For several weeks after the reading of Aunt Jimmy’s will, it was the talk of the neighbourhood, the alternate topic of conversation being the death of Terence O’More and the sudden disappearance of Bird. For Bird’s Uncle John had come and gone so suddenly that few knew of his flying visit, and those who did turned it into an interesting mystery. Some said that he was a very rich relation from the west, others that he was not an uncle at all, but the agent of the State Orphan Asylum to which the Lanes, afraid of being expected to care for Bird, had hurried her off. It is needless to say that it was Mrs. Slocum, piqued at not securing Bird as a maid of all work and no pay, who concocted this tale.

In due time Probate Judge Ricker appointed Joshua Lane administrator, to take charge of the furniture and few effects that O’More had left and settle up his debts as far as possible. There was a little money left of what his wife had inherited, in the Northboro Bank, but only enough to pay his debts, it was feared, without so much as leaving a single dollar for Bird.

Since the homestead and Mill Farm property that belonged to Mrs. O’More had been forfeited through some defect in the drawing up of a mortgage coupled with O’More’s slackness in attending to the matter, Joshua Lane had felt there was something wrong and that a little good legal advice, combined with common sense, might have at least saved something if not the entire property.

When, a year later, the mill had slipped into Abiram Slocum’s hands, Joshua’s suspicions were again aroused, for Slocum’s transactions in real estate were usually adroit and to the cruel disadvantage of some one, if not absolutely dishonest according to the letter of the law; but when Joshua had spoken to O’More about the matter, he, feeling hopeful about his painting, had put him off with a promise to “some day” show him the “letters and papers” that bore upon the unfortunate business.

The day had never come, and now that Joshua had the right he determined to sift the affair thoroughly, but the papers were nowhere to be found. The envelope containing O’More’s bank-book held nothing else but the certificate of his marriage with Sarah Turner, and some letters from his mother in the old country.

Joshua, though slow, was not without shrewdness, and he had not only kept the old house where the O’Mores had lived securely locked by day, until when, upon the selling of the furniture, it should again return to the Slocums from whom it was rented, but at Mrs. Lane’s suggestion he had Nellis, his oldest son, sleep there at night, as she said, “To keep folks whom I’ll not name from prowlin’.”

Joshua looked to the sale of the furniture to at least pay the last quarter’s rent due. By a strange happening the afternoon before the vendue was to take place, as he was about to drive up to the old house at the cross-roads to make a final thorough search in closets, drawers, and the old-time chimney nooks for the missing papers, a passer-by, hurrying in the same direction, called out to him: “There’s a fire up cemetery hill way; smoke’s comin’ over the hickory woods. Maybe Dr. Jedd’s big hay barn or Slocum’s old farm, both bein’ in a plum line from here.” When, sharply whipping up the old mare, much to her astonishment, he hurried to the place, he not only found that it was the old farm-house hopelessly ablaze from roof to cellar, but Abiram Slocum appearing a few moments later by the road that ran north of the place, flew into either a real or well-acted rage, shaking his fist and calling: “It’s that there hulking boy, Nellis, o’ yourn, that has done me this mischief. Must ’a’ smoked his pipe in bed or left his candle lighted until it burned down, for it’s plain to be seen by the way the roof’s ketched, the fire started upstairs and smouldered around all day until it bust out everywheres to onct.”

“I reckon yer insured,” said Joshua, dryly, taking little account of what he said, as he began to realize that the fire had put an end forever to the discovery of the papers that might have brought good luck to Bird, as well as destroyed a part of the slender property.

“A trifle—a mere trifle—not the cost of the wood in the house, let alone the labour at present rates. I could hev rented the place tew teachers for a summer cottage for twenty a month, and I intended buyin’ in the furniture so to do. If”—and he drew his mean features together, and then spread them out again in a spasm of indignation—“law was just, you’d ought to make it up to me, Joshua Lane,—that you had.”

