protecting hills. They had always been the hills of rest to him as a boy. He had often turned his thoughts to them longingly while he sloshed through jungles in the Pacific, but now they beckoned to him even more urgently to come back to peace and health.
“She isn’t country-bred, is she, Tom?”
The question called him to reality from his dreams. “No,” he answered gently, “no, Margie’s from California. I believe her people went out originally from New York State, but she herself was born in San Diego. Later, she lived on her father’s ranch for a while in the Coronado Valley, but she was educated in the city. She doesn’t know anything about farm life as we do.”
Rebecca looked nonplussed. California might just as well be Borneo, so far as her knowledge of it was concerned. It did seem rather too bad that Margie had come from such far-off stock, but still, she thought, a great deal could be excused in her on account of it, since it wasn’t given to everybody to be born in New England.
“Would she mind it just for a summer, do you suppose?”
“It would have to be for a longer time than one summer, Becky.”
Something in his voice made her suspicious. Mrs. Craig had walked out to meet the girls on their way home from the movies. A lone adventurous fly crept up the window curtain and Rebecca promptly slapped him with a ready hand.
“Pesky thing, doesn’t it know it’s not time for them to start pestering us,” she said. “What did you say, Tom?”
“I said that it would have to be for a longer time than just one summer. Things have not gone well with me for the past year. I haven’t got the guts to break the news to Margie now.”
“You should have,” said Becky promptly. “It isn’t fair to her not to share your sorrows with her as well as your joys.”
“Margie had enough to worry about in the years I was away when she was managing alone to keep the family together. I don’t want to have her worrying about money now.”
“Just like a man. So now you’ve backed yourself up against a stone wall and can’t see a way out. Can I help you? How much money do you need to tide you over?”
He laughed unsteadily.
“Dear old Becky. You’d give anyone your left ear if they needed it, wouldn’t you? You don’t understand how we live. It takes nearly every cent I get from the government to cover our current expenses. We’ve already made a large hole in our savings in order to get medicine and things. I’m wondering what we are going to do, and I dread even mentioning it to Margie.”
“Then let me do it,” said Miss Craig promptly. “I’d love to. Better yet, talk it over with the whole family if you’re strong enough. How long can you hold out here?”
“I’m not certain.” He looked weary and harassed. “We only rent the place and the lease is up the first of May.”
“I’ll wager you can rent a good farm up home for what you pay here, Tom—house, barns, pasture, hay fields, wood lots and all,” said Rebecca thoughtfully. “It’s a nice place here, but the cost of living is so high.” She looked out at the clean park-like territory around the large modern house. Winding drives swept in and out. Each residence stood in its own spacious grounds. There was an artificial pond where the children skated in winter, and the country club crowned the hill with a golf course sloping away to the shore on the north.
Down in the ravine stood the gray stone railroad station matching the real estate office over the way, and farther along were the village stores, the new high school of brick and concrete, and the two churches. Back and forth along the smooth highway slipped a never-ending line of cars and trucks coming and going like ants over an ant hill.
Becky turned her head toward the bed once more and asked, “Would you rather stay here than go up home with me?”
“It isn’t what I’d rather do. It’s what we may have to do unless I gain my old strength.”
“You’ll never get a bit better lying there worrying over unpaid bills and new ones stacking up. I’m going to talk to Margie.”
He shook his head with a little smile of doubt.
“But it would never be fair to take them away from this sort of thing, Becky. You don’t understand. Their friends are all here. And Jean has been taking up a course in applied design and ceramics, and Doris has her music. Kit’s deep in schoolwork and belongs to about five clubs outside of that. Even Tommy has a swimming class keeping him busy after school two days a week. Margie’s on more committees and things than I can count, and she believes we owe it to the children to give them the best social environment that we can. Perhaps we can get along in some way. There’s a little left at the bank.”
“How much?” demanded Rebecca uncompromisingly. “I mean, after you’ve paid up everything. I’ll bet there isn’t five thousand left.”
“Five thousand! I doubt much whether there is one thousand. Don’t tell Margie that. I still have a few securities I might sell and realize something on.”
“And you think that you’ve been a good husband to her. Land alive, what are men made of! Here she stands a chance of being left alone in the world with four children to bring up and you’ve never bothered her about your business. The sooner you get to it the better, I think.” Rebecca stood up and adjusted her glasses resolutely. She had seen what he could not, Margie coming leisurely up the walk, a loose cluster of pussy willows in her arms, and the girls following, all except Kit. “There they come now. I won’t say anything till you do, Tom.”
Just then Kit’s voice sounded at the door. Her short curls were rumpled and unbrushed, her eyes wide with excitement, as she hugged a heating pad to her face.
“I’ve heard almost every word you said,” she burst out. “I had an earache and stayed home this afternoon, and I’ve been asleep in there on the couch. Please don’t worry, Dad. I think it would be glorious for us all to go up into the country.”
She stopped as the front door banged and Tommy came crashing upstairs completely out of breath from a strenuous game of baseball.
“Well, child, keep your mouth shut till we know where we’re at,” warned Becky quickly. “Go back and lie down. Here they come.”
But Kit stood her ground, and Jean and Doris seemed to catch from her the fact that something was up as they came in behind their mother.
“It was a lovely walk,” said Mrs. Craig, removing her gloves as she sat down beside the bed and smiled at the patient. “We went past the Dunderdale place, Tom. It is simply lovely there. I never saw so many shrubs and trees and such beautiful landscaping. It made me think of the homes out in California. You’d enjoy the garden so this summer, and there is a screened-in porch across the back of the house. The garage is small, but it will do if we don’t get a new car this year.”
Right here Rebecca sniffed, a real, unmistakable sniff. She was a believer in quick action. If you had anything to do, the quicker you did it and got over it the better, she always said. So now she raised her head as they looked at her, and set them all back on their heels.
“You won’t get a new car this year, Margie, my dear, and you’re not going to move to any expensive house, either. I’m going to take the whole lot of you to Elmhurst, and see if Tom can’t get his health back up in that peaceful countryside.”
A queer silence hung over all of them in the room. Mrs. Craig looked down at the tired face lying back on the white pillows with a startled expression in her usually calm eyes. Instinctively both her hands reached for his and held them fast, while Jean laid her own two down on her mother’s shoulders as if she would have given her strength for this new problem.
“You mean for a little visit, don’t you, Becky?” she asked eagerly.
“No, I don’t, Jeannie. I mean for good and all, or at least until your father has time to get well, and that can’t be done in a few days.”
“But Doctor Martin says he’s gaining every day,” Mrs. Craig said. She waited for some reassuring answer, her eyes almost begging for one, but Rebecca held her ground.
“Tom, tell what the doctor said to us this morning. Not that I take much stock in him, but he may be on the right track.”
“Nothing special,” said Mr. Craig as he smiled back at them, “only it appears that I am to be laid up in dry dock for repairs for a long time, and the sinews of war won’t stand the vacation expenses if we stay where we are now.”
“I wouldn’t try to talk about it, dear, before the children,” began Mrs. Craig, quick to avoid anything that sounded like trouble or anxiety. “We must not worry. There will be some way out of it.”
“There is,” Becky went on serenely. “I say you’d better move right out of this kind of a place where expenses are high and you can’t afford anything at all. This is a real crisis, Margaret Ann.” She spoke with more decision as she saw Jean pat her mother comfortingly. “It has got to be met with common sense. When the breadwinner can’t work and there’s a houseful of youngsters to bring up and feed and clothe, it’s time to sit up and take notice, and count all of your resources.”
“How would it do for you to take Dad up home with you for a rest, Becky?” Jean suggested, stepping into the awkward breach as she always did. “Then we could let Lydia go and manage alone. And when he came back we’d have all the moving over, and it would be the prettiest time of the year along in late August.”
Mrs. Craig’s face brightened at the suggestion.
“Or we might even renew the lease here, Tom. The house is very pleasant after all, and we could get along with it if it were all done over this spring.”
Mr. Craig looked up at Rebecca’s face helplessly, and she answered the appeal.
“Now, look here,” she said with decision and finality. “You’d better get the idea of staying here right out of your head, Margie. Circumstances have made it entirely out of the question. If you’re the kind of woman I think you are, you’ll start making plans to move where it’s less expensive. I think your way lies over the hills to Elmhurst. You can pay all your bills here, sell off a lot of heavy furniture, and move up there this spring. For you can’t stay here. There’s hardly enough money to see you through as it is. I’m going to help you along a bit until you get your new start.”
“Not money enough!” said Mrs. Craig as though she could not believe it. “But we couldn’t think of going up there and all living with you, Becky.”
“You’re not going to,” answered Rebecca. “Thank the Lord, I live in a land where houses and food are comparatively cheap and there’s room for everybody. We don’t tack a brass doorplate on a rock pile like I saw there in New York, Margie, and call it a home at about ten dollars a minute to breathe. I’ve been telling Tom you’d better rent a farm near me, and settle down on it.”
“But Becky—” Mrs. Craig hesitated.
“Oh, Mom, do it, do it,” came in a quick outburst from Kit, standing back against the wall. “It would be swell for all of us and would do wonders for Dad!”
“We wouldn’t mind a bit. We’d love it, wouldn’t we, Tommy?” Doris squeezed Tommy’s hand to be sure he would answer in the affirmative. “We’d all help you.”
Tommy was silent, still too bewildered at the idea to express an opinion.
“I shouldn’t mind for myself, but we must think of the children—their schooling and what environment means to teen-agers. I suppose Jean could be left at school.”
“Thought she was all through school,” interrupted Rebecca.
“I am, only I’ve been taking lessons in town this winter in a special course, arts and crafts, you know, and next fall I was going into the regular classes at the National Academy of Design.”
“What for, dear?” Becky’s gray eyes twinkled behind her glasses. “Going to be an artist?”
“Not exactly pictures,” Jean answered with dignity. “Textile design.”
“Well, whatever it is, I guess it will hold over for a year while you go up to the country and learn to keep house. Kit here can go to high school. It’s seven miles away, but there’s a school bus that picks up those who live too far away to walk. It’s real handy.”
Kit’s eyes signaled to Jean, and Jean’s to Doris and Tommy. A fleeting vision of that “handy” trip to high school in the dead of winter appeared before them.
“What do you think of it, dear?” asked Mr. Craig, looking longingly up at the face of his wife. “It would be a great comfort and relief to me to get back to those old hills, but it doesn’t seem fair to you or the children. The sacrifice is too great. They do need the right kind of environment, as you say. Suppose we left Jean where she could keep up her studies, and perhaps put Kit into a private school. Then I might go up home with Becky, and you and the two younger ones could go out to California to Benita Ranch—”
But Mrs. Craig laid her fingers on his lips.
“You’re not going to banish us to Benita Ranch. If you think it is the best thing to do, Tom, we’ll all go with you. Wherever you go, I’m going.”
Doris laid her hand over Jean’s, and they stepped out softly. Their mother, they saw, needed to be alone with their father. They fled downstairs to the study back of the living room and were followed by Kit and Tommy who were already deep in an argument about the entire situation.
“I don’t think it’s right to move up there,” Doris said, judicially. “We may not like it at all, and there we’d be just the same, stuck in a rut, and maybe we never could get out of it, and we’d grow old and look just like Becky and talk like her and everything.”
“Take it easy, kid, be careful of what you say,” Kit said sharply. “Becky is odd in some ways but she influences a lot of people in her home town. And here too. I wish I had half her common sense.”
“I hate common sense,” Jean cried passionately. “I suppose it’s the only thing to do but did you see Mom’s face? It was utterly tragic. Dad’s been a country boy, and he’s going back home where he knows all about everything and loves it, but Mother’s so different.”
“I think Mom’s a darling, but she’s adaptable too, and she’ll go, you see if she doesn’t. And it won’t kill any of us. The really great mind should rise superior to its environment.”
“Let’s tell Kit that the first time she gripes about dishwashing,” Doris said. “I didn’t hear anything about Lydia going along, did you, Jean?”
“You’ll do your share all right, Kathleen, and when the gray dawn is breaking at that,” laughed Jean. “Farm life’s no snap and really, while I wouldn’t disagree with Dad and Becky about it, I think that those who have special gifts—”
“Meaning you?” asked Kit.
“Meaning me—should not waste their time doing what is not their forte. It takes away the work from those who can’t do the other things.”
Jean’s eyes twinkled and she smiled slightly, but Kit took her seriously and shook her head.
“You’re going to walk the straight and narrow path up at Elmhurst under Becky’s eagle eye just the same, Jean. It’s no use kicking. I don’t mind so much leaving this place, but we’ll miss the kids like crazy.”
“And the roller skating,” added Doris, who went to the neighborhood skating rink with a gang of boys and girls every Friday night. “I’m going to miss that. I wonder if there is a roller rink up there.”
“I see where Kit steps off the basketball team and learns how to run a lawn mower,” Kit remarked. “Also there will be no Wednesday evening dancing class, Doris, where you can polish your jitterbug steps.”
“I wish we could all move back to town and see if we couldn’t do something to earn money,” Jean said. “One of the girls in the art class found a job designing wallpaper the other day, and another one is making ceramics. When the fortunes of the Victorian family suddenly crashed, the humble but still genteel family usually took in paying guests, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but it went out of style ages ago, Jeannie,” Kit kicked off her shoes and stared at her blue angora socks. “We’ll not take in any boarders at all. I see myself waiting on table this summer at some hillside farm retreat for aged and respectable females. If we’ve got to work, let’s pitch in and help at home first.”
“And if it has to be, let’s not fuss and make things harder for Mom,” Doris put in.
“How about Dad?” Kit demanded. “Seems to me that he’s got the hardest part to bear. It’s bad enough lying there sick all the time, without feeling that you’re dragging the whole family after you and exiling them to Elmhurst.”
“It’s a riot, kids,” Jean said all at once, her eyes softening and her dimples showing again. “Just the minute any one of us takes Dad’s part, someone springs up and gives a yell for Mother, and vice versa. We won’t be lonesome up there so long as we have ourselves—you know we won’t—and if things are slow, then we’ll start something.”
“Will we? Oh, won’t we?” Kit cried. She got up, walked across the study, and put a stack of records on the phonograph. In a few seconds Begin the Beguine blared out and Kit did a few dance steps back to her seat.
“That’s better,” Jean said with a sigh of relief. “We’ve got to pull all together, and make the best of things. Dad’s sick, and Mother’s worried to death. Let’s promise ourselves to be as much help as possible and otherwise not get in the way.”
Becky departed for Elmhurst, Connecticut, the following Monday.
“I’d take you with me, Tom, if it were spring,” she said, “but the first of March we get some pretty bad spells of weather, and it’s uncertain for anybody in poor health. You stay here and cheer up and get stronger, and gradually break camp. If you need any help, let me know.”
It was harder breaking camp than any of them realized. They had lived six years at Sandy Cove, near Great Neck on Long Island. Before that time, there had been an apartment in New York on Columbia Heights. As Kit described it with her usual graphic touch, “Bird’s-eye Castle, eight stories up. Fine view of adjacent clouds. With field glasses on clear days, you could also see the tops of the Riverside busses.”
It had seemed almost like real country to the girls and Tommy when they had left the city behind them and moved to Sandy Cove. Tommy had the measles that year, and the doctor had ordered fresh air and an outdoor life for him, so the whole family had benefited, which was very thoughtful and considerate of Tommy, the rest said.
But now came the problem of weeding out what Rebecca would have called the essential things from the luxuries.
“Dear me, I had no idea we had so many of the pomps and vanities of this wicked world,” Jean said regretfully one day. There were eight rooms in the big home, all well-furnished. Living room, dining room and study, with Lydia’s domain at the back. Upstairs were four bedrooms. Sitting on the bed and the floor of Jean’s room, the three girls and Tommy were sorting out their belongings and piling up nonessentials to be thrown away.
“I can’t find anything more of mine that I’m willing to part with,” said Tommy flatly, stuffing a catcher’s mitt into a box already jammed full. “I’ll need that to practice with. What’s a luxury anyway?”
“Makes me think of Bob Phelps,” Doris remarked. “Last night when I went over to tell Mrs. Phelps that we couldn’t be in the Easter play, Bob was just having his supper, and he wanted more of the prune whip. His mother told him he mustn’t gorge on delicacies. So Bob asked what a delicacy was anyway, and he said some day he was going to have a whole meal made of delicacies. Isn’t that a scream?”
“Don’t throw away any pieces at all, kids,” Jean warned. “Becky says we’ll need them all for rag carpets.”
“You can buy rag rugs and carpets anywhere now,” said Doris.
“Yes, and oh, brother, at what prices too. We people who are going to live at Elmhurst will cut and sew our own, roll them in nice fat balls, and hand them over to Mr. Carpenter up at Denton, to be woven into the real thing at fifteen cents a yard. It’ll last for years, Becky says. When you get tired of it, you boil it up in some dye, and have a new effect.”
Kit regarded her elder sister in speechless delight.
“Jean Craig, you’re catching it!” she gasped. “You’re talking exactly like Becky.”
“What if I am. I don’t care,” answered Jean blithely, “it’s common sense. Save the pieces.”
“She who used to be most concerned about what she was going to wear to the next formal has suddenly changed her tune,” murmured Kit. “I marvel.”
She looked down at the garden, windswept and bare in the last chilly days of February. Yet there was a hint of spring in the air. An early robin was perched near the grape arbor they had all enjoyed so much, with its luscious grapes and ceiling of green leaves. Leading from it to the hedged garden at the back was a flagged walk.
The garage was of reddish fieldstone and, like the house, covered with ivy. A tall privet hedge enclosed the grounds. Memories of all the fun which they had enjoyed in the past six years passed through her mind. There had been picnics and dances, beach parties and tennis games. She hugged her knees, rocking back and forth anxiously.
“What’s eating you, Kit?” asked Jean, mildly. Jean was the first to have an emotional storm over the inevitable, but once it was over, she always settled down to make the best of things, while Kit was gloomy and raged inwardly for days.
“Wonder what we’ll really find to do there all the time. I don’t want to be a merry milkmaid, do you?”
“If it would help Dad and Mother, yes.”
“But definitely. You don’t have a monopoly on the desire to help, you know. We’d all walk from here to Elmhurst on our left ears if it would help Dad and Mother, but the fact that we’d do it wouldn’t make it any easier, would it?”
“Don’t be a dope, Kit,” said Tommy.
“Who’s a dope?” demanded Kit. “I’m just as ready to face this thing as anyone. If it were a small town up in the wilds, even, I wouldn’t mind, but it just isn’t anything but country.”
Jean pulled off the ribbon that tied her hair back and started pulling at a lock thoughtfully. “What’s Elmhurst then? Isn’t that a town?”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a village. Nearest town seven miles away, post office five. There used to be a post office there when the mail truck made the trip over, but they needed the building to keep the hearse in, so it’s gone.”
“You’re making that up, Kit,” put in Doris.
“I’m not,” protested Kit. “You can ask Becky. Nobody ever dies up there. They just fade away, and the hearse is seldom needed and was in the way. There are only nine houses in the village proper, one store, one church, and one school. Her house is a mile outside the village, so where will we be?”
“Is it on the map?” asked Tommy hopefully.
“Some maps. Township maps. This morning Mother and I were looking up how to get there. You’ve got your choice of two routes and each one’s worse than the other, and more of it.”
“Kit, you’re exaggerating.”
Kit ignored the remark, absorbed in her own forebodings.
“You can reach this spot by land or sea. Becky says that it takes five hours for anybody to get out of there once they’re in. You can take a boat to New London, ride up to Norwich on the train, transfer to a bus and rattle along for another hour, then hire a cab in East Elmhurst, and drive twenty minutes more up through the hills. Or you can take a Boston Express up to Willimantic, and hop on a side line from there. A train runs twice a day—”
“What road, Kit?” asked Doris. They leaned around her, fascinated at her sudden store of information.
