THE OPEN WINDOW
Tales of the Months
TOLD BY
BARBARA
AUTHOR OF “THE GARDEN OF A COMMUTER’S WIFE,” “PEOPLE OF THE WHIRLPOOL,” ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1908,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1908. Reprinted July, August, November, 1908; February, 1910.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. THIS BOOK
IS INSCRIBED TO
REV. ALLEN E. BEEMAN
IN RETURN
FOR A THOUGHT CONTENTS
Told by Barbara, the Commuter’s Wife
JANUARY—THE HARD MOON When Christmas has passed it is useless to make believe that it is not winter, even if the snow has merely come in little flurries quickly disappearing in the leaves that now lie suppliant with brown palms curved upward. Early December is often filled with days that, if one does not compare the hours of the sun’s rise and setting, might pass for those of an early spring. Sharp nights but soft noon air, meadow larks in voice down in the old fields, uneasy robins in the spruces, a song sparrow in the shelter of the honeysuckle wall, goldfinches feeding among the dry stalks of what two months gone was a scarlet flame of zinnias, or else in their rhythmic, restless flight binding the columns where the seeded clematis clings, in chains of whispered song. All through the month the garden, thriftily trimmed, and covered according to its need, refused to sleep in peace and thrust forth its surprises. One day it was a pansy peeping from beneath a box bush, then a dozen sturdy Russian violets for the man’s buttonhole, that, fading in an hour, were outlived by their perfume, while on the very eve of Christmas itself, the frosted wall flowers yielded a last bouquet, just a bit pinched and drawn like reduced gentlefolks of brave heart, whose present garb is either cherished or overlooked from a half-reminiscent pleasure in their society. Many say that the ending of the year with Christmas week is only an arbitrary time division, and so is meaningless. But this cannot be so. The natural year has ended and it begins anew, even though we do not at once see its processes, for intervals in nature there are none, and the first law of being is emergence from unseen sleep, wherein is stamped the pattern for the after-growth. Thus with Christmas passed, we all must yield to Winter. Playtime with its dalliance outdoors is over for man, and the little beasts lie in their lairs, except when hunger prods. The poor, God help them, drawing their heads down into their garments, prepare to endure. They have not two or three changes of raiment to match the graded weather from September to January—the relentless hard moon of the Indian calendar. Resistance is their final set of winter flannels, which must be worn sleeping or waking. With January the rabbit season is over, and the sturdy dogs, the merry, tireless beagles, left to themselves, abandon the trail after a sniff or two, or else return from the run with stiff, wounded feet: for does not a spear lurk in every blade of frozen stubble? and, after nosing into the house, they lie in relaxed comfort by the kitchen stove. That is, unless the thaw from their hair-set foot-pads annoys the cook (and few recognize dog needs and rights as did Martha Corkle), in which case they slink out again sheepish under reproof, and, loping uphill to the cottage, charge at Martha’s kitchen door until she opens it, protesting as usual at their lack of manners and the mess “the beasties” make. This, however, is wholly from principle, because protest against dirt in any form becomes a thrifty British housewife, even though transplanted to America. In truth all the while her heart is swelling with pleasure at their recognition, voiced as it presently is in a baying chorus, heads well thrown back, throats swelling, tails held aloft and firm, for sweet as the voice of love is hound music to the people of the English hunting country, however far from it their lives have led them. Then presently, after a meal of stew seasoned to each dog’s liking (for Lark is fond of salt and likes to chew his biscuits dry and lap the gravy after, while Cadence and old Waddles, being scant of teeth, prefer to guzzle the softened food and like a pinch of sugar), they fall prone before the fire, their bellies replete, and round, pressing the floor as close as their heavy heads. Whereupon Martha heaves a sigh of deep content and seats herself in the window corner of the front room, behind her geranium pots, with her white needlework of scallop, sprig, and eyelet hole, a substantial old-time craft lately returned to favour. This occupation also is a sign that it is winter without doubt, for not until the Christmas puddings have been made and eaten and the results have worn away, does Martha Saunders (born Corkle) sit in the bay window of her front room shedding abroad the light of her rosy face and her bright geraniums by day, while the gloom of night is pierced by her clear lamp with its gay shade, whereon an endless steeple-chase is portrayed against a screen of ruby isinglass. Here in Oaklands whoever sets a drinking trough before his door