But when he found that the few neighbours who had gathered were not sympathetic, and only seemed to regret the fire on account of the O’More furniture, he disappeared, and, strangely enough, later on no one could tell in which direction he went or if he had gone afoot, on horseback, or in the yellow buckboard in which he was wont to drive about to harry his tenants and surprise his farm hands if they but paused to straighten their backs.

When Joshua told of the fire at the supper-table, Mrs. Lane fairly snorted with indignation, saying, “Firstly, Nellis didn’t smoke last night, bein’ out o’ tobacco and leavin’ his pipe on the chimneypiece, where it is now, and secondly he asked me for a candle; and then, the Lockwood boys comin’ along, and offerin’ to walk up with him, he went off while I was lookin’ for the store-closet key which had fallen off its nail, and clean through the bottom of the clock”—(the inside of the long body of the tall clock being the place where the Lane family’s keys lived, each on its own nail).

“This morning when he came down home to breakfast he mentioned it, and said it didn’t matter because the moon was so bright he undressed by light of it, Bill Lockwood stopping up there with him for company’s sake.

“A trifle of insurance indeed! and all hope of Bird bein’ righted gone! Joshua Lane, do you know what I think and believe?” And Lauretta Ann jumped up so suddenly that her ample proportions struck the tea-tray edge and an avalanche of cups and saucers covered the floor.

“Your thoughts and beliefs ’ll soon fill a book, big as the dictionary and doubtless be worth as much,” said Joshua, pausing a second with a potato speared on his fork, while he gave his wife a stern, silencing look that was so rare that whenever she saw it, she gave heed at once, “but in this here matter I’d advise you to keep ’em good and close to yourself. We’ve got plenty ahead to shoulder this summer, besides which if papers had been found, ’tain’t likely any lawyer hereabouts would risk taking the matter without money to back him, and ’Biram Slocum to face.”

So saying, Joshua, having put himself outside of the potato, a final piece of pie, and the tea that had been cooling in his saucer, pushed back his chair and drew on his coat, saying as he went out: “The first strawberries over ter Aunt Jimmy’s ’ll be ready for marketing on Monday, and this is Thursday. I must look around and engage pickers. That acre bed of the new-fangled kind is a week ahead of Lockwood’s earliest. Aunt Jimmy was no fool when it came to foresighted fruit raisin’.”

“I never said she was, nor in other things either if her meanin’ could be read. What time did you say the fire started?” she added in an unconcerned sort of way, as she stooped to pick up the scattered cups, which were so substantial that they had not been broken by their fall.

“Let me see—it must hev been close to two o’clock when I drove out of the yard; the mail carrier had just passed, and he’s due at the corner at two, and at the rate I went I wasn’t fifteen minutes from the fire. From the way it had holt, it must have been goin’ all of half an hour. Queer ’Biram didn’t scent it sooner workin’ in the corn patch back of the wood lot as he appeared to be, leastways he came down the lane from there.

“Fire couldn’t hev ketched before one o’clock, for the hands up at Lockwood’s go up that way before and after noon as well as of mornings, and if Nellis had left anything smouldering, they’d have surely smelt it, first or last.”

Joshua paused a moment, but, as Mrs. Lane asked no more questions, went out, closing the door. No sooner did she hear the latch catch than she jumped up, saying to herself: “Appeared to come from the corn patch, did he? I wonder what he was doin’ there? He planted late, so the corn can’t be set for hoeing; he might be watchin’ for crows or riggin’ a scarecrow.” As she pronounced the last word she had reached the dresser where hung a large square calendar that advertised one of the husky sorts of breakfast foods that taste as if they might have been the stuffing of Noah’s pillow.

Lifting this down she carried it to the table, and, after hunting in the dresser drawer for the pencil with which she kept her various egg and butter accounts, she proceeded to put a series of dots about the particular day of the month (it was June 10th), and then reversing the sheet, she covered the back with a collection of curiously spelled and, to the casual observer, meaningless words.

She had barely time to replace the calendar when the boys came in for their supper, and she fell vigorously to rearranging the table and brewing fresh tea.