“Any road you please. Central Vermont up to Plainfield, or Providence line over to South Elmhurst. There’s South Elmhurst and East Elmhurst and Elmhurst Green and Elmhurst Station. It really doesn’t seem to matter which way you go so long as it lands you at one of the Elmhursts. And Elmhurst Station is five miles from Elmhurst, Plainfield is seven miles, Boulderville is—”
“Oh, please, Kit, quit it,” Jean cried, both hands over her ears. “We’ll drive over anyway. Didn’t you know that Dad and I are going to take the car up first before the rest of you? We’re going to sell Mother’s car,” said Jean. “The Phelpses are going to buy it. Bob told me so.”
“Dad says it will pay nearly all moving expenses and keep us for months. What else could he do? Besides, we’ll still have one car, that’s enough. At least we won’t be completely marooned. He’d sell that one too only it’s an absolute necessity to have one. We’re going to have to buy a trailer, too, for hauling things. Anyway I want a horse to ride, don’t you, Kit?”
“Isn’t it queer,” Doris broke in, “when a father breaks down, it just seems as if a home caves in.”
“Well, it doesn’t do any such thing, Doris,” responded Kit stolidly. “It may seem to, but it doesn’t. Even if we are going to live five miles from nowhere with the eye of Rebecca forever resting upon us, there’ll be lots of fun ahead. What’s that about the world making a pathway to your door? I’m going to be famous some day and there’ll be a nice, well-worn path leading from New York up to Elmhurst, worn by the feet of faithful admirers.”
“It’s so nice having one genius in the family,” Jean answered, leaning her chin on one hand. “Now I don’t mind leaving the house behind, or the car, or anything like that. But it’s the people I like best that I can’t take up with me. Who will we know there, I wonder?”
“Human beings anyhow,” Doris stated. “We’ll make oodles of new friends. Besides, lots of the girls have promised to visit us. We’re not going to be lonesome.”
It had been suggested that Kit and Jean stay behind to finish their schooling. They could board at the Phelpses’ home next to Sandy Cove along the shore road, but both girls begged to go with the family.
“Why don’t you stay?” advised Doris. “You’ll escape all of the moving and settling and ploughing.”
“We don’t want to escape anything,” said Kit firmly. “It isn’t any fun being left behind with the charred remains.”
“Oh, Kit, don’t call them that, it’s gruesome.”
“I don’t care. I feel gruesome when I think of being left behind. How do you suppose we’d feel to walk past the Cove and not see any of the rest of you around?”
“It’s better than being cut right bang off in the middle of everything,” replied Doris, with one of her rare explosions. “But everything,” she repeated tragically. “I can’t finish a single thing and I know I’ll never pass, being switched off to gosh knows what sort of a school.”
“Let’s not grouch anyway,” reminded Jean. “Mom’s getting thinner every day. As long as it’s got to be, let’s be cheerful about it.”
“I do wish that Kit wouldn’t be so happy about things that make you just miserable,” grumbled Doris.
Kit danced away down the hallway crooning:
“You’re an old tease, Kit,” Jean admonished in her very best big-sister style. “Please keep away from that crate of dishes.”
It had been decided to send Mr. Craig up before the moving, so he could have a week or two of rest at Maple Grove, Rebecca’s home. The latter was diligently sending down descriptions of adjacent farms and all sorts of home possibilities, but none seemed to fit the bill. Either there was too much land or not enough, or it was too far from the village or not far enough, or too much room or not room enough.
“For gosh sake,” Kit said one night, after all the family had suggested various possible houses, “let’s all tent out and do summer light housekeeping. We’ll never find just what we want—never, Mom. Jean wants a rose garden. I want at least a tennis court, even if we have to remove the hay fields. Doris wants wisteria arbors and a very large vine-covered porch. Tommy wants a dog, four cats, a hive of bees, a calf, and a pony. You want a house facing south, far back from the road, barn not too near, dry cellar, porch, century-old elms for shade, modern kitchen, indoor plumbing, and option of purchase, not over sixty-five dollars a month.”
“What do you want, Dad?” asked Jean. It was one of her father’s good days, when he was able to sit up in his big lounge chair before the fire in the bedroom, and be one of the family circle with them.
“Peace and rest,” smiled Mr. Craig.
“Me too,” Kit agreed, kneeling beside his chair and rubbing her head up and down his arm. “Dad and I are going to seek glorious peace the livelong day under some shady chestnut tree.”
“Dad may, but you won’t, Kathleen,” Jean laughingly warned. “It’s going to be a family project and you’ll have to do your share.”
“Wish we were going to an island,” Doris said wistfully. “I’ve always felt as if I could do wonders with an island.”
“Anybody could. There’s some chance for imagination to work on an island, but what can you do with a farm in Elmhurst?” Kit looked pensive with her head on one side, eyes half closed in melancholy anticipation. “Darling, precious old Dad here doesn’t know a blessed thing about farming—”
“Now, Kit, go easy,” Mr. Craig chided. “After all, I was born and raised on a farm. I should have learned something about it, I expect.”
“We’ll all be scouring pots, Kathleen,” offered Jean. “It’s the Craigs’ destiny. You know, Dad, I thought all along that Lydia would go with us. I thought she’d feel hurt if we didn’t take her, after she’d been telling us all these fairy tales about her native land where she loved to milk twenty cows at three A. M. I thought she’d simply leap at the chance of rural delights, and now she isn’t going along with us at all. She says she won’t go anywhere unless there are streetcars, tall buildings, and movies. It’s going to be tough without her.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it’s going to be nearly as bad as we expect,” Mrs. Craig said happily, as she passed through the room with her favorite silver candlesticks in her hands. “We’re facing the summer, remember, and I can’t help thinking that Rebecca will be a regular bulwark of strength to all of us.”
By the second week in March word came from the family’s bulwark that she thought the weather was mild enough for Jean and Mr. Craig to attempt the trip. Accordingly, the first section of the caravan set out on its trip to the land of oblivion, as Kit called it.
“It does seem, Mom,” Jean said at the last minute, “as if Kit ought to go with Dad, and let me stay down here to help you close up things. Kit knows how to drive.”
“I’d rather have you with your father.” Mrs. Craig laid her hands tenderly on Jean’s slender shoulders. “If I can’t be with him, I’d rather have the little first mate. Remember how he used to call you that, when you were only Tommy’s size?”
“Well, I feel terribly grown up now, Mother. Seventeen is really the dividing line. You begin to think of everything in a more serious way, you know. When I look at Kit and Doris sometimes, it seems years and years since I felt the way they do, so sort of irresponsible.”
“Poor old grandma.” Mrs. Craig laughed as she kissed her.
Jean had to laugh too, seeing the comic side of her aged feeling, but it was true that she felt a new sense of responsibility when they left New York for Elmhurst. The Saturday following their departure, the first carload of household goods left Sandy Cove. It had been a difficult job, weeding out the necessities from the luxuries, as Kit expressed it. Many a semi-luxury was slipped in by the girls on the plea that Father might need it, or would miss it. Kit had managed to save all the furniture from the study on this excuse.
“Books and pictures are necessities,” she declared firmly, saving a still life done in water colors. “This, for instance, has always hung over the desk, hasn’t it? Could we separate them? I guess not. In it goes, Doris, and see that you handle it with care. There’s one thing that we can take up with us and nothing can get it away from us, either, that’s atmosphere. Even if we have to live in a well-shingled, airy barn, we can have atmosphere.”
“Don’t laugh, Tommy,” Doris admonished as he dove into a mass of pillows. “Kit doesn’t mean that sort of atmosphere. She means—”
“I mean living with a copper vase. Miss Carruthers, our teacher at the art class, told us a story the other day about a woman she knew who was married to a band leader and they had to travel continually, living only in hotel rooms. She had a copper vase that she took wherever they went. She said even one familiar object like that, in strange surroundings, was the difference between living and just existing. Just think of Dad’s face if we can blindfold him, lead him into a lovely sunny room up there, take off the bandage, and let him find himself right in his own study just as he had it down here!”
“And as long as he’s going to stay in bed or lie on a couch he’ll never know what the rest of the house is like,” added Doris.
“But he’s not going to stay in bed, we hope,” answered their mother, catching up Tommy for a quick kiss, and for once he didn’t protest. “That’s why we’re going up there, to get him out into the sunlight as soon as possible, so he’ll get quite well again.”
Kit passed down the stairs completely covered with the burden which she bore. “I’ve got all the drapes, tablecloths, slipcovers, and underneath this load is me,” she called. “We may have to turn the attic into a cosy corner before we get through. It’s all in the effect, isn’t it, Mom?”
“I’m sorry that Dad sold your car, that’s all,” Doris remarked. Doris was the farsighted one of the family. “Bruce Pearson says he knows we could have gotten fifteen hundred for it just as easy as not. His mother told him it was worth every penny of fifteen hundred, and Dad let it go for eight hundred just because he liked the Phelpses.”
“Doris, dear, eight hundred cash is worth more than fifteen hundred promised,” Mrs. Craig said, smiling over at her. “And the car is several years old. I’m glad with all my heart that Mr. Phelps bought it, because they’ve been wanting one very much, and the children will get so much pleasure out of it.”
The children looked down at her admiringly, almost gloatingly, as she sat back contentedly in the low slipper chair in the sunny window.
“Mother, you’re a regular darling, truly you are,” Kit exclaimed. “You’re so big and fine and sympathetic that you make us feel like two cents sometimes when we’ve been selfish. Why do you look so happy when everything’s going topsy-turvy?”
Mrs. Craig held up a letter that Tommy had just brought in from the mailbox.
“Rebecca writes that Father stood the trip well and has slept every night since they reached Maple Grove. Isn’t that worth all the automobiles in the world?”
The eight hundred dollars in cash had been a helpful addition to their bank account. During the past few weeks, the girls and Tommy had learned what it meant to consider money, something they had never given a thought to before. While they had never been rich, they never had wanted, and never a suggestion of retrenching on expenses until now. Once they understood the situation, however, they all seemed to enjoy helping to solve the family problem. For several days Tommy had appeared to have something on his mind. Finally, he came in smiling and opened his hand, disclosing a ten-dollar bill. Kit staggered over to fall into a chair.
“Tommy, you mustn’t give your poor old sister sudden shocks like that in these days,” she exclaimed. “Where did you find that?”
“I sold Jiggers to Bruce Pearson,” Tommy replied, his eyes shining like stars. “He’s been asking and asking for him ever since I got him, and now I’ve done it. There’s ten dollars I got all by myself to help Dad.”
Neither Kit nor Doris spoke, but they regarded the youngest member of the family with the deepest pride and affection. Jiggers was a cocker spaniel puppy, the special property of Tommy, and they knew just what it took to part with him. Mrs. Craig took the crisp green bill from Tommy’s hand, while the tears slowly gathered on her lashes.
“It’s perfectly splendid of you, dear,” she said.
Tommy beamed and put his hands into his pockets. The family noticed that he kept carefully avoiding the window for outside was where Jiggers’ little kennel had stood. There are some things the heart cannot quite bear.
Much debating was held over the piano. The children loved it and declared it could not be true economy to part with it. It was a baby grand that they had had ever since the Riverside apartment days in town. Doris said she wanted to continue her practicing even if she couldn’t take any more lessons.
“Listen, Mom,” Kit said finally, “you know what I told you about the copper vase. That precious old piano is a copper vase and we’ll starve our inmost souls if we try to live without it. Why, we’ve loved it and pounded it for years.”
So it was boxed and shipped to Elmhurst as a copper vase, together with many another disguised necessity.
“They’ve turned into arrant smugglers,” Mrs. Craig wrote her husband. “And I cannot blame them, because I catch myself doing the same thing, packing things I should not take, and making myself believe they are essential. I’m sure I don’t see where we are ever to put everything in a farmhouse.”
Rebecca brightened up and smiled when that portion of the letter was read aloud to her. She was sitting in a straight-backed, split-bottomed chair by the south window in the sitting room, sorting out morning-glory and nasturtium seeds and putting them into old baking powder cans.
“Guess Margie’ll buck up some when she sees the house we think she will like,” she said.
While some of the Long Island farms had begun to look faintly green by the end of March, not a blade or a leaf was unfurled anywhere around Elmhurst. There was a feeling of spring in the air with a promise of buds ready to open.
Jean put on her yellow topper, tied a scarf over her head and put on a pair of pigskin gloves. She was waiting for Matt to drive around from the garage with the car and Ella Lou, Becky’s big tan and white collie. Matt was Rebecca’s hired help, smooth-faced and lean, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty. He took care of three horses and two cows and worked the farm with outside help in busy seasons.
Ella Lou was a lovable dog who followed Becky wherever she went and since Jean’s arrival, she had taken to tagging her footsteps too. She knew every road in the township. Not a thing could be changed that Ella Lou did not take note of the fact the next time she passed by.
Today when Matt drove up with her, she was standing in the back seat with her muzzle hanging out of the window. She acted as wise and knowing as could be, turning her head around to look at Jean and barking just as if she was saying “We’re going after them at last, aren’t we?”
Becky stood at the screened pantry window, mixing pie crust. She leaned down and called some last advice as Jean got into the car and adjusted the rear view mirror.
“Park beside the express office, Jeannie. There’s usually plenty of room to park there. And have the girls and Tommy sit on the back seat ’cause them springs are kind of giving way, and your Mother’s nervous. And bring up a bulb for the hall light from the Mill Company Store. No, never mind,” just as Jean stepped on the starter, “’cause they don’t carry them, come to think of it. Goodbye. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding the way. Just keep on the main highway and you’ll get there.”
Jean laughed and waved her hand. It was the first time she had driven since she had come to Elmhurst and Becky was a little apprehensive about letting her go alone.
Maple Grove stood just at the crossroads, a white comfortable-looking house, one-and-a-half stories high, with a long low “ell” hitched on to the back, and a white woodshed leaning up against it for company.
Four great rock maples grew before its spacious lawn like a row of Titan sentinels. The Baltimore orioles and robins nested in them and contended with the chipmunks for squatter’s rights.
The house stood on a hill that faced the sunset. Down from the orchard sloped corn fields and rye fields. Below the winding white road was a deep ravine where a brook ran helter-skelter by hilly pastures until it slipped away into the cool shade of a quiet glen, sweet-scented with hemlock and spruce.
In the distance, hill after hill rose in mellowed beauty, each seeming to lean in sisterly fashion against the next taller one. The course of Little River could be traced down through the valley by its fringe of willows and alders. For perhaps fifteen miles it rambled, winding in and out around little islands, dodging old submerged trees that lifted skeleton arms in protest, spreading out above some old rock dam into a tiny lake, then dashing like some wild thing being chased through a mill run and out again into low, moist meadows, thick with flag and rushes.
At a point about a mile below the house stood the old Barlow lumber mill. Ella Lou barked at a dog as they passed by. Jean drove leisurely, knowing she had plenty of time. Once she put on the brakes suddenly when she saw a shadowy brown shape that skitted across the road in front of the car. She wondered whether it was a rabbit or a muskrat. Already she was catching the country spirit. Little objects of everyday life held a meaning for her and she found herself watching eagerly for new surprises as she drove along the old river road. How the kids would love it all, she thought, with a little tightening of her throat. It might be a little lonesome at first, but surely it was, as Becky said, a peaceful countryside.
The final decision on the new home site was to be left to her mother. Several places had been selected with a leaning toward Woodhow, but, as Becky suggested, Margie must be left unbiased to form her own opinion, although according to her way of thinking, no sensible person with half their wits could pass over the merits of Woodhow, or the wonderful opportunities it presented.
“It’s going to rack and ruin and it fairly cries out for somebody to take hold of it and get it in shape,” she had said. “I don’t know but what I’d drive by it if I were you, Jeannie, on your way back from the station, even if it is a little out of your way, just to see the look on your mother’s face when she sees it.”
It was a drive of seven miles down to Nantic, the nearest railroad station. Jean made it in good time and parked beside the express office, as Becky had suggested. Already, it appeared, Mr. Briggs, the station master, knew Jean, and smiled over at the trim, city-like figure pacing up and down on the platform waiting for the Willimantic train. This was the side line up to Providence that connected with the Boston express from New York.
“Expecting some of your family up?” asked Mr. Briggs pleasantly. Nobody could say that friendly interest in strangers and their affairs was not evinced around Nantic. It was part of the joy of life to Mr. Briggs to locate their general intentions.
“My mother and sisters and brother,” Jean answered happily.
“Figure on staying awhile, do they?”
She nodded rather proudly. “We’re going to live here. We’re Miss Craig’s cousins. You’ll have the freight car up with our goods this week.”
“Like enough,” said Mr. Briggs encouragingly. “Yes, I knew you belonged to Becky. I’ve known Becky herself since she was knee-high to a toadstool. There comes your local.”
Around the hillside bend of track came the train, the wonderful train that was bringing Mother and Doris and Kit and Tommy up out of the world of uncertainty and trouble into this haven of blossoming hopes. It seemed to Jean as if seconds turned to minutes. She wanted to stretch out both her arms to it as it slowed down and puffed, but there on the last car she caught a glimpse of Kit, one foot all ready to hop off, waving one hand and hanging on with the other.
“Oh, Mom darling,” Jean cried joyously, once she had them all safe on the platform. “It’s so beautiful up here, and Dad’s looking better every day. He sits up for a while now, and the old doctor told us the only thing that ailed him was a little distemper. Isn’t that a riot? Where are your trunks?”
But this was Mr. Brigg’s cue to come forward, hat in hand, and be introduced, so he took the baggage under his own personal supervision. It appeared that you never could tell anything about when trunks were liable to show up once they got started for Nantic, but, barring accidents, they’d come up on the six o’clock train, and there wasn’t a bit of use putting any reliance on that either, ’cause they might not show up till the milk train next morning.
“Hope you’ll like it up here,” was his parting remark, as they drove up the hill road, and Kit called back that they liked it already, much to Mr. Brigg’s delight.
Mrs. Craig sat on the front seat, both as the place of honor and in remembrance of Rebecca’s warning against the back springs. At the top of the hill Jean stopped the car, so they could look back at the little town. There was the huge one-story stone mill, covering acres of ground, with immense ventilators looking like those on steamships or like strange uprearing heads of prehistoric reptiles.
The little crooked main street could be traced by its lines of buildings, and back in a mass of trees stood the old French convent. Scattered everywhere were the houses of the mill workers, all of a uniform pattern, painted white with green blinds, and a patch of green yard to each.
Jean, flushed and proud of her responsibility, turned to pat Ella Lou’s head, then started the car and headed for home. The maple buds were swelling and looked rosy red against the thickets of dark shiny green laurel. Behind them rose slim lines of white birches.
“How far is it, Jeannie?” asked Doris. Just then the road came out on another hilltop overlooking the big reservoir. “Oh, look, look, kids,” she cried. “Isn’t it like a bit of out West, Mom? All those rocks and pines.”
“I’d rather have these gorgeous hills than all the mountains going,” Kit declared with her usual forcefulness. “We seem to be going up higher and higher all the time.”
“So we are,” Jean told her. “It’s a steady rise from New London to Norwich, then up to our own Quinnebaug hills. Are you warm enough, Mom?”
“Plenty,” said Mrs. Craig happily. “Though it is ever so much cooler here than on Long Island, isn’t it?”
“We’ve got an open log fire in your room all ready for you,” Jean replied. “You can just sit and toast away to your heart’s content.”
“For gosh sake, who ever had the courage to carry all the rocks for these stone walls?” asked Kit.
“Those are the stones that were ploughed up when the land was cultivated,” answered Jean. “The land here is particularly stony, so instead of wooden fences, the farmers use the stones they uncover for marking off their boundaries. Our house will probably have them too.”
“Oh, how you talk, dear,” laughed Mrs. Craig. “When we haven’t even a home yet. You’d think there was a baronial estate waiting for us.”
“There is,” Jean answered mysteriously. “Becky and I think that we’ve found the right place. Dad hasn’t seen it, of course, but I found it, and Becky said we couldn’t get it because somebody’d died, and it had gone to people out West.”
“Which gave our precious old Jean a chance to delve into mystery,” Kit suggested. “Yes, yes, go on, kid. You’re killing us with suspense. What did you find out?”