in summer-time to succour man and thirsty beasts receives so much a year from the town fathers. Why should not those who, in the dark season, set a row of jovial red geraniums behind the window-pane by day or a well-trimmed light by night, be equally rewarded? Is not the thirst for light, colour, and other home symbols as keen a desire of the winter wayfarer as his thirst for water in the torrid season? The first New Year callers were out before sunrise this morning while the hoar-frost lay thick on the porch of father’s office, for here, Whirlpool customs to the contrary, the country doctor and his tribe expect a gentle drift of friendly visitors, as much as do the people at the parsonage, and often with them there come homespun good-will gifts. These early guests were nameless, and left their gift upon the door-mat, where father found it. A pair of redheads, duck and drake by chance, such as the gunners at this season harvest from the still-water inside the lighthouse at the bayhead. Any one interested in following backward the tracks these callers left would have found that they began at the edge of the bare, drifted sand beach and followed the wavering fence of the shore road until the outline of that also disappearing, the footprints crossed the upland fields to the lower end of the village street, where many of the houses, old, sedate, and self-sufficient in their ancestry, were prouder in their garb of mossy shingles than the Bluff cottages in all their bravery of new paint, and porches supported by stone pillars. Entering by the yard of one of the humbler of these houses, through the back garden, the footsteps meandered toward the side porch that served both as well-house and wood-shed; there the owners of the feet left a similar burden of ducks on the well-worn oak door-sill instead of on the door-mat, for that was thriftily housed within. To leave it out all night would be to incur the criticism of the Misses Falcon, dealers in village patronage and censors in chief, next door, a most disastrous thing for the single dweller in the house, whose livelihood depended upon the public, as announced by a quaint glass sign, lettered in black, that filled the right-hand lower corner of the foreroom window. C. Hallet. Tailoring, Nursing, and Accommodating, done with Neatness and Despatch. The last of the three accomplishments meaning that in the between seasons of her more serious work, Charity Hallet would accommodate her neighbours in any way, from putting up jellies and jams for the slothful to turning carpets, or setting a house solemnly to rights for a funeral. After leaving the yard, also by the back gate, that no telltale prints might mar the plumpness of the front walk, or jar the white rime that made mammoth cakes of the box bushes on either side the door, the footprints took a short cut to the hill road and paused at our steps, evidently with some scuffing and stamping, and none of the precautions used in approaching the other door. Here the two sets of footprints, those of dog and man, alone told of who had come and gone, and yet we knew as plainly as if the social cardboard had been left. The overlapping, shifty human footprints, suggesting a limp or halting gait, were those of a rubber-booted man. The round pad-marks of a four-foot, with a dragging trail, spoke of a dog either old or weak in his hind quarters. As I, answering father’s call, scanned the tracks, our eyes met and we said, as with one voice, “The Markis and the Major,” whereby hangs a pleasant winter’s tale. A comedy that was turned from tragedy merely by the blowing of the bitter northeast wind among the sedge grass. A simple enough story, like many another gleaned from between the leaves that lie along the village fences or the lanes and byways of the lonelier hill country. Down in a little hut, by the bay-side, lived the village ne’er-do-weel; this was a year ago. He was not an old man in action, but at times he looked more than his fifty odd years, for life had dealt grudgingly with his primitive tastes, and besides being well weathered by an outdoor life, both eyes and gait had the droop of the man of middle age who, lacking good food, has made up for it by bad drink. Yet, in spite of a general air of shiftlessness, there was that about him still that told that he had once not only been nearly handsome, but had been possessed of a certain wild gypsy fascination coupled with a knack with the violin that had turned the heads, as well as the feet, of at least two of the village lassies of his day who, though rigidly brought up, had eyes and ears for something beyond the eternal sowings, hoeings, reapings, and sleepings of farm life. Even in his boyhood he was looked upon as a detrimental, until, partly on the principle of “Give a dog a bad name and he will earn it,” he absolutely earned one by default, so to speak, for the things that he left undone, rather than deeds committed. He was side-branched from thrifty country stock; his father, a proxy farmer and the captain of a coastwise lumber schooner, had on a northbound