The elder boys spoke of the fire as a bit of “old Slocum’s usual luck,” for it was known that the house would need a great deal of repairing before any one but the artist, whose thoughts were always in the clouds, would be willing to hire it. Lammy alone rejoiced in the fire because, as he said, “When Bird comes back, the house won’t be there for her to see and make her sorry.”

“Better not say that outdoors,” warned Nellis, “or Slocum ’ll say you fired it on purpose—he’d like nothing better. By the way, mother,” he continued, as Mrs. Lane glanced keenly at Lammy, “what do you think I heard at the shop to-day?”

“Concernin’ what?”

“The Mill Farm.”

“I can’t think. Those Larkin folks hev worked the land these two years past, but the mill hasn’t run this long while,—not since the winter Mis’ O’More died and the ice bulged the dam; the fodder trade has all gone away, and I don’t know what ’Biram Slocum can turn it to ’nless he can insure the water an’ then let it loose somehow.”

“There is a party of engineer fellows, or something of the sort, just come to camp out up by Rooster Lake,—sort of a summer school, I guess, for there are some older men along that they call professors. They scatter all over the country surveyin’ and crackin’ up the rocks with little hammers to see what they are made of.

“This afternoon half a dozen of them came down to the shop to see some new kind of a boring tool that our foreman has designed, and Mr. Clarke was with them,—you know he is the man who started the Art and Trade School in Northboro, and has his finger in a dozen pies. Pretty soon the superintendent called me and said, ‘Here, Lane, you live out at Laurelville; these gentlemen wish to see the old Turner Mill Farm place. I’ll let you off the rest of the day if you’ll show them the way over.’

“I got in the runabout with Mr. Clarke and the others followed in a livery six-seater. The old gentleman asked me all sorts of questions about the water-power, and how low the stream fell in summer, and if the pond ever froze clear through, and one thing and another.

“When we got to the Mill Farm, there was no one at home but the dogs and hens; I suppose the folks had all gone to Northboro to the circus.”

“Sure enough, it is circus day! How did I forget it?” ejaculated Mrs. Lane. “That accounts for why there were so few folks on the roads this noon!”

“Yes, everybody seems to have gone but ourselves, even Lockwood’s field-hands took a day off.”

“They did? Then they didn’t go up and down the cemetery hill road this noon?”

“Of course not, why should they?” replied Nellis.

“You didn’t remember that it was circus day, did you, and I guess it is the first time you ever forgot it,” said Mrs. Lane to Lammy.

“I knew—all right, but I’m savin’ up for—you know,” replied Lammy, wriggling out of his chair and going to the door where he began crumbing bread and throwing it to some little chickens that had strayed up out of bounds.

“I do wish you had mentioned it, anyhow; it would hev done us all good to have a change, though to be sure I do suppose some folks would have turned our going into disrespect to Aunt Jimmy,—Mis’ Slocum in particular.”

“She went, and Ram, and Mr. Slocum, though he came home early. I saw him down in the turnpike store back of the schoolhouse this noon; he was sayin’ he’d had to come back early on account of havin’ a lot of things to attend to over at the Mill Farm this afternoon,” said Lammy.

“The turnpike store? He doesn’t trade there—it’s a mile out of his way,” said Mrs. Lane, thoughtfully.

“He didn’t get to the Mill Farm, anyway,” said Nellis, “because I was there from after dinner until I came home just now. Where was I? You got me all off the track.”

“You were sayin’ that Mr. Clarke asked you all sorts of questions about the mill stream,” said Mrs. Lane, who now seemed to have lost interest in Nellis’s story.

“Oh, yes,—well, Mr. Clarke and that Mr. Brotherton,—that is superintendent of the engine shop in Northboro,—poked about a lot together, measuring things and figuring in a little book he had in his pocket. It looked as if they were going to make an afternoon of it, and as I saw a fishin’ pole inside one of the open sheds, I thought I’d go down the sluice way and try for a mess of perch. I was lyin’ quiet out along a willow stump, thinkin’ the folks were in the mill, when I heard voices on the dam above. Mr. Clarke said: ‘I tell you what, Brotherton, I want you to negotiate this affair for me. That Slocum is a tricky fellow. I saw him a month ago and told him I’d not touch the property until that snarl about the mortgage foreclosure was untangled, the price he asked was outrageous for two hundred acres, of course the buildings are only fit for kindling. Now I want you to either buy me the farm and water right, or else lease it for say twenty years; then I will run a spur of the Northboro Valley railroad down here, move the locomotive works and the paper-mill, and enlarge both plants. This is the right place; plenty of room to build houses for the hands, and close enough to my place to be under my eye without being annoying.