“Oh, I found him,” said Jean, enthusiastically. “He lives away out West in Saskatoon, and has never even seen this place, so he’s willing to sell it for almost nothing, $4,000, and even that includes the water power.”
Kit shook her head deploringly.
“Listen to the poor child, Mom. She chats of thousands as if they were split peas and she was making soup.”
“Shut up, Kit. He’ll rent it for sixty-five dollars a month, timber rights reserved excepting for our own use, and we can sell the hay.”
“How many rooms, dear?” asked Mrs. Craig.
“Seven,” replied Jean. “They call it Woodhow and I think it’s a beautiful name.”
“Where is it?” Doris inquired cautiously.
“When can we move in?” Tommy asked practically.
“Well, you can see the roof, I think, as soon as we get up to the top of Peck’s Hill. I’ll stop then. It’s fearfully lonesome, and maybe you’d rather be in the village. Becky says that some people do say—”
“Make her shut up,” Kit exclaimed. “Jean, you’re talking exactly like Becky. Isn’t she, Mother?”
“Never mind, dear. Go right on,” comforted Mrs. Craig, smiling at the eager young face beside her. Three weeks at Maple Grove had surely taken a lot of the spread out of Jean’s sails.
“I don’t think we’d be one bit lonely. It’s about a mile from Maple Grove, and half a mile from Mr. Peck’s place down the valley, and the mail goes right by the door. And there’s an old ruined stone mill on an island, and a waterfall, and a bridge, and big pines along the terrace in the front yard. It does need painting, I suppose, and shingling in spots, and the porch lops a little bit where it needs shoring up, Matt told me—” Jean stopped for breath.
“Specify Matt,” Doris asked mildly. “We don’t know a thing about Matt, Jeannie.”
“He’s the hired man, and he can do anything.”
“But, dear,” interrupted Mrs. Craig, “can’t you realize that there must be something wrong with it or it never would be rented for such a sum.”
“Oh, there is,” Jean replied promptly. “It’s too far from the railroad or village, and the mill burned down six years ago, and the owner died from the shock of losing everything he had, and there it stands, going to rack and ruin, Becky says, waiting for the Craigs to appear and turn it into a home.”
“How about school?” asked Kit suddenly.
Jean waved her hand grandly.
“Who wants a school out here? But if you’re so set on one, there’s a school over at the Gayhead crossroads. There’s a school bus that picks the kids up and takes them home again at night.”
“Jean has us all moved and settled already,” Mrs. Craig said. “I’m sure I’d like to be near where Rebecca lives.”
“Well, there it is,” Jean exclaimed happily. Ella Lou pricked up her ears and started to whine excitedly. Down one little hill, up another, over a culvert, and suddenly there appeared white chimneys rising above an apple orchard at the top of the hill.
“There it is,” she said, pointing to it with her hand. “Seven miles from nowhere, but right next door to heaven.”
The following morning Miss Craig said she thought she would drive down to Woodhow with Margaret Ann herself, and they’d look it over.
“If you children feel like coming down, why don’t you walk over. You can take the short cut through the woods. It’s not far. Like enough you’ll find some bloodroot out by now and saxifrage too. Don’t be like Jean, though. The other day she came up from the brook and said she’d found a calla lily, and it was just skunk cabbage.”
So the girls and Tommy took the short cut through the woods. They were just beginning to show signs of spring. The trees were bare, but under the dry leaves they found the new life springing. It was all new and interesting to them. Down at the Cove they had been in a beautiful part of Long Island but it was all restricted property. Here the woods and meadows spread for miles in every direction. Every pasture bar seemed to invite one to climb over it and explore. And where the woods ended in rocky pastures and wide spreading fields, they came out to a spot where they overlooked Woodhow and its grounds.
Becky and Mrs. Craig were there before them. The side door stood hospitably open and Ella Lou was lying on the front porch just as though she belonged there. It was a curiously interesting old place. First of all, a rock wall enclosed the grounds, with rock columns at the two entrance gates. These were wide, for the drive entered on one side, wound around the house, and came out on the other road, as the house stood at a corner.
The house itself looked like a glorified farmhouse, although it was hard to place it in the history of architecture.
“I think perhaps it started out to be Mid-Victorian with that general squareness and the porch,” said Mrs. Craig.
“That isn’t Mid-Victorian, Mother darling,” Jean interposed. “That’s the Reaction Period in New England. First of all none of the Puritan Women had any time to sit out on porches, so all the houses were made plain-faced. Then after the war they began to turn their minds to lighter things, so they stuck a cupola up here, and tacked on a little porch there, and gave the windows fancy eyebrows, and little scalloped wooden lace ruffles along the edges of the eaves. Isn’t that so, Becky?”
“Well, I declare, Jeannie,” laughed Becky, “maybe you’re right. I’d say, though, it was mostly a hankering after modernization. I don’t set much store by it myself, so long as I’ve got plenty of flowering shrubs around a house, and climbing vines. That makes me think, you’ve got a sight of them here, flowering quince and almond, and peonies, and all sorts of hardy annuals. There used to be a big border of them, I remember, at the back of the house, and behind it was an old-fashioned rose garden.”
“A rose garden!” Kit and Doris gasped.
“Let’s go and see if we can find it,” cried Jean.
Back they went to find it, and after hunting diligently through hazel bushes and upspringing weeds, they found one terrace that dipped into a sunken space once walled in. Now the tumbled gray rocks had half fallen down, and some were sunken in the earth. But still they found some old rose bushes, and several of the large bushes looked hopeful. There was a flagged walk with myrtle growing up between the stones, and a tumble-down arbor that Tommy declared looked exactly like a shipwrecked pilothouse off some boat.
Doris, sitting down on the broad front steps, was listening to the music of falling water in the distance and the wind overhead in the great, slumberous pines. There were four of these, two on each side of the long terrace, with rock maples down near the rock wall and several pear and cherry trees. Along the terrace were flower beds, three on each one, outlined with clam shells.
“Miss Trowbridge used to have gladiolus set out in those beds, with pansies and sweet alyssum set around the edges, and outside again, old-hen-and-her-chickens. They looked real pretty.”
“Who was Miss Trowbridge, Becky?” asked Mrs. Craig. She sat beside Jean, her hands clasped lightly in her lap, her hat lying beside her. There was a look of content on her face, a look that had been a stranger there for many months. Tommy tossed a spray of half-blossomed cherry twigs in her lap and ran away again.
“She was sister to the Trowbridge that owned the mills. She married some man out in Canada, lived awhile out there, then gave up and died. She never did have much backbone that I could see, but she loved flowers. Did you notice a big glass bay window off the dining room? She called that her conservatory. I remember asking her once if it was her ‘conversationary,’ and how she did laugh at me! Well, every one can’t be expected to know everything. It’s all I can do to keep up with Elmhurst these days. Her name was Francelia and she married a McRae.”
“But who had the place after she and her brother died?”
Rebecca never believed in directness when it came to genealogies. She delighted in them, and would slip her glasses down to the middle of her long nose, elevate her chin, and go after a family tree like a government forester.
“Well, according to my way of thinking, it should belong to Sally Hancock and her brother Buzzy. His name’s Seth, but they call him Buzzy. Their mother was Luella Trowbridge, sister to Francelia and Tom who owned the mills, but she married Clint Hancock against everybody’s word, and her father cut her off in his will, and never saw her from the day she was married. Tom did the same, but Francelia used to go over and see her after Sally and Buzzy were born. They live down near Nantic. You must have passed the house, little bit of a gray one with rambler roses all over it, and a well sweep at one side. The property went to Francelia after Tom died, and she had one boy. He’s out in Northwest Canada now and don’t give a snap of his finger for this place, when there’s Sally and Buzzy loving it to death and can’t hardly walk on the grass. Still, I suppose if they went to law, they’d get nothing out of it after all the lawyers had been satisfied.”
Kit and Doris listened open-eyed.
“My goodness, Becky,” exclaimed Kit, “how on earth do you ever manage to keep track of all of them?”
“Keep track of them? Land, child, that ain’t anything after you’ve been to school with them and lived neighbors all your life. You children will like Sally and her brother, and maybe you can help put a little happiness into their lives, poor youngsters.”
“Oh, Mom, I love this place already,” whispered Jean contentedly, snuggling close to her mother’s side.
“Do you, dear?” Mrs. Craig smiled down into her eldest child’s face. For some reason she always waited for Jean’s judgment and opinion.
“Yes, I do, because it isn’t really a farm and still we can have a garden and sell the hay and get out wood and raise all we need for ourselves. I don’t think we can do much else the first year, can we, Becky?”
“If you do all that you’ll be getting along fine. I’m going to start you off chicken raising with a lot of little ones from my incubator. You can buy all you want for ten cents apiece, and if you get about fifteen last year pullets and a rooster, you’ve got your barnyard family all started.”
“Oh, I’d like to take care of the incubator chickens. May I, please?” begged Tommy instantly. “I think one of the saddest things in life is to be hatched without a mother.”
“Sympathetic Tommy,” laughed Kit, catching him down on the grass and rolling him over. “He’s going to adopt all the chickens and gosh knows what else.”
“I’m going to keep bees,” Doris announced dramatically, yet with a certain aloofness in her manner. “I want a garden and bees that bring me home the honey from the clover fields.”
“Lovely,” Jean exclaimed, hugging her knees, and rocking to and fro contentedly. “You always select such royal occupations, Doris. I shall be the middleman of the farm. I am going to find markets for all you raise. I’ll make the farm pay expenses. We’ll need a trailer to attach to the rear bumper of the car to hold the produce. I think we ought to go into the village soon and see about getting one. I want the place, don’t you Mother?”
“I think I shall love it,” said Mrs. Craig, lifting her face to the swaying pine boughs overhead. “I wish that I could stay here now and not have to go away at all.”
“We’d better get started,” said Becky. She rose from the porch step. “Ella Lou’s begun to get restless and that’s to let me know it’s almost noon. She can always tell the time when the sun gets high.”
“I feel sure Mom wants the place, don’t you, Jean?” Kit asked as they went up through the woods towards home. “All the time we were going through the house I could see every bit of our furniture in the right places there. And there’s so much room that Dad will hardly know the difference between this place and the old one at the Cove. He could have that room overlooking the valley on the second floor. You can see the big brown stone dam from there and the ruins of the mill, and hear the falling water. I wish we had time to climb out over the old dam to the mill.”
“It’s better than living right in a village,” Jean answered, pushing aside the young birches that crowded the way. “I rather dreaded that somehow. Everybody’d want to know all about us right off, and why we came up, and what ailed Dad, and everything else. I hope, though, Mother won’t be lonely here. You know, kids, it’s lonely for a woman like her, where Becky doesn’t mind it.”
“We’ll have to pitch in and make up to her for everything she’s left behind,” said Doris solemnly.
“Dear old Dorrie.” Kit put her arm around her sister and squeezed her affectionately.
“It’s all a question of system,” Jean thought aloud, her hands deep in the pockets of her gray flannel slacks. “We’ll have to make a business of living, and learn how to do things we hate to do with the least effort.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, you’re just a bluffer, Jean Craig,” exclaimed Doris suddenly, “just a bluffer. Anyone would think to hear you talk that you actually enjoyed going without things. Of course when we’re with Mother and Dad, or even Becky, we have to put on a whole lot, but when we’re alone I do think we might at least be sincere with ourselves. We all know how we feel at heart about this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?” asked Kit, on the offensive instantly. “What are you driving at?”
“Giving up everything we’ve been used to, and living out here in the woods. I’m going to miss the girls most of all.”
“Well, we don’t like losing everything any better than you do, Doris,” Jean said soothingly. “Only—”
“Don’t pat me,” retorted Doris, shaking off her hand. “I know I’m selfish, and I’m beginning to feel sorry I said anything. Only it does look so bleak and forlorn here somehow.”
“But if you have to do a thing, why, you just have to do it, that’s all,” Kit declared. “It’s better to make up your mind you’re going to like it, besides, I really think I am. Look at that cow ahead of us. It must have strayed.”
Through the birches ahead they could see some object obstructing the narrow path, its back towards them. Large as a cow it was, and reddish brown, but in place of short horns, this animal had spreading antlers, and Jean caught sight of its round puff of a tail.
“Hey, kids, it’s a deer!”
At her voice the deer started and pushed into the thick underbrush until it came to a stone wall. They watched it rise and clear it at a bound like a thoroughbred horse, its knees bent under, its head held high. Then it was gone.
“Well, isn’t that simply breathtaking, but I mean, simply divine? Wish we could tame some, don’t you?”
They all agreed.
Tommy ran along the path ahead of them. “I like this ever so much better than the Cove,” he called. “It’s all so wild and free.”
They paused at a spur of land that looked out over the long valley. Little River flowed in a winding course marked by alders and willows. Now that there was no foliage to obscure the view, they could catch a glimpse here and there of a red roof or a white chimney. There was the Smith mill, then the old white Murray homestead with its weather vane standing on a little hill like a big yardarm at large. Then came their own old ruined mill, half tumbling down, with empty window casings, all overgrown with woodbine and poison ivy. Farther up the valley one caught the hum of another mill, purring musically in a sort of crescendo scale ending in a snappy zip as the log broke.
As they neared Maple Grove, Jean exclaimed suddenly, “I just seem to have the feeling that we all belong here somehow! I know we’re going to love it.”
That very night a council was held of what Mr. Craig termed “the Board of Amateur Experts.”
“I think I need Matt in here for support,” he said laughingly from his favorite resting place, the old-fashioned, high-backed couch in the sitting room.
Maple Grove was a large, comfortable house. There was a front entrance, a side entrance and a well room at the back of the kitchen. There was a parlor and a front bedroom, a side bedroom and a big sunny sitting room that was dining room also, and finally the old kitchen with its Dutch oven and hooks in the ceiling for hanging up smoked beef and bacon sides.
Not that Becky ever used the Dutch oven nowadays except to store things away in. She had instead a fine modern electric stove over which she hovered like a sorceress from five A. M. to eleven A. M., producing such marvels of cookery that held the girls spellbound—raised doughnuts with jam inside and powdered sugar outside, apple turnovers made with Peck’s Pleasants and rich Baldwins, ginger cookies, large as saucers with scalloped edges, soft and rich as butterscotch, and pies, with rich, flaky crust and delectable filling in endless varieties. Jean declared that she had learned more about cooking in the few weeks she had lived at Maple Grove than in all her life before.
“Well, there’s cooking and cooking, girls,” Rebecca had replied placidly, fishing for brown doughnuts with her long, hand-wrought iron fork. “It’s one thing to cook when you’ve got everything to do with, and quite another when you are eternally figuring out how to make both ends meet. Of course, I don’t have to do that. Land knows there’s plenty to eat and more too, but it’s all plain food, and you’ve got to learn how to toss vegetables around in forty different ways out here if you want any variety.”
It was that evening that the Board of Amateur Experts discussed everything that lay ahead of them from the said vegetables to chickens, cows, horses, and farm implements.
Mr. Craig had seemed relieved when he was sure that his wife approved of Woodhow. It was near Maple Grove and Rebecca, he said, and they would surely need both many times during their first experimental year in the country. Also, it was on the mail route, and not too large a place in acreage for them to handle. There was a good apple orchard, a little run-down, but it would be all right with pruning and proper care. Besides, there were four good pear trees, two large cherry trees, white hearts and red, and three crabapple trees.
“Guess if you hunt around, you might find some quinces too, and plenty of berries and currants,” Rebecca said. “It’s been let go to waste the past few years, and it’ll take a year or more to get it back into shape. You’d better write out West and get a three-year lease, with option of purchase.”
“We couldn’t think of buying it, even with a GI loan from the government,” Mrs. Craig demurred, “but we might try the three-year lease. What do you think, dear?”
“I should write tonight,” Mr. Craig told her confidently. “Even if I should gain my health completely, we could still stay up here summers, and you all would enjoy it, I know. Look at Tommy’s red cheeks, and Jean looks like another girl. If I keep on much longer on Becky’s cooking, I expect to be mowing hay in the lower meadows by July.”
So the letter was written, the wonderful letter freighted with so many hopes. All the youngsters escorted Mrs. Craig down to the mailbox at the crossroads the next noon. It was truly a fateful moment, as Kit remarked solemnly. So much depended upon the nature of the answer from far-off Saskatoon. Perched on the fence rail Tommy began to whistle loudly.
“What’s his name, Mom?” asked Kit.
“Ralph McRae,” Jean answered for her mother.
“You know, really, Tommy,” protested Doris, “if you could just see how ridiculous you look on that fence rail, you’d come down.”
But Tommy ignored her and kept to the rail all the same, whistling. Even Kit felt the inspiration of the moment.
“Oh, I love these April mornings! You can smell everything that’s sweet and new in the air, can’t you, Mom? And I found arbutus buds down in the pines too, and an old crow’s nest, and the crocuses are up.”
Mrs. Craig lifted her face to the blue sky with its great white clouds that drifted up from the south and sighed contentedly.
“There comes the mailman down the wildwood way,” Jean called from the curve of the road.
Already they had grown to watch for mail as the one real event of the day. Mr. Ricketts, the rural free delivery carrier, was a typical product of a small community, with his cap pushed back on his head, a smile of perpetual well-being on his face.
“Looks like we’d get a spell of fine weather,” he called. “Tell Miss Craig I noticed a postcard for her about her subscription being up for her floral monthly, and if she ain’t going to renew hers, I’ll send in my own for this year.”
“Now just hear that,” exclaimed Becky when she was given the message. “He’s read my floral monthly regularly coming along the route. Well, I don’t know as I mind. He’s a real good mail carrier anyhow, and all men have failings. But Tom Ricketts knows better than to read my floral monthly without so much as by your leave. But I’ll renew it.”
“He must have read the postcard too,” said Doris.
“Read it?” Becky sniffed audibly. “I’d like to see anything get by them down at that post office. They know a sight more about you than you do yourself. Postmaster Willetts could sit down singlehanded and write a history of the local inhabitants of this town just from memory and postcards, I don’t doubt a bit.”
The very next day the girls and Tommy went again to Woodhow. The keys were at Mr. Weaver’s, the next house down the road from Maple Grove. It was a rambling gray house sitting far back from the road and facing the western hills. Philip Weaver lived there alone. He was ninety-one and had had six wives, Rebecca told them.
“Though mercy knows, nobody holds that against him. It was a compliment to the sex, I suppose, if he could get them. And Uncle Philly’s buried them all reverently and properly.”
They found the old man working at a carpenter’s bench out in the woodshed. His hair was gray and curly and his upper lip clean-shaven. Tommy said he looked like the pictures of Uncle Sam. He was tall and lean and stoop-shouldered, but his blue eyes were full of twinkles and he had the finest set of false teeth, Kit remarked soberly, that she’d ever seen, and the most Winsome smile.
“Winsome? Philly Weaver Winsome?” laughed Rebecca when she heard it. “Well, I must say, Kit, that is the best description yet. Winsome!”
“But he is,” Kit protested, “really winsome. He gave us each a drink from his well and showed Jean his Dutch tile stove and his grandfather’s clock. And he’s got the cutest old chest out in that side hall, Rebecca. I asked him how much he’d take for it, and he said no, he guessed he’d better not, though it was worth as much as two dollars and a half, but it had been his great-grandmother’s hope chest. Wasn’t that amusing?”
Armed with the key and waving goodbye to the old man at the top of the hill, they started down to the crossroads. Already they called the house home. It was so satisfying, Kit said, just to wander about the rooms and plan. There was one large southeast room that must be the living room. Back of this, opening out on a wide side porch, was the dining room. On the opposite side of the front hallway was a small room they could use for a study. Between it and the kitchen was a good-sized hallway lined with shelves and long handy drawers beneath them.
It was the kitchen and attic, though, that the girls lingered over most. The former extended across the entire back of the house and Doris said there was room enough to hold a dance in it.
“Where are you, Jeannie?” Kit called. “You’re missing thrills of discovery.”