trip married a comely Canadian-French woman, half-breed it was whispered, who was possessed of the desire for liberty and the outdoor life, far beyond her desire to observe the village p’s and q’s. This new strain in the cool New England blood caused neighbourly bickerings, bred mischief, and had finally made the only child of the marriage a strolling vagabond, who instinctively shunned the inside of a schoolhouse, as a rat does a trap. So that after his mother died when he was sixteen, all his after days he had lived in the open by rod and gun, fish-net and clam fork, berry picking, or playing his fiddle at village picnics and other festivals. It was at one of these festivities that he first met Charity Hallet, called in those days Cheery from her disposition that fairly bubbled over with happiness. A fiery sort of wooing followed; that is, fiery and unusual for a staid New England town, where sitting evening after evening by the best room lamp or “buggy dashing” through the wild lanes of a moonlight night or of a Sunday afternoon were considered the only legitimate means of expression. Alack! this man possessed neither horse nor buggy, or the means of hiring one, and the door of the Hallets’ best room was closed to him, as well as every other door of the house. What would you have? Swift dances snatched when some one else relieved the fiddler; meetings by stealth in the woods, intricate journeys through the winding marsh watercourses where, hidden by tall reeds, a duck boat slipped in and out, holding a half-anxious, half-happy girl, while a tall, bronzed youth either poled the craft along or sometimes pushed it as he strode beside it waist deep in water, his eyes fixed upon the merry ones beside him. Of course discovery came at last, and Charity’s father sent her to spend a winter with an aunt in another State and “finish” school there. Meanwhile for half a dozen years the youth followed the sea and on his return found Charity an orphan in possession of the house and a snug income, and though she was still unmarried, a vein of prudence or a change of heart, just as one happens to view it, had at least diluted her romance. “Get some employment with a name to it; I couldn’t stand an idle man hanging about,” she had said when man and dog (there had always been and always would be a dog following at this man’s heels) for the first time entered the Hallet front door and prepared, without ceremony, to resume the boy and girl footing as a matter of course. The man, of primitive instincts and no responsibility, had looked at her dumbly for a minute, and then the light of her meaning breaking upon him he jumped to his feet and bringing his heels sharply together, said, “I thought you were fond o’ me, Cheery, and that women sort o’ liked somebody they were fond of hanging around ’em,” and without further ado he called the dog, and closing door and gate carefully behind him, turned from the village street to the shore road with easy, swinging gait; but from that day his fiddle never played for the village dancers. The thrifty half of Charity Hallet congratulated the half that was longing to open door and heart to man, dog, and violin in the face of prudence and the village, upon its escape. But sometimes prudence and the wind race together, for the next year the most trusted man in the township, under cover of decorous business, made way with all of Charity’s little property, except the house; and the glass sign, once used by a great aunt, was rescued from the attic rafters, placed in the foreroom window; and at twenty-five Charity, who had been sought far and near, and had been wholly independent in action, began the uphill road of being a self-supporting old maid. The man’s feet never again turned toward her front gate, though the dog’s did, and many a bone and bit did he get there, for the dog who grew old, evidently bequeathed knowledge of Charity’s hospitality to his puppy successor, and so the years went. If mysterious heaps of clams, big lobsters from the deep fishing, delicate scallops or seasonable game appeared in the morning under the well house, no word was spoken. Five, fifteen, twenty years went by, and the very face of the country itself had changed and Cheery Hallet had almost forgotten how to smile. The man’s natural hunting grounds being largely reclaimed from wildness, the game becoming scarcer and the laws of season and selling close drawn, like many an Indian brother of old, too unskilled to work, too old to learn, he found himself absolutely facing extinction, while in these years the drink habit had gradually crept upon and gripped him. A few days after Christmas he was sitting outside his shore hut, that, lacking even the usual driftwood fire, was colder than the chilly sunshine, facing hunger and his old red setter dog, the Major, who gazed at him with a brow furrowed by anxiety and then laid his gaunt, grizzled muzzle against his master’s face that rested on his hands. The turkey won at the raffle in Corrigan’s saloon had been devoured,—flesh, bones, skin, and I had almost said