“‘It will suit my daughter Marion, too. She has all sorts of ideas about building a model village. Of course this is between ourselves, for if that old Slocum rat dreamed that I was behind you, he would ask a dollar a blade for every spear of run-out wire-grass on the farm.’”

“To think of it!” sighed Mrs. Lane, sitting down so suddenly in the big rocking-chair that it nearly turned a somersault in surprise, “and it was only a scrap of a mortgage, not more’n $2500, that was the cause of workin’ the O’Mores out of property that had been in her family near two hundred years. Everybody knows there was crooked business if it could only be proved. But your father can’t find any papers, and now just as he was going this afternoon to search through poor O’More’s furniture and things at the house, it had to go and burn down, and the hopes we had that something might be worked out for Bird hev all gone up in smoke,” she said, addressing the stove solemnly.

The boys went out together to take a stroll up to the scene of the fire. Hardly had they disappeared when Mrs. Lane jumped from the chair with such a bound that it completed the somersault and stood on its head facing the wall.

“I wonder!” she ejaculated, addressing the pump by the sink, and shaking her finger at it as if the gayly painted bit of iron was her husband. “Yes, it must be it. All along I allowed ’Biram Slocum fired that house for the insurance. Now, by a new light I read he did it so in case there was any papers or letters to and fro about that mortgage that they’d get burned.

“I’ve noticed he and she hev made plenty of excuses to get into the house alone, but I never reckoned it was for anything else but for general meddlin’, and pa’s keepin’ everything so close, even nailing up the cellar doors and winders, balked ’em.

“He knew the auction was ter-morrow, and that he’d rather burn the papers and furniture than risk Joshua or others finding ’em is my firm belief, and I’d like to prove it. Not that it’ll do Bird any good now, but it would be a satisfaction, even though, as Joshua says, ‘We’ve got enough business of our own to shoulder before fall and settlin’ time comes.’ I wonder if ’Biram ’ll hev the cheek to ask for the rent now.

“Yes, I’m going to do a little nosing on my own account,—yes I be!” she continued, adding more mysterious words to the back of the calendar and nodding determinedly at the pump as if it had contradicted. “Knowing never does come amiss, even if it is salted down for a spell. Shoo!” she cried presently, waving the dish towel at the chickens who had boldly ventured in, and then the tumult, caused by Twinkle’s chasing them back to their yard with much barking and sundry nips, brought her back to the present and the work of dish-washing and tidying the kitchen for the evening.

Even then her head and hands did not work together. She hung the biscuit in a pail down the well and set away the butter in the bread-box, put sugar instead of salt into the bread sponge she was setting; and, finally, before she sat down to rest remembering that the pantry door locked hard and creaked when it opened, she poured toothache drops instead of oil upon both hinges and key, and presently began to sniff about and wonder if Dinah Lucky, who had been in that day to do the weekly laundry, was doctoring for “break-bone pains” again, and hoped she had used the laudanum outside instead of in, otherwise nobody could tell when she would turn up to do the ironing.

******

Next morning if Joshua Lane and Lammy had not been in such a hurry to get down to the fruit farm to prepare the crates and small boxes for the coming strawberry picking, they would have noticed that Lauretta Ann seemed to be quite excited and anxious to get them out of the way.

But Joshua was unusually absorbed and quiet—he was disappointed at not finding the papers—but he had a hard summer’s work ahead of him with plenty of thinking in it; while as for Lammy,—he was trying to calculate how many strawberries he must pick at a cent and a half a quart to buy a round-trip ticket from Laurelville to New York, so that he might invite Bird to come up for a Fourth of July visit; also as to whether it would be possible to do this and have anything left to buy fire-crackers. Yet, after all, crackers were of small account, for Bird did not care much for noisy pleasure, and if she didn’t come, he wouldn’t care for even cannon crackers himself.