But Jean was getting her own thrills. She had rolled up the legs of her blue jeans and ventured down the old winding cellar steps, groped around in the dark until she found the outside doors and removed the big wooden bar that held them. The stone steps outside were green with moss, and an indignant toad hopped back out of the sunlight when she threw open the doors.
“We’ll get the moldy smell out of the cellar in a few days,” she told the others, rolling up her sleeves and sitting down in the sunshine on the top step. “And there’s a furnace down there, too. It looks old and rusty, but it’s there.”
Kit stood with her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at the tall tapering pines. They were splendid old trees, towering as high as the house itself. Their branches spread out like great hoopskirts of green. Underneath was a thick silky carpet of russet needles, layer on layer from many seasons of growth. Beyond the limits of the garden lay the strip of white road, and across that came wide fields that seemed to fall in long waves to meet the river. On all sides they slipped away from the old house, their square borders outlined with the gray rock walls, each with its brave showing of springtime green, where every clambering vine had sent forth leafy tendrils, and even the moss had freshened up under the April showers.
“In a couple of weeks more they’ll all be green,” said Jean, her dark eyes bright with anticipation. “And we’ll plough them and sow them, and they’ll grow and grow, kids, and turn a real golden harvest over to us by fall.”
“Goods have come,” called Mr. Ricketts from the mailbox one morning. The pink freight card lay on top, and he seemed as pleased as anyone to find it there. “Letter from out West too, I noticed, so I presume you folks will be settled pretty soon.”
“I almost feel as if I ought to let him read what Mr. McRae says,” Mrs. Craig said amusedly. “He’s so friendly and interested.”
As she opened the letter, the girls gathered around her chair, eager-eyed and curious to see what it contained. Jean declared that she liked the handwriting because it was firm and plain without any flourishes. Kit was sure he used a stub pen and was rather morose and dignified. Doris asked if she might keep the postage stamp for a memento.
“You read it, dear. I’d much rather you did,” their mother said, handing it over to Mr. Craig.
Rebecca was out in the buttery singing softly to herself about some day when the mists had rolled in splendor from the beauty of the hills, so there was just their own family together as they listened anxiously for the verdict. The letter ran:
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, April 4th
Mr. Thomas Craig, Elmhurst, Connecticut
Dear Mr. Craig: Your letter of March 28th received. I should be very glad to rent the old house down at Stony Eddy on a lease, but do not want to let it go out of the family. Miss Craig can tell you the conditions under which it came into my possession and why I am not at liberty to part with it. If you care to rent it at $65 a month, it is yours. Any necessary repairs it may need I am willing to make. I have never seen the property myself, but whatever Miss Craig says about it will be satisfactory to me, as she was my Aunt Trowbridge’s dearest friend.
Hoping if you decide to take the place, you may be happy there, I am,
Yours sincerely, RALPH McRAE.
“It’s ours,” Jean breathed thankfully.
“I always felt that it was, somehow,” Mrs. Craig smiled happily around at her family. “And I know you’ll like it, Tom.”
“Oh, I know the place, I remember admiring it as a boy. Besides, I’d like anything up here. Why, I could live out yonder in Becky’s corncrib very comfortably this summer if she’d only let me,” teased the invalid. “Better send a check out at once for the rent, Margie, and get into it as soon as possible.”
It was the third week in April when they drove down in relays from Maple Grove and took possession of the new home. There had been considerable repairing to be done—painting and papering, mending the water pipes and furnace, and cleaning out the chimneys.
The goods had been brought up from Nantic by Matt in the big hay wagon in four trips. Mrs. Craig had wanted to hire a truck from Norwich, but Rebecca said it was all nonsense with two big horses standing idle in the barn just aching for work, and Matt fussing around over frost still being in the ground so he couldn’t do any deep ploughing. So the goods came up and were packed into the big front room downstairs while the girls and Mrs. Craig went back and forth settling.
Matt’s younger brother came to do the papering and painting. He looked exactly like a young rooster, Kit declared, all neck and legs, and he was fearfully shy. She found immediate diversion in appearing before him suddenly in her most abrupt manner to ask his opinion anxiously on something, whereupon Shad would blush intensely to the roots of his taffy-colored hair, and splash paste blindly.
His name was Shadrach Farnum, but Shad suited him to perfection. As Rebecca said, he did sort of run to bone. But he could paint and paper well, and gradually the rooms began to look different. The big living room was covered with a soft gray that harmonized well with their dark green and chartreuse upholstered furniture. The bookcases were painted the same shade of gray. Window seats were built around the two bay windows, and the girls worked hard making new chartreuse cushions and crisp white curtains for the windows.
“It looks so warm and friendly, doesn’t it?” Doris exclaimed when the big round table was brought in and the copper lamp placed in the center. The copper lamp was really an institution in the Craig family. The girls had given it personal conduct from the Cove on Long Island to Nantic. Jean had found it in an old copper and brass shop in New York at a wonderful reduction, and had carted it home herself in triumph. The bowl was broad and low and squat, shaped a good deal like a summer squash. The parchment shade was perforated by hand with exquisite artistry into strange Muscovite designs, through which the light shone softly. When it was lighted the first evening in the new home, Doris said she felt that everything was complete.
The day after they really moved in, Rebecca drove down with Ella Lou and some good advice, a large brown crock of freshly baked beans and a loaf of brown bread.
“You need a good safe horse that you all can ride and also use for work,” she said. “Sam Willetts has a brown mare that seems just about the ticket. I telephoned over to him this morning and he’ll sell her for $75, which isn’t bad at all. If you like, Margie, I’ll call him up again as soon as I get back and Buzzy Hancock can bring her over. Buzzy’s working for Mr. Willetts now, and the mare used to belong to the Hancocks. She was a regular pet, Sally said.”
Mrs. Craig was sure it was a good plan and Rebecca was instructed to close the bargain. So it was thus Woodhow made the acquaintance of Buzzy Hancock, destined to be a close friend before summer was over, and always a family standby.
It was a little while after supper when Buzzy rode up leading the mare behind his own horse, and they all went out to look at her. Buzzy was about seventeen and tall. He had rosy cheeks, blue eyes, curly brown hair, and dimples so deep that Doris said it was a burning shame to waste them on a boy.
He stood at the mare’s head, patting her slender, glossy neck and combing her mane with his fingers, telling the girls and Tommy her history, how she had belonged to Molly Bawn, their old mare, and how his father had broken her to harness himself.
“But she never had to be really broken in. Sally and I started riding her bareback when she was out in pasture and she was just as tame as a kitten. She understands anything you say to her. Mother hated to sell her to Mr. Willetts, but we had to, and as I was working for him, why, she didn’t know any difference. She’s used to a good deal of petting—”
“Oh, we’ll all pet her,” Jean promised. “We must get a saddle and harness. Do you know where we can get some?”
“Down at Mr. Butterick’s,” said Buzzy. “He’s the man who handles all sorts of riding equipment.”
“You have wonderful people up here,” Doris said fervently. “It seems as if whenever you want a certain kind of a person, there he is waiting for you. Where does Mr. Butterick live?”
“Down in Rocky Glen. Second house past the basket weaver, Mr. Tompkins.”
“Suppose we go over there tomorrow, kids,” Jean suggested. “Or do you have to take the mare over, Buzzy, and let Mr. Butterick sort of fit her with a harness and saddle? I wish I could put her in the barn right now.”
“Better get somebody to take care of her first,” Doris said practically. “We’d feed her fish cakes and doughnuts.”
Buzzy shifted his weight from one foot to the other uneasily.
“Don’t suppose you folks think of taking anybody on regularly, do you? Mother said I was to ask, and say if you wanted me I might come up. It’s nearer home than Mr. Willetts’ and there’s only Sally and Mom at home, and they need me to do the chores after I get home at night.”
Jean hastily glanced at Kit for fear she wouldn’t remember all that Rebecca had told them about Buzzy Hancock and his sister. But just then Mrs. Craig stepped out on the side porch and smiled at Buzzy until he turned red and grinned.
“I could come for about ten a month, Mother thought,” he added with much embarrassment.
Mrs. Craig thought ten was about right too, and Buzzy rode away in the spring twilight. All the way up the hill they heard him whistling Stardust. Although the deal had been closed over the brown mare, and the check reposed in Buzzy’s overalls’ pocket, he took her back with him, and promised to ride her over in the morning so the Craigs should not have the care of her overnight.
“I asked him what her name was,” Tommy said, “and he told me they just called her Molly’s Baby. We must think up a better name than that. You know, Mom, she looked over at me so wistfully when Buzzy said she would have to go back overnight. I know she wanted to stay with us.”
The next addition to the place was the lot of chickens. It had been agreed the first year that no large expenditures should be made for anything, because it was all more or less experimental.
“We want to take care of Dad, and make him well this first year,” Jean told the others up in their room one night.
At first the housework had proved to be the great stumbling block in the way of perfect peace and daily comfort.
“I tell you, Mom, if you’ll just say what you want done, we’ll do our best to oblige,” Jean had promised at the very beginning, but the girls had found themselves tangled up in less than two days, treading on each other’s heels and losing their tempers, too.
Mrs. Craig laughed at them when she happened in and found them all bickering.
“You’ll have to learn teamwork,” she explained. “You must learn that when you put your bread to rise it doesn’t shape itself into loaves and hop into the pans and walk over to the oven.” Here Kit blushed hotly, remembering how her first batch had risen to the occasion beyond all expectations, and rambled during the night all over the edge of the pan and the arm of the chair she had set it on. “And, Tommy, darling, if you catch mice in traps alive, and then decide to tame them, we’ll have mice all over the place.”
Tommy had discovered a nice little brown prisoner under the pantry shelf, had taken him out into the rose garden and there let him go, all in a spirit of pity that left Kit and Jean speechless.
Also, sundry noises having issued from his room at night, the girls had started down the dark hall to investigate, and had stepped on turtles which Tommy had found sunning themselves on logs in the pond, and had put into empty tomato cans and smuggled up to his room for future humanitarian reference.
“OK, Mom,” said Jean in a subdued voice, “we’ll try to make fewer mistakes. With patience maybe we’ll learn how to do housework with one hand. I told Kit to fix the bread a dozen times, but she wouldn’t listen.”
Just then Buzzy came to the kitchen door, bare-headed and smiling.
“Sally said for me to tell you folks that she heard Ma Parmelee had some good Plymouth Rocks for sale. They’re about as reliable a hen as you can get. Ma’s going to sell off everything and go to live with her son down in Nantic. It’s near toward where I live, if you’d like to drive over that way.”
Mrs. Craig thought it was a good idea, and that Jean could drive her over. Jean went into the living room to get the keys for the car from the desk and came back. She and Buzzy walked out to the garage for the car together.
As they walked along, Jean said, “I wish spring would hurry up and make up its mind to stay awhile.” Letters had come from some of the girls back at the Cove that day and she felt a wave of loneliness and half panic at what they had undertaken.
After Jean had backed the car out of the garage, Buzzy helped her to attach the new trailer. At the back door Jean tooted the horn and waited for her mother to join them. While they were waiting Buzzy loaded some burlap sacks into the trailer for the hens.
“Better tie them to something when you start off,” he advised. “They always flop around a lot in sacks.”
It was a drive of about two and a half miles, up through the hills. Each new road seemed to lead them straight up to the edge of the world and then to dip again and leave the clouds behind. The woods held a haze of green now that hung over the distant hills like a mist. Once a row of young quail blinked dizzily from a pasture bar and fled at the noise of the approaching car. And all at once there came the quick thud of hoofs from a lane at the right of them, and a young girl riding horseback waved for them to stop. She was about as old as Kit, with friendly blue eyes and brown hair brushed back from her face and fastened with a silver clasp at the nape of her neck.
“How do you do,” she said, blushing in a way that seemed familiar to them, for it reminded them of Buzzy. “I’m Sally Hancock.”
“Oh, we’re ever so glad to know you, Sally,” Jean said at once. “Buzzy’s told us all about you until we felt that we really did know you.”
Sally blushed deeper than ever, just as Buzzy did, and brushed a fly off her horse’s neck. She sat her horse well, in a pair of navy-blue riding breeches and a man’s shirt open at the throat. Altogether both Mrs. Craig and Jean approved of her at sight, for she seemed like a girl edition of Buzzy himself.
Sally told them they were on the right road, and to keep to the left after they passed the cemetery.
“I’m going down the other way or I’d ride along and show you where it is.”
“You must come down to see us when you can, please. We’re rather lonesome, since we’re quite new around here. Are there many boys and girls?”
“Quite a few,” said Sally. “And luckily there are just about as many girls as boys. The Swedish girls over on the old Ames place, and there are two French girls near us. Their father’s the carpenter, Mr. Chappelle. Etoile’s the older one and the little on they call Tony. I’ll be over to see you one of these days.”
“Isn’t she a darling, Mother?” Jean exclaimed when they drove on. “I do hope she’ll come down. Kit would be crazy about her.”
“Anybody would be,” agreed Mrs. Craig, still smiling. “You know, Jean, I think that you youngsters are going to find a special work up here that only you can do. A work among these boys and girls of our own neighborhood.”
“But, Mom, our own neighborhood up here means a radius of about ten miles.”
“Even so. Rebecca’s old doctor covers twenty miles and has been doing it for forty years. He knows all of the families as if he were a census taker.”
Jean thought for a minute. They were going up a long hill and she shifted into second. “There seem to be so few real American girls up here, Mother,” Jean began slowly. “I thought we’d find ever so many, but while I lived up at Maple Grove I rode around a good deal, and you’d be surprised how many foreigners are up here. Becky told me the reason. The old families die out, or the younger generation moves away to the towns, and the foreigners buy up the old homesteads cheaply.”
“Well, dear?”
“But, Mother, you don’t understand. There are all sorts. French Canadians, and a Swedish family, and a Polish family, and the old miller up the valley from us used to be a Prussian sailor. Then there are the real old families, of course—”
“Are you thinking of confining your circle of acquaintances to the old families, Jeannie?”
Jean laughed at the amusement in her mother’s voice.
“Of course not, Mom. Still I suppose we must be careful just moving into a new place like this. We don’t want to get intimate with everybody. You’ll like some of the old families.”
“I think I’ll like some of the new ones too. Have you noticed, Jean, in driving around, that the houses which are mostly unpainted and rather run-down-looking belong to the old timers, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, probably of first settlers?”
“Oh, Mother, there are some of the most interesting stories about them too, how they came out—walked, actually walked most of them—from the Massachusetts Bay Colony when there was some sort of a breakup, and a few dropped off here, and a few there, and they settled in villages wherever they happened to stop. I found a cemetery in the woods near Becky’s, with old slate gravestones, and dates away back to 1717.”
“I’d like to see them, dear, but at the same time they were foreigners too, or children of foreigners, immigrants from a far land. Can’t you understand what I mean? These newer families are like new blood to the country. It takes only a couple of generations to blend them in, Jean, and they bring new strength to us. Think what we get from the different nations. I remember out in California I had a wonderful girl friend whose people had been Polish exiles. That was a strange group of exiles who sought a haven in our land. There was Sienkiewicz, the great novelist, and many whose names I forget. Wanda was my girl friend’s name and my mother and aunts didn’t like me to be so friendly toward her because she was a foreigner, completely forgetting that they themselves had come from foreign extraction. I think that you children are very fortunate to be born in an age when these queer old earth lines, these race barriers, are being torn down and the idea of one world is coming forth. Up here in our lonely hills, we are going to face this same problem that all nations are coping with, and we in our small way can help open the gates of the future.”
“Why, Mother, I never heard you talk this way before,” Jean exclaimed. “You always seemed just sweet and feminine. I—why, somehow I never felt you were interested in such things.”
“If we mothers are not interested in them, who should be?” she asked, her eyes full of a beautiful tenderness and compassion. “And you are going to do your share right here in Elmhurst, making a circle that shall join together the hands of all these boys and girls from different races. We’ll give a party soon and get acquainted with them all. Now let’s pay attention to chickens, for I think this must be the house.”
Jean turned into a side drive leading around to a house that stood well back from the road. As Jean said afterwards, the house looked as if it had been outdoors all its life, it was so weatherbeaten and gray. “Ma” Parmelee bustled out to meet them, plump and busy as one of her own Plymouth Rocks.
“Twelve pullets and one rooster you want?” she said. “Well, I guess I can fix you up. I heard you folks had moved in down yonder.” She led the way out to the big barn, followed by the chickens. The great doors were wide open, and the barn floor was covered lightly with wisps of hay. “Ma” scattered a measure of grain over this, and let the hens scratch for it.
“I have to work hard for what I get, and they ought to, too,” she said pleasantly. “Now, we’ll take any that you like and put them into bags. I’m going to sell you my very best rooster. His name’s Jim Dandy and he’s all of that. He’s pure Rhode Island Red, and two years old. You don’t have to worry about hawks when he’s around.”
After the chickens were all safely in the bags and put into the trailer, “Ma” waved goodbye and told them not to forget the Finnish family that was moving into her house.
“I’m going to live with my married daughter, and these poor things don’t know a living soul up here. Do drive over and speak to them as neighbors. There’s a man and his widowed sister and her children. All God’s folks, you know.”
“Finns,” murmured Jean speculatively, as they drove away. “There’s a new blend to our community, Mom. I’ve always wanted to know someone from the Scandinavian countries and Sally told me there is a Swedish family here too.”
Spring seemed to descend on the land all at once in the next few days, as if she had quite made up her mind to come and sit awhile, Becky said. One day the earth still looked windswept and bare, and the next there seemed to be a green sheen over the land and the woods looked hazy and lacy with the delicate budding leaves.
One night as Doris was out shutting up the hen houses and filling the pigeons’ pan with water, she stopped short, her head upraised eagerly like a fawn, listening to a new sound away off along the edges of the woods and deep down in the lower meadow where the brook flowed. It sounded keenest and sweetest over where the waters of the lake above the old dam moved with soft low lapping among the reeds and water grasses. Here it became a curiously shrill trilling noise, subdued and yet insistent like the strumming of muffled strings on a million tiny harps.
“It’s the peep frogs,” called Buzzy, coming up from the barn with Buttercup’s creamy contribution to the family. “They’re just waking up. That means it’s spring for sure.”
“Isn’t it cute of them to try to tell us all about it,” Doris cried delightedly, and away she ran to the house to insist that Kit and Jean and Tommy come out and listen too. In the twilight they walked around the terraces below the porch. Once Doris stopped below their father’s window to call up to him.
Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Tommy, all night long, something he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really getting to be quite encouraging.
Sally paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls and Tommy received their first real information about the other neighbors around Elmhurst.
Buzzy was ploughing up the kitchen garden behind the house and Jean, with Sally at her side, sat on the low stone wall that separated it from the orchard, poring over a seed catalogue.
“I’d love some zinnias and snapdragons and blue delphiniums in big beds along the terraces,” she said. “Think of the splashes of blue up against those pines, girls. Remember the Jefferies’ place back at the Cove. Mrs. Jefferies paid her gardener a hundred dollars a month.”
“You’ll like the rare, rich red of radishes and beets and scarlet runner beans better,” Sally declared merrily. “We always lay out money on the food seeds first and then what’s left can go for flowers. Anyhow, when you’ve got heaps of roses and snowballs and syringas and lilacs and things that keep coming up by themselves every year, you don’t need to buy very much. Did you find the lilies of the valley down along the north wall? Mother says they used to be beautiful when she was a girl.”
The girls were silent, remembering what Rebecca had told them of the romance of Luella Trowbridge. But Tommy’s curiosity got the better of his caution and he coaxed Sally away to hunt for the lilies of the valley hidden away under the hazel bushes.
It was Sally, too, who took them up the hill to the rocky sheep pasture and showed them where arbutus bloomed around the edges of the gray, mossy rocks. And it was Sally, who pointed out to them the wintergreen, or checkerberry, as she called it, with its tiny pungent berries.