feathers,—so ravenous had been the pair, for Charity Hallet being ill was tended by a neighbour, who would rather burn up plate scraps than feed tramp dogs, as she designated the Major, who as usual had come scratching at the kitchen door, and so for many days he had crept away empty. A few days only remained of the upland open season, but for that matter the sportsmen speeding from all quarters in their motors to the most remote woodlands and brush lots had changed the luck and ways of foot hunting, and what birds remained had been so harried that they huddled and refused to rise. His duck boat was rotten to the danger point, while the clam banks that had meant a certain weekly yield had the past season been ruthlessly dug out by the summer cottagers, who herded in a string of cheap and gaudy shore houses and knew no law. This was the plight of Marquis Lafayette Burney, fantastically christened thus at his mother’s command, and called from his youth “The Markis,” in well-understood derision. Feeling the dog’s caress, the man raised his head and gazed at his solitary friend, then out upon the water. The wind that ruffled the sand into little ridges raised the hair upon the dog’s back, plainly revealing its leanness. Out on the bay beyond the bar the steel-blue tide chafed and fretted; within the protecting arm lay still-water without a trace of ice on it, while in and out among the shallows the wild ducks fed and at night would bed down inside the point. Along the beach itself there was no life or sound, a wide band of dull blue mussel shells thrown up by a recent storm only intensified the look of cold, while the gulls that floated overhead carried this colour skyward, and cast it upon the clouds. “It’s come jest ter this, Maje,” the Markis muttered, “there’s nothin’ ter eat! nothin’ ter eat! Do you sense that, old man? Come fust o’ the year, if we hold out to then, we’ll hev to make other arrang’ments, you and me! Town farm’s a good place fer the winter, some say, and some say bad, certain sure we won’t be over het up there, that’s what I dre’d in gettin’ in out o’ the air!” Then as a new thought struck him, he cried aloud, “God! suppose they won’t take you in along o’ me!” and the Markis started back aghast at the thought and then peered about with blinking eyes that he shielded with a shaking hand, for the Major had disappeared. The Markis whistled and waited. Presently from behind the dunes loped the Major carrying something in his mouth; with a cheerful air of pride he laid before his master a turkey drumstick, sand-covered and dry, the last bone in the dog’s ground larder; then, stepping back with a short, insistent bark, he fixed his eyes on the Markis with lip half raised in a persuasive grin. As the man slowly realized the meaning of the bone, his bleared eyes filled and the knotting of his throat half stopped his breath. Pulling the slouch hat that he always wore still lower to hide his face, though only gulls were near to see, he drew the Major close between his knees and hugged him. Who dares say that any man o’ersteps salvation when a dog yet sees in him the divine spark that he recognizes and serves as master? Into the hut went the Markis, took down his gun from its rest above a tangle of shad nets that he had been mending before cold weather, picked up a pair of skilfully made duck decoys, and looked at them regretfully, saying, “A couple o’ dollars would fix that boat in shape, but where’s a couple o’ dollars?” the last coin he had fingered having gone to pay the Major’s license on instalments, the final quarter being yet due, and only two days of grace. Still rummaging he picked up some bits of fish line and flexible wire; these he dropped into a ragged pocket together with a handful of unhulled buckwheat. Then he padlocked the door of the cabin carefully, threw his gun over his shoulder, and set off along the road that led up country, with his slow slouching gait, the Major to heel, muttering to himself,—“I hain’t never done it before, I allers hunted square, but time’s come when I’ll jest hev ter set a couple o’ snares and see what’ll turn up. I know where I can place a pair o’ grouse for two dollars at this time o’ year, and two dollars means another week together for us,—yes, another week!” Two hours later the Markis and the Major crept out of the lane that ran between a brush lot and stubble field on the Lonetown side of the Ridge. Both master and dog were footsore and weary, while the Markis wore a shifting, guilty look; for he had spoken truly: pot-hunter he had always been, but never a setter of snares, except for mink or muskrat. To be sure he would come to the front door to offer berries that he frankly said were gathered in one’s own back lot, but this day was the first time that he had thought to set a loop to catch a partridge by the neck instead of shooting it in fair hunting. Straightening himself for a moment he glanced shoreward down the rolling hills, while the Major dropped upon a heap of dry leaves and dozed with twitching limbs. The sun came from behind the wind