“I suppose ’Biram Slocum will go over to Northboro smart and early to collect his insurance,” Mrs. Lane remarked, apparently looking out of the window, but stealing a side glance at her husband’s face.

“Mebbe he will; but when I turned the cows out an hour ago, I saw him driving Milltown way in his ordinary clothes with a plough and a dinner-pail along, so I reckoned he was goin’ to work on that patch of early corn he’s got down at the Mill Farm.”

At this Mrs. Lane’s eyes glistened, and she plunged some dishes into the tub of suds with a splash that was an unmistakable signal that breakfast was over and all but lazy people should be out.

This morning she bustled so that a half hour did all the work of “redding” up that usually took two at the very least, and when Dinah Lucky came to do the ironing with no sniff of laudanum about her, though the kitchen was still heavy with it, Mrs. Lane looked puzzled, then much to that fat aunty’s astonishment popped the batch of six plump loaves into the oven and, leaving Dinah to tend the baking,—a thing that save for illness she had never trusted to other hands in her twenty years of housekeeping,—she took a small basket, a knife, and her crisp gingham sunbonnet, and muttering something about trying to get one more mess of dandelion greens, even if it was counted late, disappeared through the woodshed door.

Dandelions grew in plenty in the moist meadow below the cow barn, but Mrs. Lane crossed the road and took a winding path through the woods. After following this for some distance and crossing several fields where she filled her basket with greens, cutting only the very youngest tufts with the greatest deliberation, she turned into the highway through the cemetery gate and walked rapidly past the “four corners,” never stopping until she stood in the enclosure that had once been Bird O’More’s garden. Then she set down the basket, and, seating herself on the scorched chopping-block, looked about her.

The house had burned down to the foundation; some of the heavy chestnut beams had not been wholly consumed but lay in a heap on the hard dirt floor of the cellar. Otherwise the only bits of woodwork remaining were the frames of two cellar windows that had been protected by the deep stone niches in which they rested. The great centre chimney, around which so many old houses are built, held its own, and its various openings, most of them long unused, marked the location of the different rooms; several of these, such as the smoke closet and brick oven, being closed by rusty iron doors.

Presently Mrs. Lane set out on a tour of inspection. The half dozen outbuildings were quickly explored, for, with the exception of the barn, they were quite open to the weather and as rickety as card houses. Tall weeds struggled with the straggling sweet-william and fiery, hardy poppies in the strip before the lilac bushes that Bird had called her garden, and the rusty wire of the henyard fence enclosed a crowd of nettles that stretched toward the light like ill-favoured prisoners in a pen. The grass and low bushes had been trampled by the people who had gathered to watch the fire, as well as by the cows that had strayed in through the latchless gate.

Clearly there was nothing to be discovered here. Next Mrs. Lane walked about the ruined foundation looking for a likely spot to get down into the cellar. The old chimney with its nooks and crannies was the only thing left to examine, and she had made up her mind to do it even if it meant a rough climb, bruised knees, and scratched fingers.

In some places little heaps of ashes were still smouldering, but by picking her way carefully down the stone steps that had been under the flap-door, she reached the base of the chimney and tried the first iron door. It was warped with the heat, but after some difficulty she opened it, only to find the ample closet absolutely empty. Talking to herself and saying that it was not likely that anybody, even an artist, would hide papers in a cellar, Mrs. Lane looked up to see how it would be possible to reach what had been the kitchen level, where the chances looked brighter; for there was the brick oven and a wide fireplace, closed by sheet iron through which a stove-pipe had pierced. There was no way up but to use the chinks between the big stones for stairs and climb. True, she had seen an old ladder in the barn, but Lauretta Ann was too practical a woman to trust a dozed rickety ladder—she preferred to cling with her fingers and climb, and cling and climb she presently did.