“She’s perfectly wonderful,” Kit declared that day at lunch. “She knows the exact spot in this entire township where every single flower bobs up in its season. We found saxifrage at the base of an old oak, and white trillium and bloodroot, and perfect fields of bluets. And she wouldn’t let us pick many either, only a few. She says it’s just as cruel to rob a patch of wild flowers of all chance of blooming again next year as it is to rob birds’ nests.”
Here Doris chimed in.
“And she’s going to teach me how to start a flower calendar. Not in a book, Mom. We’re going to take some of that monk’s cloth and mount specimens on it, then make a folio with leather covers of dyed sheepskin.”
“Sally seems to be a regular dynamo for starting activities,” said Mrs. Craig amusedly.
“She is just exactly that,” Kit answered earnestly. “I never met a girl with so many ideas up her sleeve. And they’re as poor as churchmice. Sally told us so herself. And here she is, cooped up in Elmhurst without any outlet at all. She knows what she wants to do, but we girls can tell her how to do it.”
“Sally’s going to peddle our rhubarb for us,” Kit went on. “I think that rhubarb is a most wonderful plant. It seems to spring up everywhere and pay compound interest on itself every year. I found a lot of it growing and thought it was peonies or dahlias, but Sally told me it was rhubarb, and we’re going to market it. She says there’s a big cranberry bog on this place too, away off in some sunken meadows above the dam, and we must look out because somebody comes and picks them without asking anything at all about it. So we’re going to watch the old wood road that turns into the sunken meadows. We can see it, Mom, from the window over the kitchen sink, and heaven help anybody who takes our cranberries!”
“I wouldn’t start looking for him yet awhile, dear. Cranberries won’t be along until frost,” laughed Mrs. Craig.
Tommy, with Buzzy’s help, was devoting himself to the hens. Although they had come rather late, still quite a few were setting, and Tommy had several almanacs and calendars marked with the dates of the “coming offs,” as Buzzy put it. Then there were about twenty tiny balls of fluff in the brooder from Rebecca’s incubator, and over these Tommy fussed and wasted more sentiment than any chickens deserved.
One of “Ma” Parmelee’s pullets had turned out to be a vagrant. Never would she stay with the rest of the chickens in the hen house or yard, or even around the barnyard. She was jet black and very peculiar. At feeding time she would show up, but hover around the outskirts of the flock and nibble at kernels of corn anxiously.
Jean named her “Hamlet” in fun, because she said she was always looking for “rats in the arras.” But her real name was Gypsy. It was agreed that Gypsy had no idea of her natural obligation to society at all, that she didn’t have the slightest intention of setting on any eggs, in fact that she didn’t even have the gratitude to lay any eggs. All she did was appear promptly at mealtime and eat her share.
“There’ll be Gypsy a la Reine one of these fine Sundays,” Kit prophesied darkly, but Tommy begged for her life. In fact, whenever chicken was on the bill-of-fare Tommy always begged off any of his flock from execution, and Buzzy had to go to one of the neighboring farms and buy one.
“It seems so awful to eat a chicken that you’re well-acquainted with,” Tommy explained. “And another thing, Mom, did you know that the boys set traps around? Not now, but in the fall. At least, I think it’s in the fall. I had Buzzy paint me some signs on shingles and I’m going to put them all over the place.”
“What do they say, dear?”
“They say just this.” Tommy’s tone was full of firmness and decision. “Any traps set on this property will be sprung by ME.”
“Do they state who ‘Me’ is?”
“I signed it with Dad’s name, and put underneath ‘Per T.’”
The screen door slammed and Kit walked into the living room from the porch. “Good night, everybody,” she said. “The night is yet young, but I’ve promised Buzzy—or rather, Buzzy and I have a bet that I can’t get up at five and help weed the garden. And we bet my tennis racket against five of Buzzy’s records. Don’t anyone call me, because it’s got to be fair.”
Doris and Tommy decided that they were sleepy too, and the three went upstairs together, leaving Jean and her mother to read in the big living room. Presently Mrs. Craig glanced up and saw that the book lay idle on Jean’s lap, and she was looking down at the wood fire that burned on the old fireplace.
“What is it, dear?” she asked. “Tired?”
Jean shook her head, and smiled. “No, country life doesn’t tire me. I love it even though I am lonesome for my old friends. I think I’ll go over to Sally’s tomorrow and see if she’ll take me to meet some of the young people.” Jean dangled her legs over the arm of the chair and studied her scuffed saddle shoes. “If they are all as nice as Buzzy and Sally they must be swell.”
Breakfast at Woodhow was supposed to be seven-thirty, but the girls and Tommy got up at about six and spent the hour before out in the garden. It was so fascinating, Doris said, to be out-of-doors in the early morning. Sometimes when the air was warmer than the ground there would be a morning mist out of which rose clumps of tree tops like little islands.
The following day, at five-thirty exactly, Jean wakened drowsily to find Kit standing by her bed, already dressed in blue jeans and a sweater.
“I want you to look at this clock and be a witness that I’m up on time,” she said briskly, holding up an alarm clock. “It’s perfectly gorgeous outside, Jean. I don’t see how you can lie and sleep with all nature calling.”
“Nature didn’t call you before, did she, Kathleen? Go away and let me sleep.”
“Well, I get the records anyway.” She seated herself blithely on the foot of the bed. Jean sat up and hurled her pillow at her, but Kit dodged and ran, laughing, down the hall.
After breakfast though, when the dew was gone from the meadow grass, Jean had Buzzy saddle Princess, the mare, and declared she was going to ride over and get Sally to take her visiting. Kit and Tommy were busy out in the kitchen garden, and Doris was helping with the dusting. For some reason Jean wanted to go without them on this first reconnoitering expedition.
She rode down the hill toward Elmhurst, bowed with a little rising flush of color to the group in the front of the feed store, and stopped before the brown and white house where the Hancocks lived.
“Hello, Jean,” called Sally buoyantly, beating some oval-braided rugs out on the clothesline. “Can you stop in?”
Jean leaned forward, the reins held loosely in her hand. “I wanted to see if you couldn’t go riding with me. Just so I can meet some of the girls. We want to give a barbecue or some sort of a party to get acquainted with our neighbors.”
“Why, the idea,” Sally exclaimed, dropping her stick and pushing back her hair. “I think that’s awfully nice. Wait till I ask Mother if I can go.”
Jean waited and presently Mrs. Hancock stepped out on the side porch and down the steps. She was rather like Buzzy and Sally, curly-haired and young-looking, with deep dimples and eyes that still held an abiding happiness in their blue depths. Her face was careworn and there were lines around her mouth that told of repressed pain, but it was the look in the eyes that held you. Luella Trowbridge may have gone through trouble, but she had married the man she loved and had been happy with him. She stretched out both hands to Jean.
“Buzzy’s told us so much about all of you up there that it seems as if I know every single one of you,” she said pleasantly. “You’re Jean, aren’t you? Of course Sally can go along if she wants to. Don’t forget the new girl over at the old Parmelee place.”
Jean never forgot that morning. They rode miles together, stopping at the different houses and meeting the girls who were, to Jean at least, the material upon which she had to work.
At the old Ames place they found the two Swedish girls, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, working out in the onion patch with their brothers. Ingeborg was the elder and Astrid the younger, sixteen and fourteen years old. They had moved from New York two years before, but had both gone to the public schools there and were ready for anything Jean suggested.
“Ingeborg belonged to a basketball team,” Astrid said. “I can swim and play tennis best.”
The Chapelles lived in a little gray house close to the road on Huckleberry Hill, two miles below Rebecca’s. Etoile was shy-eyed and graceful, smiling but non-committal, and little Tony peered around her mother’s skirts at the stranger on horseback and coquetted mischievously. But they would come, and gladly, Mrs. Chapelle promised.
“They like very much to come, you see?” she said eagerly, trying to detach Tony from her skirt. “Tony, I have shame for you, ma petite. Why don’t you come out and say hello? Etoile, go bring some lilacs, quick!”
Etoile sped away to the tall rows of white and purple lilac bushes, and broke off two large bunches to give to Jean and Sally. Then Mrs. Chapelle remembered that she must send over to her new neighbor a pat of her butter. Such beautiful butter never anyone see, never. Jean must ride around through the lane and see the three Jersey cows browsing there in the clover field, Henriette, Desiree, and Susette.
Last of all came the Icelandic farm, and here Jean found only the hired men, two grave-faced, light-haired transplanted vikings, who eyed her curiously and silently. Hedda, the daughter, and her mother had driven over to sell two young pigs at the Finnish place.
“Oh, golly,” laughed Jean, “let’s go home. I feel as if I had been riding like Peer Gynt, all over the world, just touching at countries here and there. Let’s go right straight home, so I can talk to Mother and get a perspective on it all.”
“Better ask the Mill girls over while you’re about it,” Sally suggested, so they made one last stop at the red sawmill in the valley below Woodhow. “They’re Americans. My friend lives here, Lucy Peckham. She’s got five sisters and three brothers, but Lucy’s the whole family herself.”
The three brothers worked in the sawmill after school, and Jean didn’t see them, but Lucy sufficed. She came running out of the kitchen with a brown and white checked apron covering her up, and her red hair streaming behind her. She was short and freckled and not one bit pretty, unless good health and happiness and smiles made up for beauty. But the instant you met Lucy you recognized executive ability concentrated in human form.
“Billy, keep out of those lettuce beds,” she called to a younger brother, strayed somehow from the mill. “How do you do, Miss Craig—”
“Oh, call me Jean,” Jean said quickly. “We’re close neighbors. If we didn’t hear your whistle we’d never know what time it is.”
“Well, we’ve been intending to get up the valley to see you, but Mother hasn’t been well, and all the girls are younger than I, so I help around the house. We’ve got twins in our family, did Sally tell you? Sally and I named them. We thought of everything under the sun, Martha Washington and Betsey Ross, and Ruth and Naomi, and Mercy and Faith, and then we got it all at once. We’ve had twins in our family before, Josephine and Imogene, that’s Mother and Aunt Jo, but we didn’t want to repeat. Somehow, it didn’t show any imagination.” She laughed and so did Jean. “So we called ours Elva and Sylvia. We say Elvy and Sylvy for short. Anne and Charlotte are twelve and nine and the twins are only five. They’re too cute for anything. Wish you’d all come down and see us Sunday afternoon.”
“Lucy’d ask the whole world to supper Sunday afternoon,” Sally said as they finally turned up the home road. “She’s just a dear, and she has to work all the time. She never has a single day to herself, and she doesn’t mind it a bit. She does manage to get away to sing in the choir Sunday mornings, but that’s all. And even if she isn’t pretty, she’s got a voice that makes gooseflesh come out all over you, and you shut your eyes and just tingle when it rises and falls. I think she’s wonderful. Isn’t her hair red?”
“It’s coppery and it’s beautiful,” Jean answered decidedly. “I think she’s swell. Why can’t Anne and Charlotte buckle down and help, so that Lucy can get away once in a while?”
“Her mother says she can’t do without her.”
Jean pondered over that and finally decided it was too deep for her to settle. It had been a very profitable afternoon, and after she had taken Sally home, she rode into the home drive, feeling as if she really had a line on Elmhurst girls. Tommy came running down to meet her as she jumped off, while Buzzy came to take care of Princess. Tommy’s eyes were shining with excitement.
“Jeannie, what do you suppose has happened?”
“Something’s sprouted,” Jean guessed laughingly. Tommy spent most of his time watching to see if any of the seeds had started to sprout.
“No. It isn’t that. Gypsy’s got little chickens. She marched into the barnyard with ten of them, as proud as anything. And nobody knows where she hatched them at all.”
Jean had to go immediately to see the new brood. Gypsy had cuddled them around her in the barn on a pile of hay and steadfastly refused to be removed. If ever a hen looked nonchalant she did, quite as if she would have said, “I can do it just as well as any of these ridiculous nesters that you’re so proud of, and my chicks are twice as perfect as theirs.”
“They’re wonderful babies, Gypsy,” Jean told her. “Be careful of them now. Mothers have to behave themselves, you know. No more gallivanting off to the woods.”
“She probably will. I’m going to put them into a little coop tomorrow and her too.”
It only proved, as Kit remarked, what children would do for a flighty and light-minded person.
Jean changed into a dress and ran down into the kitchen to help get lunch and tell her experiences of the day, which proved so entertaining and comical that Mrs. Craig finally came out and asked if they were ever to have anything to eat.
“Dad’s tray is all ready, Mom,” Jean replied, sitting up on the kitchen stool beside the stove, “I’m just waiting for the biscuits to bake, and Kit’s fixing a beautiful jelly omelette. Mother, you never saw anything so funny as these precious inhabitants, but they’re all gold, just the same, and I like them. And we’re going to have a barbecue.”
“We’ve forgotten to write Mr. McRae and tell him how much we like the house,” Doris said a few days later.
“He doesn’t know anything about the house, or care either,” protested Kit, struggling with some raspberry bushes that needed disentangling and tying back against the woodshed boards. “He’s never even seen it. Do you suppose he has the least bit of sentiment for it the way we have or Sally has? I wouldn’t bother to write to him.”
“Oh, I would,” Doris answered serenely. She was down on her knees hunting for four-leaf clovers. “It isn’t his fault that he’s never seen the place. Maybe we could coax him back.”
“We don’t want to coax him back. It must be our one endeavor to keep him right out there in Saskatoon forever. We must tell him the cellar’s damp and the roof leaks and the whole place has gone to rack and ruin. If we don’t he may come East and take it away from us, and we want to save up and buy it and give it back to Sally and her Mother and Buzzy.”
“What’s Buzzy’s real name?” asked Tommy irrelevantly. “I never thought to ask him.”
“He wants to study electrical engineering or else be a rancher,” Kit said. “I never asked him what his real name is. You’re awfully inquisitive, Tommy.”
“What do all boys see in ranches, I wonder,” put in Doris. “Back at the Cove, Dave Phelps always wanted to be a cowboy and he’s got to be a lawyer, his father says.”
“Maybe he’ll escape West some day and be whatever he likes. I think one of the very worst things in life is to have to be something you don’t want to be.” Kit surveyed her work. “Of course, in the ups and downs and uncertainties, as Becky would remark, we must be prepared for all things, but if you can decide what you’re best fitted for, then you ought to aim everything at that mark. If Buzzy wants to be an electrical engineer, he ought to get books now, and study them hard, and if he wants to be a rancher, he ought to go West—”
A voice came from midair apparently, overhead on the woodshed roof which Buzzy was patching with waterproof paint and tar. It was a mild and cheerful voice and showed plainly that Buzzy was personally interested in the conversation.
“I can’t go West just now, Mom needs me. But I’m going as soon as I can.”
The three stared up at him with laughing faces. “Buzzy Hancock,” exclaimed Tommy, “why didn’t you sing out to us before?”
“Wanted to hear what you had to say,” said Buzzy simply. “Thought maybe I’d get some good advice. And my first name’s Seth. Seth Guilford Trowbridge Hancock. I’m named for my grandfather. Sally called me Buzzy when I was a little kid, so I suppose that I’ll be that all my life.”
“Sally and Buzzy,” repeated Doris musingly, “when you’re really Sarah and Seth. Nicknames are queer, aren’t they? I think that babies should be called pet names till they’re old enough to choose their own. Still Seth’s a good name. It’s a name to grow up to, Buzzy. You ought to be stout and dignified, like Mr. Pickwick.”
“Guess I don’t know him, do I?” asked Buzzy. “Sally wants to be something too, but girls can’t do that. She wants to be a builder and look after land. She wants to go to the State Agricultural College too, and take the forestry course. Do you know what she does? She read some place that the chestnut trees were dying out, so she takes a pocketful of sound chestnuts with her whenever she goes out for a walk in the woods, and every once in a while she sticks her finger in the ground and plants a chestnut. What do you think of that?”
Kit drew in a deep breath.
“I think she’s wonderful. I don’t see why she can’t go to the State College if she likes, or why she can’t take the forestry course. It isn’t whether you’re a boy or a girl that matters in such things. It’s just whether you can do the work that counts.”
“She can shut her eyes and walk through the woods and tell the name of every tree just by feeling its leaves.”
Jean appeared on the back porch and called down to them to come up and wash for dinner. She stood there in the doorway for a minute after the rest had gone in, looking out at the fields highlighted by the sun. As she stood there Buzzy came up, looking as if there was something on his mind.
After a moment he said, “Jean, there’s going to be a barn dance up at the Grange Saturday night. I wondered if you’d like to go?”
“What? A barn dance? I’ve never been to one. I’d love to. What are they like?” said Jean all in one breath.
“Oh, they’re a lot of fun. Everybody goes to them. They do square dancing and sometimes they do regular dancing besides. They have a caller, a man who plays the fiddle and directs the dancing so you know what steps to use. It’s not hard to learn.”
“It sounds like a good time,” said Jean.
“OK, then, I’ll pick you up about eight. That be all right?”
“Swell, Buzzy. Gee, I’d better go! Something’s burning.” With that Jean turned and ran back into the kitchen, feeling happier than she had since the family had moved to Woodhow. When she told her mother about it later, Mrs. Craig agreed that Buzzy was very nice indeed to have offered to show her some of the fun of living in the country.
Saturday night promptly at eight o’clock, Buzzy appeared at the front door with his hair slicked down, his shoes polished, and looking quite different from the boy who worked in the fields all day in overalls. Jean opened the door for him, wearing a pretty light blue cotton dress that set off her dark hair.
“Hi, Buzzy. Come on in. I’m all ready.” She picked up her bag, called good night to her family and they went out.
It was a lovely spring evening, the smell of cherry blossoms hung in the air and the moon was beginning to come up over the hills. Buzzy opened the door of his battered jalopy and Jean got in. Walking around to the other side of the car, Buzzy broke off a sprig of cherry blossoms and tossed them into Jean’s lap. She turned and smiled at him as she fastened the flowers in her hair.
“Gee, you look nice tonight, Jeannie,” he said, and abruptly started the car.
Judging by the number of cars parked when they arrived at the Grange, there were already a number of people there before them. Inside they found quite a crowd. A square dance had already begun, so Jean and Buzzy stood watching the twirling mass of people dance by them.
“Gosh, they dance so fast. I’ll never be able to do it,” exclaimed Jean. “Does just that one fiddler play all evening?”
“Not always,” he explained. “Sometimes somebody plays the piano, too, or Jed Perkins brings his bass fiddle, but usually just Nate plays. That’s his name, Nate White. Come on, let’s try it. They’re starting again. Just follow me and you’ll be all right.”
Buzzy led her out onto the floor and they began to dance. Much to her surprise, Jean found the steps quite easy after she tried them a few times. It was far more strenuous than it looked, however, and after a couple of dances she was forced to sit down and catch her breath.
“I’ve never danced so fast in all my life,” she gasped while they were resting. “I’m terribly thirsty. Do you suppose they have anything cold to drink?”
“Sure,” said Buzzy. “I’ll be back in a minute with some of the best-tasting lemonade you ever drank.”
While he was gone, Sally appeared from out of the crowd and came over to where Jean was sitting. “Hi,” she said. “How do you like night life, country style?”
“It’s fun,” replied Jean, “although it’s a little exhausting. But then, country living seems to be more strenuous altogether than what I was used to.” Just then Buzzy came back with the lemonade and Sally moved off with her partner.
After a few more dances, Jean declared she couldn’t take it any more, so the two left and drove back home. At the door Jean said, “I can’t thank you enough for the lovely time tonight, Buzzy. I never knew a barn dance could be such fun.”
“We’ll have to try it again some night. Good night, Jean.”
“Good night.” And Jean went into the house and upstairs to Kit, who was still awake and waiting impatiently to hear the details of the dance. The two older girls had always discussed their dates and parties with each other back at the Cove, and the tradition was not broken now. Together in Jean’s room, they talked it over while Jean undressed.
“Buzzy’s tops, Jean,” said Kit, after she had finished describing the evening. “I’ll bet he’ll be the best friend we make in this neighborhood.”
“It’s an evening I won’t forget soon,” replied Jean sleepily. “My feet ache so from dancing, I couldn’t possibly forget it for at least a week.”
