“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.”
8. The House on the Hill
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.”
9. Fateful Moment
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.”
10. New Home, New Friends
“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.”
11. Jean Makes a Discovery
“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.”