To young people it seems a very small feat to climb the outside of a broad, rough, stone chimney that slopes gradually from a wide base toward the top. For Mrs. Lane—stout, thick of foot and nearer fifty than forty—it was a terrible exertion, and she paused between every step she took to catch her breath, muttering, “Lauretta Ann Lane, you are a fool if ever there was one. Suppose folks should pass by and see you creepin’ up here like a squawkin’ pigeon woodpecker hanging to a tree?”

She, however, did not in the least resemble even that heavy-bodied bird. Did you ever see a woodchuck mount a low tree when cornered by dogs? That was what Mrs. Lane looked like as she climbed. And did you ever see the same woodchuck scramble, slip, and flop down, flatten himself, and then amble to his hole, when he thought his pursuers had ceased their hunt? Well, that was the way in which Mrs. Lane came down to the cellar bottom, when she found that the brick oven had been used merely to hold broken crockery and such litter.

For a minute or two she sat flat on the floor, resting, nursing her bruised hands, and gazing idly at the outline of the sky through one of the window holes in the stone wall. Then, as she recovered herself, a bit of something fluttering from a broken staple in the scorched window-frame attracted her attention. She picked herself up and examined it. The glass had broken and fallen in, while the bit of metal had caught a narrow rag of woollen material some six inches in length. This was singed at the edges, but enough remained to show that it was a herring-bone pattern of brown and gray such as is often seen in men’s suitings.

Mrs. Lane looked at the rag thoughtfully for a moment, then, detaching it, pinned it carefully inside the lining of her waist, picked up her basket of greens which were by this time rather withered, freshened them with water from the well, and trudged home openly by the highway, saying, as she walked, “’Tain’t much, and most likely it’s nothin’—still maybe it’s a stitch in the knittin’, and if it is, another ’ll turn up sooner or later to loop on to it.”

At dinner Mr. Lane gave his wife an odd look saying: “Why, mother, where’ve you been? You look as if you’d gone a berryin’ on all fours! You’re scratched on the nose and chin, let alone your hands.”

“Be I?” answered “mother,” so fiercely that Joshua quailed, and remembered guiltily that he had forgotten her request to clear a tangle of cat brier from over a tumble-down stone wall in the turkey pasture, where his wife passed many times a day to herd this most contrary and uncertain of the poultry tribe, so he said nothing more, but held his quarter of dried apple pie before his face like a fan, while he slowly reduced its size by taking furtive bites at the corners.

About four o’clock Mrs. Lane seated herself on the front porch to sew. She was dressed in a clean print gown, with her collar fastened by a large photograph “miniature” pin of Janey when a baby, a sign that she considered herself dressed for callers. True it was Saturday and Dinah Lucky was still pounding the ironing board, but that was because she had “disappointed” on the two first week-days sacred to such work, and not through any slackness on Mrs. Lane’s part.

The weekly mending was always a knotty bit of business, and to-day doubly so, for now that Lammy was working at the fruit farm, it seemed as if he fairly moulted buttons and shed the knees and seats of his trousers as crabs do their shells. Spreading a well-worn pair of knickerbockers on the piazza floor, she trimmed the edges of the holes and dived into a big piece bag for material for the patches.

“Seems to me I can’t find two bits alike and I do hate to speckle him up all colours and kinds as if he was a grab-bag. I know what I’ll do—I’ll put in what I’ve got and clip down to the store for some blue jean, and run him up a couple o’ pairs of long overalls to cover him, same as his brother’s and Joshua’s. Wonder I didn’t think of ’em before, only I can’t realize that Lammy is big enough to be at work.”

A man’s shadow crossed the piazza. Mrs. Lane looked up quickly; she had not heard the gate click, and Twinkle, who kept both eyes open as well as ears cocked most of the time, was down at the fruit farm with Lammy.

“Buy something to-day? Nice goots, ver’ cheap,” said a voice in broken English, and a pedler stood on the broad step and swung two heavy packs down to the floor, while he wiped his face and asked if he might get some water from the well.

“‘Buy something to-day? Nice goots ver’ cheap.’”