In the following days, the girls and Tommy turned their attention to plans for the barbecue. The first thing to be sure of was a full moon. This came along the last week in June, so they made their arrangements accordingly.
Buzzy and Sally took almost as much interest in the affair as the girls themselves. All that day, when it finally did arrive, they worked gathering wood for the fire, knocking together temporary picnic tables, and digging the barbecue pit at the back of the house. Doris was making the lemonade and said she had cut and squeezed lemons until her whole mouth was puckered up, and her fingernails felt pickled. Kit was everywhere at once, it seemed. She showed Buzzy how to make the spit for the meat to be cooked on. She beguiled Matt, who had come down from Maple Grove to help around a bit, into moving the phonograph out on the front porch.
It did seem as if all Elmhurst and surrounding territory had turned out to show its neighborly spirit. There were cars parked along the road, in the barnyard, the driveway, and everywhere.
“I shouldn’t wonder, Margie, if we had as many as a hundred folks here tonight,” remarked Becky.
“More likely two hundred, Rebecca. It looks like a big crowd all right.” They were up on the porch where Mrs. Craig hovered between the lounge chair where Mr. Craig sat, and her various guests, welcoming each in her own charming way.
Doris and Kit followed Jean’s lead. First Jean rounded up the girls whom she had met on the ride with Sally and introduced them to the other Craig sisters. Tommy could not be located from one minute to another. He raced all over the grounds. One minute he was back by the barbecue pit trying to supervise things but generally heckling Buzzy. The next minute he was back in the front of the house dodging in and out of the crowd. But Doris and Kit led the other girls over to where the lemonade, ice cream and cake was laid out and asked them to serve. It was much better than standing around, shy and silent, not knowing what to do next. Kit found one girl, Abby Tucker, leaning disconsolately against a pear tree at the side of the drive. Her white dress was too short for her, and her hair was straggling in limp strands down her back. She looked lonely and rather indignant too.
“Don’t you want to come over and help us with the ice cream?” asked Kit.
“No, I don’t,” said Abby flatly. “They always ask me to help pass things to eat at the church suppers. I want to have a good time myself tonight. Though we aren’t going to have a good time.”
Kit looked at her doubtfully. She thoroughly realized the state of mind that will not let itself be happy, that in fact, finds its happiness in being unhappy, but Abby’s moroseness baffled her.
“Don’t you like it here?” she asked.
Abby nodded.
“Don’t you know anyone?”
“Know most of them.”
“Then what is it?” Kit laid her arm timidly around the stooped shoulders and at the touch of real human sympathy, Abby’s reserve melted.
“My new shoes pinch awful,” she exploded.
Kit took her straight up to the house to her own room, and ransacked closets and shoe boxes until she found a pair of loafers to fit Abby, and the latter came down again smiling and radiant, ready to serve ice cream, or make herself agreeable in any way she could.
Sally came up to the porch, personally conducting her mother to Mrs. Craig. She was a tall, fair-haired woman with deep dimples like the children’s and a happy face. Seated in a chair on the porch with the roses and honeysuckle shedding a perfume around, she breathed a sigh of relief.
“Seems so nice to sit up here again, Mrs. Craig,” she said. “Sally’s told me all about how you’ve fixed the place up till it seemed as if I couldn’t wait to see it. I used to drive over once in a while after Father died, and get some slips of flowering quince and rose bushes to set out. You know I love every blade of grass in the garden and every pine cone on those trees.”
“It’s too bad you and the children couldn’t have had it.”
“Well, I don’t know. I never fret much over what has to be. Maybe this boy Ralph is all right. He’s my nephew, but I’ve never seen him. His father was a claim settler out in Oregon first off, when Cousin France married him. We called her that. Her name was Francelia. Good stock, I guess. I wish Buzzy could know him, he’s so set on being a rancher. I suppose settling and ranching’s about the same thing?”
“Not quite,” Mrs. Craig told her. Then came a chat about her own father’s ranch in California, and when Sally came back after her mother, she found her animated and interested over Buzzy’s future.
Kit and Etoile were arranging a jam session for alternate Saturday afternoons, the ones between to be given up to tennis and basketball. Those who couldn’t dance would be taught by the others. Ingeborg and Astrid and Hedda Hagerstrom stood listening and agreeing with shining eyes and eager faces. Hedda was short and strong-looking, with the bluest eyes possible and heavy blonde braids. She stared at Kit with wide-eyed wonder, Kit radiant and joyous in a yellow chambray sun-back dress, with a sprig of rambler roses in her hair.
“You’ll come, won’t you, Hedda?” she asked. “And bring any other girls over your way.”
“There’s only Abby over my way. We live on the same road.”
“Then bring Abby, but tell her to wear old shoes. We ought to find enough girls to make up a good team out here.”
“Do you like hikes?” asked Lucy Peckham. “I think it would be fun to have a hiking club, and each week tramp away off somewhere. There’s ever so many places I want to see.”
“It’s a good idea, Lucy,” Sally exclaimed.
The crowd began to break up and the Craigs stood on the porch saying goodbye to everyone. It was after twelve before the last car had driven away. Tommy was found sound asleep in the living room on the couch. Jean and Doris hunted in the grass for lost spoons and ice cream saucers.
“It was a good party,” Jean said happily. “We got acquainted with all our neighbors, and now I feel as if I could go ahead and organize something.”
The following Saturday had been set as the first day for the girls to meet at Woodhow. Lucy was the first to arrive, as she lived nearest, and she brought with her Anne and Charlotte.
Hedda and the two girls from the old Ames place, Ingeborg and Astrid, arrived together and helped Kit and Doris plan the tennis court. Below the terraces the lawn lay smooth and even out to the south wall, but it had been decided to sacrifice a slice of the hay field across the road rather than the garden, and Matt had ploughed up a good-sized oblong of land for them, harrowed it smooth, and then the girls had pondered over the problem of rolling it. It must be rolled flat, wet down, and rolled again until it was fit to use.
“We could fill a barrel with sand, and roll that,” Doris suggested.
“Got something better than that,” Buzzy said. “Over at Mr. Peckham’s they’ve got a road roller. Mr. Peckham’s the road committee in Elmhurst township—”
Kit caught him up. “The whole committee, Buzzy?”
“Ain’t he enough? Ought to see him get out and clean up with those boys of his. He’ll let us take it, I’m sure, and it will roll that court down as smooth as can be. I’ll go after it this afternoon when I finish with the potato patch.”
The house being too far away from the site of the tennis court, the girls had to fill buckets with water from the brook and pour them over the harrowed ground. It was hard work in the hot sun. “I’m half dead,” exclaimed Doris.
“Cheer up, kid,” Kit told her briskly. “Think of the result and what fun it’ll be to play out here.”
Lucy stood back and looked at their work. “What else are you going to do up here?” she asked.
“Next we’re going to start weekly hikes,” Kit told her. “You girls have lived here for years, haven’t you—”
“We just came up a while ago,” Ingeborg corrected.
“I know, and so did Hedda, but Etoile and Tony and Lucy and the rest of you all grew up right here, didn’t you? Well, then. What do you know about the country for ten miles around?” Kit paused dramatically. “Do you know every wood road and cow path through the woods? Where does Little River rise? Have any of you followed the rock ledge up into the hills?”
“Nobody but the hunters go there, and they don’t come till fall,” said Hedda gravely. She hardly ever smiled, this transplanted little daughter of far-off Iceland. Her manner and expression always seemed to the girls to hold a certain aloofness. Up at her home, later on, they saw a finely carved model of a Viking ship which her father had made back in the home island, and Jean declared after that she always pictured Hedda standing at its high prow, facing the gale of the northern seas, her fair hair blowing behind her like a golden pennant, her blue eyes fearless and eager.
“But we’ll go. We’ll pack a picnic lunch. Hey, kids, are there any snakes up here?”
“Lots,” said Lucy. “But mostly black snakes. They’re ugly to look at, but they don’t hurt you. And little garter snakes, and green grass snakes. I never think about them.”
“Are you afraid of anything out here, Lucy?” Doris asked interestedly. She had eyed Lucy admiringly from the first moment of their acquaintance, and privately Doris held many fears. It was all very well to say there wasn’t anything to worry over, as Kit did, but one may step on toads in the dark, or hear noises in the attic that make one shiver even if they turn out to be just chipmunks after corn and nuts.
“Nothing that I know of,” Lucy replied serenely. “I never felt afraid in the dark. Just as soon go all over the house, upstairs and down, and when I go down into the cellar, I yell ‘look out, rats, here I come!’ Guess the only thing I’m really afraid of is a bat.”
“Everybody’s afraid of something,” Etoile said, her eyes wide with mystery. “I have the fear too, oh, but often. I am most afraid of those little mulberry worms, you know them? They come right down at you on little ropes they make all by themselves, and they curl up in the air and then they drop on you. Ugh!”
Kit rolled over on the grass in delight at this. “That’s a riot,” she laughed. “Tell some more, Etoile.”
“We’ve got a haunted house on our road,” Astrid said in a lowered voice. “The little spring house between the old mill and our place. It’s been there years and years, my father says. He knows the old man at the mill, and he told him. As far back as they can remember it has always been haunted. First there lived an old watchmaker there. He had clocks and watches all over the house, and they ticked all the time.”
“Maybe they kept him from being lonely,” Doris suggested.
“He was very strange, and when he died, then two old Indian women came to live there. And there was a peddler used to go through and put up overnight there, and he never was seen any more.”
“You can see the grave in the cellar where they buried him,” Ingeborg whispered. “Right down at the foot of the stairs. And at night he comes up and goes all around the house, rattling chains. Yes, he does. My brother went down with some of the boys and stayed there just to find out and they heard him.”
“Let’s go over there on our hike and stay overnight, kids,” Kit exclaimed. “I think it would be swell.”
“Don’t you believe in ghosts, Kit?” asked Lucy. “I don’t like to believe in them, but I just thought they had to be believed in if they’re really so.”
“No, I don’t. We’ll stay overnight at the spring house, kids. It’s a shame to have a real ghost around and not make it welcome. If there are any ghosts, which I doubt, they must be the lonesomest creatures in all creation because nobody wants them around. Suppose we say that next Friday we’ll walk up to the house and camp out for the night. Who’s afraid?”
The girls looked at each other doubtfully.
“Can I bring our dog along?” asked Ingeborg. “Then I’m not afraid, I don’t think.”
“Bring anything you like. I’m going to take a flashlight. Here comes our roller, now. We’d better finish the tennis court.”
Rebecca told the story of the old spring house when they saw her. She could remember Scotty McDougal, the old watchmaker who had lived there.
“Land, yes, I should say I could. He used to wear an old coonskin cap with the tail hanging down, and carried an old gun along with him wherever he went. After he died, two old women moved in from somewhere in the woods toward Dayville. They were Indian, I guess, or gypsy, real good-hearted people so far as I could see. Used to weave carpet and rag rugs and make baskets. There was a story around that they could tell fortunes and see things in the future, but that’s just talk. I never pay any attention to such things at all. Probably, if you could clear the house of its name, somebody’d be willing to live in it. It belongs to Judge Ellis.”
“Who’s Judge Ellis?” asked Kit, who always caught at a new name.
“Who’s he?” Becky laughed heartily. “Meanest man in seven counties, I guess. He ran for Senator years ago and was beaten, and he took a solemn oath he’d never have anything to do with anybody in this township again, and I guess he’s kept it. He lives in the biggest house here.”
“All alone?” asked Tommy.
“All alone excepting for a housekeeper and his grandson. He’s just a fussy old miser, and the way he lets that boy run wild makes my heart ache.”
“How old a boy is he, Becky?” asked Mrs. Craig, feeling sympathetic at once.
“Oh, I should say about fifteen. Name’s Billie. He’s a case, I tell you. What he can’t think of in five minutes isn’t worth doing. Still, he’s a good boy, too, at that. Five of my cows strayed off from the pasture lot last summer, and he found them after Matt had run his legs off looking for them. And once we lost some turkeys, and he found them over in the pines roosting with the crows. He knows every foot of land for ten miles around here and more, I guess. You never know when he’s going to bob out of the bushes and grin at you. The Judge don’t pay any more attention to him than if he was a scarecrow. Seems that he had one son, Finley Ellis, and he was that wild the Judge turned him off years ago. And one day he got a letter, so Mr. Ricketts told me, from New York, and away he went, looking cross enough to chew tacks. When he came back he had Billie with him, and that’s all Elmhurst ever found out. Billie says he’s his grandfather, and the Judge says nothing.”
“I’d like to see him,” Jean exclaimed.
“Who? The Judge?”
“No, no. Billie, this boy. What does he look like?”
“Looks like all-get-out half the time, and never comes to church at all. You’ll know him by his whistling. He can whistle like a bird. I’ve heard him sometimes in the early spring, and you couldn’t tell his whistle from a real whippoorwill. There is something about him that everybody likes.”
“I hope he comes over this way,” Mrs. Craig said.
“Oh, he will. The Judge never lets him have any pocket money, so he’s always trying to earn a little. He’ll come and try to sell you a tame crow, most likely, or a trained caterpillar. I was driving over toward their place one day and I declare if I didn’t find him lying flat in the middle of the road. Ella Lou barked and I asked him what he was doing. ‘Don’t drive in the middle of the road, Miss Craig,’ he said, ‘’cause I’ve got some ants here, taming them!’ Real good-looking boy he is too.”
“Gee, but he sounds like fun,” Kit remarked fervently. “I almost feel like hunting him up, don’t you, Jean?”
Jean nodded her head. She was putting up currants and raspberries, and the day was very warm.
“Why do you keep a fire going in the house?” Miss Craig asked her. “Put an old wood stove out in the back yard, the way I do, and let it sizzle along. Goodbye, everybody.”
“Come down and play tennis with us,” called Doris.
“Go ’long, child.” Becky chuckled. “How would I look hopping around, slapping at those little balls! Come on, Ella Lou.”
“Golly,” Kit exclaimed as the car drove away, “it seems as if every single day something new happens here, and we thought it would be so dull we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.”
“You mean Billie’s something new?” asked Doris.
“Doesn’t he sound interesting? I’m going out to ask Buzzy about him.”
“You’d better help me finish these berries, Kathleen,” Jean urged. So Kit gave up the quest temporarily and sat on the edge of the kitchen table, stripping currants from their stems, and singing at the top of her lungs.
“Oh, Kit, do stop,” begged Jean. “It’s too hot to sing.”
Kit looked out at the widespread view of Woodhow, rich with uncut grass billowing with every vagrant breeze like distant waves. It was hot in the kitchen, hot and close. Suddenly Kit fled out the back door and over to the pasture where Princess rambled.
“Kit’s fretful, isn’t she?”
“She thinks she’s getting into a rut,” answered Jean. “We all do. Some days I get so homesick for the kids back home and everything that we haven’t got here—the library and the art museum and the movies and the symphony concerts. I think we ought to write down and ask some of the girls to come up.”
“I don’t. Not until Dad’s well.”
Tommy was out of hearing. Jean looked over at Doris, who in some ways always seemed nearer her own age than Kit.
“Doris, honest and truly, do you think Dad’s getting any better?” she asked in a low voice.
Doris hesitated, her face showing plainly how she dreaded acknowledging even to herself the possibility of his not improving.
“He eats better now, and he can sit up.”
“But he looks awful. I get goose pimples when I look at him sometimes. His eyes look as if they were gazing away off at some land we couldn’t see.”
“Jean Craig, how can you say that?”
“Hush, don’t let Mother hear,” cautioned Jean anxiously. “I had to tell somebody. I think of it all the time.”
“Well, don’t think of it. That’s like sticking pins in a wax statue back in the Middle Ages, and saying, ‘He’s going to die, he’s going to die,’ all the time. He’s getting better.”
Jean was silent. She felt worried, but if Doris refused to listen to her, there was nobody left except Becky. Somehow, at every emergency Becky seemed to be the one hope these days, unfailing and unfearing. Dauntless and cheerful, she rode over every obstacle.
But when Jean found an opportunity of speaking to her of her father, Rebecca’s face looked oddly passive.
“We’re all in the Lord’s hands, Jeannie,” she said. “Trust and obey, you know. There are lots worse things than passing over Jordan, but we’ve just got that notion in our heads that we don’t want to let any of our beloved ones take the voyage. Tom’s weak, I know, and he ain’t mending so fast as I’d hoped for, but he’s gained. That’s something. You’ve been up here only a couple of months. It took longer than that to break him down, and it may take years of peace and rest to build him up. Let’s be patient. Dr. Gallup seems to think he’s got a good deal more than an even chance.”
It would never do to leave Sally out of any hikes, Kit said as the end of the week drew near again, and so Buzzy was commissioned to give her a message.
“Tell her we’re going to walk from here over to Mount Ponchas, and back by way of the Spring House. We want to start at five Friday night.”
“Ought to start at daybreak for a hike,” Buzzy replied. “Never heard of starting near sundown. You’ll fetch up by dark at the rock ridge and sleep in a deer hollow.”
“Maybe we will,” Kit responded hopefully. “I hadn’t thought of that, Buzzy. It sounds awfully nice. If you could just get a peep at our lunch you’d want to hike too, no matter where we fetched up.”
“I’ve camped out along the river. Not this river. The big one down at the station, the Quinnebaug. We fellas go down there when the bass is running and fish for them nights. Eels too.”
“Do you know a boy named Billie Ellis?” Kit asked suddenly. “Does he ever go along with you?”
“Billie Ellis? I should say not,” Buzzy answered emphatically. “Judge Ellis wouldn’t let him go along anywhere with the rest of us fellows. He caught a big white owl the other day over in the pines back of the Ellis house.”
“I wish he’d come over our way some time. I’d love to know him. He sounds so kind of—well, different, you know.”
“He’s different all right,” laughed Buzzy good-naturedly. “I remember once three years ago it was awfully cold, and we boys had been skating and went into the feed store to get warm. And who should come in but Billie Ellis without any hat on, and only an old sweater and a pair of pants on, and shoes and socks. We asked him how he ever kept warm such weather, and what do you suppose he said?”
“What?” Kit’s face was eager with interest.
“Said he had seven cats he kept specially to keep him warm. Said the Judge wouldn’t let him have any fire, so he trained the cats to cuddle around him and keep him warm. So long. I’ll tell Sally you want her to go along with you.”
Kit sat out on the terrace after he had passed up the hill road. Jean and Doris were upstairs with their father, and Tommy was out in the barn somewhere. Her mother was playing the piano. Buzzy had been gone about fifteen minutes when Kit heard the sound of a car coming along the level valley road. It couldn’t be anyone for here, she thought. But just then the car turned in at the wide drive entrance and came up to the porch steps.
“You had better wait,” she heard a voice say, such a nice voice, young and alive-sounding. Then somebody bounded up the steps, three at a time, and crossed the porch, with her sitting right there on the top terrace below the rose and honeysuckle vines. Kit always jumped to conclusions and now she decided for some crazy reason that this was Ralph McRae, from Saskatoon.
There was no doorbell or even a knocker, and the double doors stood wide open, but the screen doors were locked inside, so Kit stood up and called.
“Just a minute, please. I’m coming.”
He waited for her, hat in hand and smiling. It was shadowy, but she saw his face and liked it. He was young and handsome.
“Are you Miss Craig?” he asked, and Kit flushed at the tone. As if she didn’t long seventeen hundred times a month to be the Miss Craig like Jean.
“No. I’m only Kit,” she answered. “You’re our Mr. McRae, I think. Hello.”
He shook hands with her and Kit led him around to the side door and let him in while she lighted a lamp.
“Mother’s in here,” she said, leading the way into the living room. Mrs. Craig stopped playing and looked up. “Mother,” Kit said. “Mr. McRae’s come from Saskatoon.”
“Just as if he’d stepped over the whole distance in about seven strides,” Doris said later, after Mr. McRae had been settled in the guest chamber, and the family could discuss him safely. “I think he’s awfully nice-looking, don’t you, Jean?”
“I can’t think about his looks, Doris,” Jean replied blushingly. “All I can do is wonder what he has come after. Does he want the house and farm? Or has his conscience troubled him so much about Sally and her mother and Buzzy that he’s going to lay Woodhow on their front doorstep in restitution? Or did he just want to see what we all looked like?”
“Ask him,” suggested Kit blandly. “He seems to be a very approachable young man so far as I can see.”
“He wanted to go up to Rebecca’s for the night and Mother wouldn’t let him. That shows that she likes him.”
The next day Mr. Craig sat out in a big chair on the porch with their guest, and seemed to enjoy his company wonderfully.
“I do believe, Mom,” Jean said, “that poor Dad has been smothered with too much coddling. Just look at him brace up and talk to Mr. McRae.”
“I hope we can persuade him to stay with us while he is in Elmhurst.”
“He doesn’t act as if he needed much persuading. They’ve discovered that they were both in the Army and are comparing the Canadian Army with ours. They’ve already discussed salmon culture and whether a soy bean crop will do well in Connecticut. We girls think it’s unfair of Dad to monopolize such a charming guy.”
“Jeannie, you’d better come and help me put up our lunch,” called Doris from the kitchen. “Bacon and eggs are going to be the main course, with gingerbread and fruit for dessert.”
It had been agreed that the girls should meet at Woodhow that afternoon. Buzzy had been sent up to Maple Grove with the news that Ralph McRae had arrived, and an invitation for Rebecca to come down for supper. She drove down about four, fresh and cool-looking, wearing a black and white dress and a wide-brimmed black straw hat. Ralph helped her out of the car and stood smilingly while she examined him closely and patted his shoulder as she expressed her obvious approval.
“Just the sort of boy I expected Francelia’d have,” she said happily. “Well built and handsome too. Going to stay awhile, Ralph, and get acquainted?”
“Why, I’d like to, Miss Becky. It gets kind of lonesome out West with none of my own people there. I’ve always wanted to come back here and see all of you. Mother used to talk a lot about you all to me when I was little. She didn’t have anybody else to tell things to.”
“Like enough,” Becky responded rather soberly. “You must meet your cousins.”
“I didn’t know I had any.”
Miss Craig glanced over to the woodpile where Buzzy was sawing some chestnut tops for dry wood to mix in with the birch.
“Come over here, Buzzy,” she called briskly. “This is the boy cousin and Sally’s the girl, both children of your mother’s own sister Luella. Guess we’ll get this straightened out some time. Buzzy, this is Ralph McRae, your own blood cousin.”
Ralph took Buzzy’s tanned, supple hand in his, and held it fast, looking down at his cheery, freckled face.
“I think we’re going to be pals, Buzzy,” he said, and Buzzy’s heart warmed to him. Nobody had ever called him that before.
When Sally arrived with the other girls, she too was introduced, but she proved less pliable than Buzzy. Straight and tall, she faced her new cousin, every flash of her eyes telling him that she resented his having all while they had nothing, and Ralph could make no headway with her.
At five they were ready to start. Lucy could not go, nor Anne, Charlotte, or Tony.
But the older girls were all there, and at the last minute Abby Tucker came hurrying along the road with a large paper bag.
“Thought I’d never get here, but I did,” she said triumphantly. “I made popcorn balls for all of you. And I’ve got some red pepper too. Going to throw it at the ghost.”
“Why you cold-blooded person,” Kit exclaimed. “Red pepper at a poor harmless ghost! Shame on you.”
But Abby only smiled mysteriously and gave the girls to understand that red pepper was the very latest weapon for vanquishing ghosts.
Jean had told each girl to bring a blanket. These were spread down and rolled up army-fashion until they looked like life buoys, then slung over the girls’ shoulders. The commissary department consisted of Kit, Hedda and Ingeborg, who counted over their supplies. There were jam turnovers and deviled-egg sandwiches, loaf cake and cheese, ham-on-rye sandwiches, cherries, and gingerbread.
“You’re equipped for a journey over Chilkoot Pass,” Ralph told them teasingly. “How many weeks will you be gone?”
“We’ll be home tomorrow about sundown,” Kit retorted haughtily. “Should you see the distant light of a signal fire you may come after us.”
Jean looked hopeful at this remark, almost as though she wished it might happen. She suddenly seemed reluctant to leave on this long-planned hike.
The girls left Woodhow and turned into the open road. The first couple of miles went fast enough and then Etoile glanced back over the shadowy road behind them and said, “It’s getting a little dark.” Even though it was still broad daylight.
“We’ve got a flashlight,” Astrid said comfortably, “and Tip for sentinel. There isn’t anything to be afraid of that I can see.”
“Speak for yourself,” retorted Kit. “If we don’t see or hear something I’m going to be awfully disappointed. And if we do hear anything coming slowly upstairs, don’t flash the flashlight right at it until it has a chance to show itself. I hope it will be a lovely pale green.”
Etoile stopped short in the middle of the road, her eyes wide with dread.
“I think perhaps I’d better go right back now, girls.”
But Kit and Ingeborg promised faithfully to guard her if she would only stick the night out. They went on up the long wood road, past the falls above the mill, past Mud Hole where the boys fished for eels, past Otter Island where Matt came to fish, and on to the old spring house. It was set far back from the road in a garden overgrown with weeds and tall timothy grass, and tiger lilies grew rankly in green clumps along the gray stone walls. The little wooden shelter over the well was knocked over and the boards that protected the windows had been pulled half off. Jean went to the kitchen door and found it unlocked. Only wasps and spiders were to be seen, and one stout old toad that backed hurriedly out of sight under the stone doorstep.
“Let’s look it all over before it gets really dark,” she said, and they went in and out of each bare room, upstairs and downstairs, into the old musty cellar, even into the low-roofed loft over the summer kitchen.
“Now, we know there’s nothing here, don’t we?” Kit said, after the tour of inspection was over, and they sat out on the grass near the well, with their food spread around them. “How perfectly wonderful things taste after you’ve walked, don’t they? More ginger cookies, please, Hedda.”
“Which room are we going to sleep in?” asked Abby. “I’d just as soon sleep out here all night on blankets, wouldn’t you, Etoile?”
“We don’t care if you want to,” Doris agreed. “Try it on the little side porch. Then you can watch the cellar entrance because the ghost may decide to come up that way.”
It was getting quite dark by the time the supper was cleared away. Candles were lighted and set on the mantel in the front room and in the kitchen. Kit and Hedda had returned from a successful foraging expedition around the barn and corn house, and had brought back armfuls of hay to spread under their blankets on the floor. Tip, the brown water spaniel, took the whole affair very seriously and made the circuit of the grounds over and over again, chasing imaginary intruders.
“Well, girls, I guess we’re all ready to go to bed, aren’t we?” Kit called finally. They agreed and went into the big living room where the fireplace was. The nights were still very cool up in the hills, so Hedda and Doris had been appointed wood-gatherers and a fine dry wood fire blazed on the stone hearth. After they were ready for the night, they sat around this in a semicircle, eating popcorn balls and telling stories, until all at once there came a sound that silenced everyone and left them wide-eyed and scared.
It was unlike any sound the girls had ever heard back at the Cove, almost like a human being in distress and yet like some animal cry too.
“It’s a fox,” whispered Astrid, getting nearer to her big sister.
“No, it isn’t,” said Abby. “That’s a deer. They always yell like that when there’s a full moon.”
“It was right near, I think, right outside.” Kit sat up, eager and tense. “Shall I flash the light, Jean?”
“Not yet. Wait until it comes again. I think it was only some night bird.”
So they waited breathlessly. Every tiny creaking noise in the old house was intensified by the heavy silence. Jean rose and went to the window. The moon was not up yet, and it was hard to distinguish objects, but down in the garden she thought she saw something that looked like a cow lying down.
“I can’t tell just what it is. It may be only a stray cow or horse,” she said softly.
“Throw something at it,” suggested Kit hopefully. “Let’s all throw something.”
“Just to see whether it jumps or not,” Astrid assented. She hunted around and found some loose half bricks in the chimney place.
“Where’s Tip? He hasn’t barked once,” remarked Abby.
“Dogs are always frightened when they see ghosts. Let me fire away at it first.” Astrid took aim and the half brick flew down at the dark thing with a deadly thud, but there was no stampede. She leaned far out the window, staring at it anxiously. “It seems to me I can see it move and it has horns and a sort of woolly tail, kids.”
“Sounds like a yak,” Kit chuckled. “I’m willing to do this much. I’ll go to the door and open it, and you girls stay here with bricks to throw, and when I flash the light on it, if it jumps you can save me.”
But before she could carry out the plan the sound came again, longer and more thrillingly penetrating than before. It was a wail and a challenge and a moan all in one, not just one cry, but a prolonged succession of them. As soon as it stopped Sally exclaimed, “Now I know. That’s an owl and it comes from the little attic over the ell where we couldn’t climb because there weren’t any stairs. Remember?”
“Sure, Sally?” Etoile’s tone was almost trembling. “Never have I heard such a cry.”
“Oh, I have. It’s an owl, I know it is, one of those big ones. Riding through the woods at night coming home from town I’ve been half scared to death by one of them. Sounds like seventeen ghosts all rolled into one. Come along, Kit, you and I’ll go hunt it up.”
The rest followed gingerly, a strange procession bearing candles, Kit leading with the flashlight. Tip stumbled up drowsily from the kitchen and barked at them.
“Oh, yes, it’s all very well for you to bark now,” laughed Jean. “Why didn’t you go after that noise?”
They reached the ell room and found a trapdoor in the ceiling. Abby remembered seeing a ladder out in the back entry behind the door, and this was brought in.
“And see this, kids,” she exclaimed, running her finger over it. “No dust on the rounds. That shows it’s been used lately.”
“Aren’t we the smart ones? Abby, I love the way you never miss anything.” Kit leaned the ladder up against the wall and mounted it, with Sally close behind and the other girls at its base. “What if it shouldn’t be an owl—”
She stopped with her palm against the trapdoor. Raising it about an inch she flashed the light, and there was a great fluttering overhead.
“What did I tell you!” Sally cried excitedly. “Do it again, Kit. It can’t hurt you and the light blinds it.”
So the trapdoor was lifted again with the light of the flashlight turned on full, and Kit cautiously pulled herself up into the opening. It was tent-shaped and low, not more than four feet at its highest. But instead of being bare like the rest of the old house, there were certainly evidences that someone had been there. There was a tin can filled with fresh water, and a strip of rag carpet laid down on the floor. A box of fish hooks and neatly rolled lines lay on one side, and there was a small frying pan and a knife and fork. Rolled up in one corner was a pair of old overalls, and some books much the worse for wear lay beside them. Kit’s glance took in everything, and last of all, backed into a corner and blinking hard, was the ghost itself—a big white owl.
Sally pulled herself up too, and reached out after the books gently so as not to frighten the owl any more. With a couple in her hand, they lowered the door again, and joined the others.
“It’s an owl and a hermit’s nest,” Kit told them excitedly. “Open the books, Sally, is there any name inside?”
Sally read off the titles, “Treasure Island and David Copperfield! He’s got a nice collection, hasn’t he, whoever he is? There isn’t any name inside, though.”
“Well, there was certainly fresh water in that tin,” Kit said positively, “and that shows the haunted house is inhabited by something tangible, I mean something besides the owl. Let’s go to bed very calmly and sleep. I’m sure we’ve laid the ghost.”
Evidently they had, for the rest of the night was peaceful and safe except for the owl crying out lonesomely at intervals until about four o’clock, when the dawn came. Rolled in their blankets, the girls slept soundly until the sunlight threw broad golden beams into their quarters.
There was no rope on the windlass at the well, so Ingeborg proposed that they go down to the river and wash there. It was lots of fun. They found that the dark and fearsome object they had heaved bricks at the night before was only a big gray rock half sunken in the ground.
Along the river margin turtles sunned themselves in rows on the half-submerged logs, and a muskrat scuttled clumsily for cover at sight of the invaders.
“I wish we could go right in,” said Jean, looking up and down the winding course of the river as she parted the alders, “but it isn’t really safe when you don’t know the water. This looks full of unexpected holes and snags. Where does it run to?”
“Down past the two mills, and rises away up in the Quinnebaug Hills,” Sally told her, kneeling on a flat rock and splashing herself well. “Did you see that black snake slither out of the way then? They’re awful cowards. Yes, Jean, this comes from Judge Ellis’ place about two miles beyond here, three and a half by road.”
“Judge Ellis? Billie’s grandfather?”
“You talk just as if you knew him already, Doris.”
“Well, I feel as if I do, after all Rebecca has told us about him. And when I do meet him, I’m going to make him my friend.”
“Who? The Judge?”
“No. This Billie person. Or I’ll take him home to Tommy—Tommy would be crazy about him.”
“Hey! Look what I found,” Kit called out. “Here are some fishing poles hidden in the bushes. Know what? There must be some boys around.”
All at once upstream they heard somebody whistling. At first it sounded almost like a bird trilling high and clear, but then it suddenly changed to boogie-woogie. The girls sat there on the bank, sheltered from view by the alders, and waited until a flat-bottomed rowboat came into view. Standing at the stern, one bare foot on the back seat and one on the cross seat, with a long punting pole in his hands, was a boy of about fifteen. He looked exactly like Huckleberry Finn, his head protected from the sun by a limp straw hat and his tattered overalls rolled above his knees.
Whistling recklessly, sure of himself and the solitude, he came down the river and guided the boat to shore near where the girls sat scrutinizing him. He hauled it up halfway out of the water, dropped the pole into it, and started up the bank before he caught sight of them.
“That’s Billie Ellis,” Sally said quickly and waved her hand to him. “Hi, Billie.”
“Hi,” Billie returned. “Where’d you come from?”
“Out of the blue,” Doris spoke up merrily. “Got some fish for breakfast?”
Billie hesitated, trying to appear nonchalant, but plainly very much rattled by these girls who had invaded his domain. He rolled down his overalls very slowly and deliberately to gain time, and this gave the others, particularly Doris, a chance to see just what he looked like. He was quite tall, with crew-cut hair of a rather nondescript color, and big brown eyes that were startlingly frank and uncompromising. He was tanned a nice healthy brown, and his smile was eagerly friendly. Altogether, the Craigs approved of Billie at sight. To the others he was more or less familiar, even though none of them knew him well.
“Where you all going?” he asked.
“Just walking over the country,” Abby told him. “Where are you going, Billie?”
Billie flushed at this direct question. “Oh, I don’t know,” he answered lamely. “I come down the river a lot.”
“We fed the owl,” Doris said innocently. “Just some bread and ham. I suppose it thought it was a new kind of mouse.”
Billie glared at her with quick indignation. They had not been satisfied with finding out his landing place and swimming hole. They had gone into the old house and discovered his secret den and the big white owl. He had always regarded girls as semi-dangerous, but this was worse than even he had expected. He turned to Sally as the one in the crowd that he knew best.
“What did you go into the house for?”
“To stay the night,” Sally answered promptly. “The door was open and we went in. If people don’t want company they should keep their doors locked. Anyhow, nobody lives here and we didn’t hurt anything. We wanted to see the ghost.”
Billie grinned at this admission, a quick mischievous grin that made his whole face light up and seem to sparkle with fun.
“Did he come up and rattle his chains for you?”
“No, he didn’t, and I’ll bet he never did for anybody else.”
“Maybe not,” Billie agreed blandly. “How far up the river are you going?”
“To Mount Ponchas.”
“That’s only seven and a half miles. You can go along up the hill road from here, and when you come to the state road that has telegraph poles on it, you turn off and go west. It’s three hills over and you pass through one village, Shiloh Valley. When you come to Ponchas don’t forget to look for the grave of the Cavalier.”
“Where’s that?” asked Doris. “We haven’t heard of it at all.”
This was touching Billie’s heart in the right spot. He knew every acre of land for miles around Elmhurst and was especially interested in its historic lore. The girls did not know it then, but life was quite dull over at the Judge’s place. There were only the Judge; Mrs. Gorham, his housekeeper; Farley Riggs, his general business man; and Ben Brooks, the hired man. They were an unsympathetic household for a boy of fifteen, especially one who had been unwelcome; but he had made friends with Ben and had found him a treasure house of information.
There might be other sections of importance in the United States besides Elmhurst, Connecticut, but Ben held them in slight esteem. He had been born and brought up there and had never even wanted to go away. He was about forty when Billie first came, genial, optimistic, rather good-looking, and an insatiable reader.
Next to roaming over the country, Billie liked best to sit up in Ben’s room, looking at his books and magazines and listening to him talk on current topics and historic events. No subject was too intricate for Ben to tackle. No government ever evaded him when it came to diplomatic tricks or ways. He was on to them all, he told Billie.
It had been Ben who had first told Billie about the mysterious stranger who had come to Elmhurst back in the pioneer days. The colonists had suffered much from Indian raids until there came into their midst a man whom they called the Cavalier. With his Negro servant, he had lived among them and taught them defense against their savage enemies, taught them the best way to win over the soil and reclaim the wilderness. Yet when he died they knew no more of him than on the first day when he rode into their village. His grave lay over on the south side of Mount Ponchas where he had wished it to be, near a rock where he had often held council with the Indians.
“Be sure to see it when you get there,” Billie advised. “I wish I was going along with you.”
“Come over to our place, won’t you, Billie?” Doris asked in her most neighborly way. “I’d like to ask you about some arrowheads we found. Will you?”
Billie nodded his head nonchalantly. It was like giving a bird an invitation to call on you, or handing your card to a rabbit. But he watched them as they went up the hill road from the river, and when Doris turned and waved, he waved back. At least he was interested in his trespassers, even though he could not quite forgive them for having discovered his pet hiding place.
It was noon before they reached Ponchas, although they might have gone ever so much faster if every new flower by the way had not coaxed them to linger. They camped at the base to eat their lunch and then Kit and Ingeborg went hunting the Cavalier’s grave. It was Hedda who found it when she brought water from the spring house that had been built over a live spring gushing out at the base of the rock. Near by was a heap of gray moss-covered rock piled into a cairn, with a rugged rock cross at the head. On it were cut out the words:
He succored us
The Cavalier
1679
“Well, I do think they might have told us more than that,” Jean said, when the others came to look at it. “Perhaps, though, this would have pleased him better.”
They stood for a few moments gazing at the quiet resting place, wondering what the Cavalier’s real story was.
“I think his servant could have told us if he had wanted to,” Etoile said wisely. “I’ll ask my dad about him. He knows many of the old stories of the places around here. He came here from Canada when he was a very little boy. There were wolves around in the wintertime, and the spring came earlier then. He has found arbutus as early as the first week in March.”
When they started back they sang along the road, first the songs that all of them knew, and then Hedda sang two strange Icelandic songs her mother had taught her, lullabies with a low minor strain running through them. She had a strong, sweet voice, and sang with much feeling.
After hearing the other girls Jean said they ought to have a glee club, even if they met only once a month.
“Just for music. Mom told me that music is the universal language that everyone understands. Let’s meet at our house next week, and we can start learning the folk songs of other countries. Etoile can teach us French songs, Ingeborg and Astrid the Swedish ones, and Hedda the songs of Iceland. We could learn a great deal that way and enjoy ourselves at the same time.”
“I think we ought to meet somewhere else, not all the time at your house, Jean,” Etoile demurred in her courteous French way. “We would love to have you come any time.”
“Then we will come, won’t we, girls?” Jean said. “And Lucy will enjoy that because she can sing too, and it will be near home for her.”
But the next few weeks were filled with home activities and it was hard to squeeze in time for all that they had outlined. There were berries to can and preserve, and Ralph McRae prolonged his stay, but only on one condition—that he be allowed to take hold of the farm, with Buzzy’s help, and manage the haying and cultivating for them.
“I had no idea a man could be so handy,” Jean declared. “He’s mended the sink, and he’s burned up the rubbish at the end of the lane, and he put new roofing on the hen houses, and he even climbed into the big elm and put up Doris’ swing for her.”
Kit smiled to herself at this, for secretly she thought Ralph McRae was just right for Jean. And she, too, liked him enormously, he was like the big brother she’d always wanted. She resolved to talk it over with Buzzy, who had become her fast friend, and see if together they could work out some scheme.
“He’s very capable,” Kit agreed. “I think by the time he goes we will have everything on the place mended and repaired.”
“He’s a good doctor too,” replied Jean. “Dad’s been so much better since he came. I wish when he goes back to Saskatoon that he’d take Buzzy with him. He’s got his heart set on going West.”
“Yes,” agreed Kit, “it would be wonderful for Buzzy. Not having a father he should have the companionship of an older man.”
“What do you mean ‘an older man’?” said Jean indignantly. “To listen to you, a person would think Ralph was a decrepit old man of thirty-five. He’s only twenty-four.”
“How do you know how old he is? Did you ask him?”
“No. Becky told me. And I don’t think that’s old at all.”
It took three days to cut the hay, even with the girls and Tommy helping Buzzy and Ralph. One morning when Buzzy and Kit were working together apart from the others, Kit saw her opportunity to discuss her plan for Jean. Buzzy regarded the idea disdainfully at first, but Kit seemed so anxious he rather half-heartedly agreed to do what he could.
Buzzy had a brilliant if indefinite plan to offer. “Look, Kit,” he began. “It’s almost certain that Mom will let me go back to Saskatoon with Ralph. We’ve talked it over and Mother knows how much I want to learn about ranching. Maybe when we get out there, you and Jean could come out and visit us.”
“Wel-l,” Kit said dubiously, “it’s an awfully long way and the trip would cost too much. Besides, he’s here now. Can’t you think of something that would get results right away?”
“Gosh, what are you trying to do, marry her off or something?”
“Of course not, silly. What would I want to do that for? I’m going to miss you, Buzzy,” she added irrelevantly.
“I won’t be leaving until the end of July, so don’t get mournful, yet.”
Later that day, Kit’s confidence in Buzzy was restored, when he came up with a pail of spring water and remarked to Jean, “Say, if you go down where Ralph’s cutting now, you’ll see a bobwhite’s nest and speckled eggs. Don’t take any, though.” And Jean ran off to inspect the nest. “Is that what you meant, Kit?” he said, after Jean had gone.
“You’re getting the idea.”
Ralph was almost finished cutting the hay when Jean ran up. “Buzzy said you found a bird’s nest over here. I came to see it.”
“It’s over this way. Come on, I’ll show it to you,” Ralph said, taking her hand.
“Gee,” said Jean, when he had pointed out the nest with the three speckled eggs, “the country holds so many surprises. Where I used to live we never saw things like this, except in the educational movies they showed us at school. Even in the short time we’ve lived here, I’ve learned so much about the outdoors. Why, now I can name the birds I hear singing in the woods and recognize the wildflower plants even when they’re not in bloom. It’s really amazing.”
“I know,” said Ralph, looking down at her and smiling. “Even I have learned a good deal during my visit. It’s much different from the prairies that I’m used to.”
“Really?” said Jean, returning his gaze. “Tell me what the country out there is like. You haven’t said much about it, you know.”
So Ralph began telling her of his work on the ranch. “I wish you could see it, Jeannie, it’s really beautiful, those rolling prairies and the cattle roaming over the land.”
It was nearly time for supper, so the two walked back to the house together, leaving the others to bring in the wagonload of hay. Ralph went on to talk of other things and by the time they reached the house, Jean felt as though she had known him a long, long time instead of only a few short weeks.
“Come back here, Ella Lou. No use in chasing rabbits when you never catch any of them,” came Becky’s voice from the driveway. “Anybody home?”
Kit sprang out of the porch swing and Doris emerged from the vegetable garden as if by magic. Billie Ellis sat beside Becky as big as life, as she would have said, and looked amiably at the girls.
“The Judge is very sick,” Miss Craig began abruptly. “I’m going down there with Billie, and I may have to stay overnight. He’s pretty low, I understand, and wants me, so I suppose I’ll have to go. Goodbye. If you’ve got any tansy in the garden, Margie, I’d like to take it down.”
Jean hurried to get a bunch of the herbs, and Mrs. Craig walked out to the car.
“Is he very sick, really, Becky?” she asked.
“Can’t tell a thing about it till I see him, and then maybe not. A man’s a plague at best and when he’s sick he’s worse. I suppose it’s acute indigestion. Dick Ellis always did think he could eat anything he wanted to and do anything he wanted to, and the Lord would grant him a special dispensation to get away with it because he was Dick Ellis. I guess from all accounts he hasn’t changed much. I’ll get a good hot mustard plaster outside, and calomel and castor oil inside, and tansy tea to quiet him, and I guess he’ll live awhile yet. Get back in the car, Ella Lou.”
“Well, of all things,” said Mrs. Craig, as the car backed out of the drive. “And they haven’t spoken to each other in over thirty years. I think that’s the best thing that’s happened since we came here.”
“What do you mean, Mom?” asked Jean. “I didn’t know that Rebecca knew the Judge.”
“They were engaged years ago, dear,” Mrs. Craig explained. “They quarreled a few days before they were to have been married, and Rebecca broke the engagement. They never spoke to each other afterwards. She wanted to go up to Boston on her wedding trip and on to Concord from there, and the Judge wanted to go to New York, as he had some business to settle there and he thought he could attend to it on the honeymoon trip. Rebecca said if he couldn’t take time away from his business long enough to be married, she wouldn’t bother him to marry her at all. Even now it’s rather hard deciding which one was right. Now he thinks he is dying and has sent for her. And I suppose, underneath all her odd ways, that she still loves him after all.”
The girls were quite intrigued with the story of Becky’s romance and waited eagerly for the sound of her car turning into the driveway on the return trip. But night came on and passed, and it was well into the next afternoon before Billie drove in alone.
“Grandfather’d like to have Mr. Craig come down and draw up his will. Becky says he’s been a lawyer, and there isn’t another one anywhere near here.”
“But, Billie, he isn’t strong enough,” began Mrs. Craig. She was sitting out on the porch, a basket of mending on her lap, and in the lounge chair beside her was Mr. Craig. “Is the Judge worse?”
“Gosh, no, he’s better. Aunt Becky fixed him right up. He’d just eaten too much, she said.”
“I think I’d like to go, dear,” said Mr. Craig. “You or Jean could come along, and I’d like to meet him again. I knew him when I was a boy.”
It was his first trip away from the house since they had moved there, but now that the time had come, it seemed an easy thing to do, as if the strength had been granted to him to meet just such a crisis. Mrs. Craig accompanied him, and they drove over through the village and up two miles beyond until they came to the Judge’s home, a large square colonial house on a hill, surrounded by tall elms and rock maples. The green blinds were all carefully closed except those in the south chamber where Becky held supreme sway now. She sat by his bedside, spick and span in a dress of green linen. There was a bunch of dahlias on the table.
“Come in, come in, boy,” the Judge said in his deep voice. He stretched out his hand to Mr. Craig and nodded his head. There was a look in his eyes that told of an indomitable will, but they softened when they rested on his visitor.
“Sit down, lad. No, the easy chair. Becky, give him the easy one. So. Well, they try their best to get us, don’t they? I thought last night would be my last.”
“Oh, nonsense,” laughed Miss Craig. “Just ate too much, and had a little attack of indigestion, Dick. You’ll live to be eighty-nine and a half.”
The judge’s eyes twinkled as he gazed at her.
“Still contrary as can be, Becky. Won’t even let me have the satisfaction of thinking you saved my life, will you?”
“A good dose of peppermint and soda would have done just as well,” answered Becky serenely, turning to introduce Mrs. Craig. “He says he wants to make his will, but I think it’s only a notion, and he wants company. Still I guess we’ll humor him. It seems that he was going to leave everything he had to me. And I just found him out in time. The very idea when he’s got Billie, his own grandchild, flesh and blood, and such a charming boy too. He can leave me Billie if he likes, but he can’t leave me anything else. So you make it that way, Tom.”
“Leave her Billie, Tom,” sighed the Judge, “leave her Billie, and me too, if she’ll take us both.”
“Wouldn’t have you for a gift, Dick,” she answered, cheerful and happy as a girl as she looked down at him. “You’re a fussy, spoiled, selfish old man, just as you always were, and I couldn’t be bothered with you. But I’ll keep an eye on you so you don’t kill yourself before your time with sweet corn and peach shortcake, though I suppose it’s a pleasant sort of taking off at that. I’ll take Billie and Margie around the garden while you and Tom fix up that will, and mind you do it right. Billie’s going to have all that belongs to him.”
As the door closed behind her, the Judge winked solemnly at Mr. Craig. “Finest woman in seven counties. Ought to have been the mother of heroes and statesmen, but there she is, mothering Billie and bossing me to her heart’s content. Do you think she’d marry me, Tom?”
“I don’t know, Judge,” Mr. Craig replied. “Becky’s odd.”
“Well, maybe so. Go ahead and make the will as she says. Everything to Billie, and make her guardian.”
So the will was drawn up and Mrs. Gorham, the housekeeper, and Mrs. Craig witnessed it. Billie, standing down in the garden with Miss Craig, did not realize what was happening. He only knew that somehow the barriers of ice were lifted between himself and his grandfather, and that a new era had dawned for all of them.
He watched the Craigs drive away, and went back upstairs to the long corridor. Becky heard his step and opened the door of the sickroom.
“Come in here, Billie,” she said. It was the first time that Billie had ever been in his grandfather’s room. He stood inside the door, a sturdy figure, barefooted and tanned, with eyes oddly like those that surveyed him from the pillow. He hesitated a moment, but the Judge put out his hand, a strong bony one, and Billie gripped it in his broad one.
“I’m awfully glad you’re better, Grandfather,” he said, a bit shyly.
“So am I, Billie, last night I thought my hour had come, but I guess it was only a warning. A meeting with the Button Molder perhaps. Do you know about him? No? You must read ‘Peer Gynt.’ A boy of your age should be well read.”
“And when has he had any chance to get well read, I’d like to know?” demanded Rebecca, in swift defense of her favorite. “The boy finished the district school a year ago. Been learning everything he knows since then from Ben, your hired help. If the Lord has spared you for any purpose, Dick, it is to bring up Billie right and teach him all you know.”
“Well, well, quit scolding me, Becky. Do as you like with him. I’ll supply the money.” The Judge pressed Billie’s hand almost with affection. “What do you want to be?”
“A lawyer or a naturalist,” was Billie’s prompt reply.
“Be both. They’re good antidotes for each other. Talk it over with him, Becky, and do as you think best.”
He closed his eyes, and Billie took it as a signal to leave the room, but the Judge spoke again.
“Where do you sleep, Bill?”
Billie colored at this. It was the first time anyone had ever called him Bill and he felt two feet taller all at once. “In the little bedroom over the east ell, sir.”
“Change your belongings to the room next to this. It faces the south and has two bookcases filled with my books that I had at college. You will enjoy them.”
Billie went out softly, down the circular staircase to the lower hall and, once outdoors, on a dead run for the barn. Ben was husking corn on the barn floor, sitting on a milking stool with the corn rising around him in billows, whistling and singing alternately.
Billie poured out his news breathlessly, and Ben took it all calmly.
“Well, I’m glad for you. I always believed the Judge would come out of his trance some day and do the proper thing. That Miss Becky’s a sightly woman. Knows just how to take hold. Guess she could marry the Judge tomorrow if she wanted to. Mrs. Craig is a fine woman too. I’ve never seen her before.”
Somehow this didn’t seem to fit in with Billie’s mood and he left the barn. All the world looked different to him. He was wanted, really wanted, now. He wasn’t just somebody the Judge had taken in because they were related and he had to out of pride. He was to have the big south chamber right next to the Judge’s own room and study all he wanted. Best of all, since he had grasped that bony hand in his, he knew that he could go to him with anything and that he really was going to be a grandfather to him.
It was nearly two miles over to Woodhow if he went cross lots, but he started. When he arrived he found Doris stoning cherries for pies. “Hi, Billie,” she called. “Come over here and help.”
Billie climbed the stone wall and came, flushed and triumphant. Throwing himself down on the grass beside Doris, he told what had happened, and she made up for all that Ben had lacked in enthusiasm and imagination.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” she cried, setting down the pan of cherries. “Why, you can be anything at all now you want to be.”
Billie looked at her peacefully. “I knew you’d take it like that,” he said. “I just wanted to tell somebody who would almost feel the way I did about it. You’re a swell pal, know it?”
“Thanks, Billie, that’s a real compliment. Come on into the kitchen and I’ll give you some gingerbread with whipped cream on it.” The two went into the house together and while Billie ate, Doris listened while he planned the future.
“I just know you’ll succeed, Billie,” she told him confidently, when she said goodbye on the back steps. “Come down any time and we’ll talk about it some more.”
Rebecca stopped by later that afternoon, chin up and smiling.
“He’s sound asleep,” she said. “Now that everything’s kind of quieted down, I don’t mind telling you something. After Billie had gone, the Judge and I talked things over and I don’t know but what I’ll have to move over there and take care of the two of them. Land knows they need it.”
“Oh, Becky, marry the Judge?” gasped Jean.
“Well, I might as well,” laughed Rebecca. “We’ve wasted thirty years now, and he’ll fret and fuss for thirty more if I don’t marry him. I’ll sell Maple Grove, or you Craigs can have it if you like, rent free.”
The last week in July saw the end of Ralph McRae’s visit at Woodhow. He had been East nearly two months and Buzzy was to go back with him. It was impossible to measure or even to estimate Buzzy’s inward joy over the decision, for there had been born in him the spirit of those who long for travel and adventure. He had listened to the distant whistle of the trains that slipped through the Quinnebaug valley, and longed to be on them going anywhere at all.
“I wish I were going too,” said Sally. “I wish all of us were going. I’d love to have a ranch out there and work it myself.”
“Oh, dear child, what strange notions you do have.” Mrs. Hancock sighed. “I never thought of such things when I was your age. I wanted to be a teacher, that was all.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Well, your grandfather said I was needed at home, and so I stayed on until I met your father when I was eighteen. Then I married.”
“And maybe if he’d let you be a teacher, you wouldn’t have wanted to get married. I want to study all about trees and forestry and conservation, and I want to ride over miles and miles of forests that are all mine. I’m going to, too, some day.”
“How old are you now, Sally?” asked Ralph.
“Practically sixteen. Fifteen and a half, anyway.”
“Maybe next year when I bring Buzzy home, we can coax Aunt Luella to take a trip out with you. How’s that?”
Mrs. Hancock flushed delicately, and smiled up at her tall nephew. “How you talk, Ralph. That would cost a sight of money.”
“Well, I tell you, Aunt Luella,” said Ralph, his hands deep in his pockets as he leaned back against the high mantelpiece in the living room. “I want to hand over Woodhow to you and the children. I haven’t any feeling for it like you have, and it seems to me, after talking it over with Mr. Craig, that it rightfully belongs to you. He’d like to buy it, he says, inside of two or three years. They like it over there, and plan to stay in Elmhurst, but if you want to take it over, I’m willing to transfer it before I go West.”
“Ralph, you don’t mean you’d give up the place yourself? Why, whatever would I do with it? I love every inch of ground there and every blade of grass, but you see how it is. Buzzy’s set on going West and Sally wants to go to college and I don’t know what all. I couldn’t live on there alone, and they haven’t got the feeling for it that I have. The younger generation seems to have rooted itself up out of the soil. I wouldn’t know what to do with it after I’d got it, and I wouldn’t take it away from the Craigs for anything. Why, they love it almost as much as I do.”
“I know, Aunt Luella, but I wanted you to have the opportunity to say yes or no,” answered Ralph. “Now, then, here’s the other way out. Supposing I make it over to you, and you have the rental money, and then sell it to Mr. Craig when he is able to take it over. You’d have the good of it then.”
“That’s the best way, Mom,” Sally spoke up. “They have all been so nice to us, and it’s just as Ralph says. They do love it.”
“You could come back East every now and then and visit if you did make up your mind to live out in Saskatoon.”
“Land, you speak of journeying thousands of miles as if you were driving up to Norwich. I went to Providence once after I was married, and that’s the only long trip I’ve ever made.”
“Then it will take you a whole year to get ready,” laughed Ralph. “Buzzy and I will be back for you and Sally next summer.”
The night before their departure Mrs. Craig gave a dinner for them, with Rebecca and her new husband, Judge Ellis. Ralph and Buzzy sat between Kit and Jean at the table. Both girls were sad to think of their friends leaving.
“We’re going to miss you, Ralph,” said Jean rather shyly. Her mother had told her about the new business arrangement whereby Woodhow was to become really their home.
Ralph colored slightly. He could not bring himself even to try and express just what it had meant to him, this long summer visit with them. He had come East a stranger, and had found the warmest kind of welcome from the newcomers in the old home. He looked around at them tonight, and thought how much he felt at home there.
First, there was Mr. Craig, with his thin, scholarly face, high forehead, and curly dark hair just touched with gray, his keen hazel eyes behind rimless glasses, and finely modeled chin. Then Mrs. Craig, surely the most gracious woman he had ever known excepting his own mother. Just the mere sound of her soft, engaging laugh made trouble seem very unimportant. And Kit, imperious, argumentative Kit, so full of energy that she was like a Roman candle. He would best remember her as she had stepped out of the shadows into the moonlight to welcome him. Doris beamed on him from her place across the table. To Doris he was like a knight that had come along the highway and, if possible, she would have had him in crimson hose and plumed cap. And Tommy, fun-loving, constantly chattering, full of odd knowledge that boys of eleven seemed to pick up, and always asking questions.
Last of all, Ralph looked down at Jean at his side. Jean, almost eighteen, already a replica of her mother in her quick tenderness and her looks. His eyes lingered on her. She was very sweet, he thought, the sweetest of them all. He was going to miss Jean very much.
Tommy trailed Ralph into the living room after the others that evening and told him over and over again to send him a tame bear, one that he could bring up by hand and train.
“Well, I guess you’ll have your hands full, Ralph,” Rebecca exclaimed, “if you fill all these commissions. I declare it seems as if you belonged to all of us.”
Jean and Kit drove Ralph and Buzzy to the station the next day. The boys had already made their goodbyes to the others at home, for Mrs. Hancock had preferred it that way. She declared she would cry at the station and would rather say goodbye to her son and nephew at home, where she could weep in privacy.
As the train puffed its way around the hillside bend of the track, Jean remembered when she had once before waited for the same train to arrive. The day which now seemed so long ago, when she was meeting the family arriving from Sandy Cove. That time she had thought the train would never come. Now, all too fast, it was making its way into the station.
“You promise to write to us now, Buzzy,” reminded Kit.
“Sure thing.”
“I’ll be back next summer, Jeannie,” said Ralph, looking deep into her eyes. “And you’ll be surprised how fast the days will fly by in the meantime. Goodbye, dear.”
“Goodbye.” Jean was suddenly overcome by the meaning of their farewell and added, “Oh, Ralph, I shall miss you so very much.”
As she and Kit walked back to the car, Jean thought over what Ralph had said last. Would the next year go so fast as he had said? He seemed so positive. Yet Jean wondered.
Jean had no need to worry. Her adventures at an art school in New York, told in JEAN CRAIG IN NEW YORK proved that Ralph was right.
FALCON BOOKS
Jean Craig Grows Up
BY KAY LYTTLETON
When Tom Craig came home from the Pacific, wounded, the Craig family found there wasn’t enough money to maintain their beautiful home and send Tom to the country to regain his health. So the family moved to a farm in Elmhurst. Lovely Jean, only seventeen, was a staff of courage for her family in their new life. But it wasn’t all hard work. There were picnics, new friends and there was Ralph McRae, the young and handsome landlord.
This is the heart-warming story of a family who met hardship with pluck and humor, and of Jean Craig, gay and lovable, whose courage surmounted all obstacles.
Other FALCON BOOKS for Girls:
JEAN CRAIG IN NEW YORK
JEAN CRAIG FINDS ROMANCE
PATTY AND JO, DETECTIVES