clouds with which he had been running a race all day, and suddenly the face of nature melted as with a smile and grew more tender. A big gray squirrel ran along the stone fence, a blue jay screamed, but the Markis started nervously and once more looked shoreward. What was that flickering and glimmering far away upon the beach? Merely the sunlight flashing upon the single window of his cabin? No, a puff of smoke was running along the dry grasses from the inlet of the creek, where the men who watch the oyster grounds had beached their boat and kindled a bit of fire to heat their coffee. Another puff, and the smoke arose in a cone the shape of the Markis’s cabin that the hungry flames were devouring! With a harsh cry the man dropped his half-made snare and fled impotently, for now indeed were the Markis and the Major homeless vagabonds! When father, being sent for by a farmer of the marsh road who said that both man and dog had doubtless perished in the hut, reached the shore a little before sunset, he stumbled over the Markis lying among the broken sedge and seaweed, numb with cold and despair, the Major keeping watch beside. When, after being shaken awake and some stimulant hastily forced between his lips, the Markis started up muttering a plea to be left alone, and saw who was bending over him, he whispered, for his voice was hoarse and uncertain, “It’s you, Doc, is it? Well, I’d ruther you’n another! For it’s all up this time; it’s either go to the town farm to-night, or be a stiff, and I’m near that now. We thought mebbe we could pull through till the next shad run, Maje and me, but now the nets and all hev gone!” Then, sitting up and pulling himself together with an effort, “Would you—I wouldn’t ask it of any other man—would you house the Maje, Doc, until maybe he’d drop off comfortable and quiet, or I get round again? and once in a time jest say, quick like, ‘Maje, where’s the Markis?’ to keep me in mind?” This time the Markis made no effort to hide the tears that washed roadways down his grimy cheeks. “But there is no need of this,” father replied, as, clearing his throat and wiping his nose, he tried to look severe and judicial, (dear Dad! how well I know this particularly impossible and fleeting expression of yours)—“I got you the promise of work at Mrs. Pippin’s only last week, to do a few light errands and keep her in split kindlings for three square meals a day, and pay in money by the hour for tinkering and carpentering, and you only stayed one morning! Man alive! you are intelligent! why can’t you work? The day is over when hereabout men can live like wild-fowl!” “Doctor Russell,” said the Markis, speaking slowly and raising a lean forefinger solemnly, “did you ever try to keep Mis’s Pippin in kettlewood for three square meals a day, likewise her opinion o’ you thrown in for pepper, and talk o’ waiting hell fire for mustard, with only one door to the woodshed and her a-standin’ in it? Not but the meals was square enough, that was jest it,—they was too square, they wouldn’t swaller! Give me a man’s job and I’ll take a brace and try it for the Major here, but who takes one of us takes both, savvy? Beside, when Mis’s Pippin was Luella Green she liked to dance ter my fiddlin’, and now she don’t like ter think o’t and seein’ me reminds her!” Here father broke down and laughed, he confesses, and with the change of mood came the remembrance that the son of the rich Van Camps of the Bluffs, whose sporting possessions dot the country from Canada to Florida, needed a man to tend his boat house that lay further round the bay, and to take him occasionally to the ducking grounds at the crucial moment of wind and weather. Thus far, though several landsmen had attempted it, no one had kept the job long owing to its loneliness, and the fact that they lacked the outdoor knack, for the pay was liberal. In a few words father told of the requirements. Shaking the sand from his garments the Markis stood up, new light in his eyes,—“What! that yaller boat house round the bend, with all the contraptions and the tankboat painted about ’leven colours that Jason built? I’d better get to work smart in the mornin’ and weather her up a bit, it ’ud scare even a twice-shot old squaw the way it is! The weather is softenin’; come to-morrow there’ll be plenty o’ birds comin’ in and we’ll soon learn him how to fetch home a show of ’em, which is what most o’ them city chaps wants more’n the eatin’,—won’t we, Maje? Yes, Doc, I’ll take the ockerpation straight and honourable and won’t go back on you! Go home with you for supper and the night? That’s kindly, we air some used up, that’s so! And something in advance of pay to-morrow? and he’ll let me raise a shingle and pick up what I can takin’ other folks fishin’ and shootin’ when he don’t need me? and he’ll most likely supply me clothes,—a uniform like a yacht sailor’s, you say? Well, I suppose these old duds are shabby, but me and they’s kept company this long time and wild-fowl’s particular shy o’ new things, and the smell of them I reckon! Weathered things is mostly best to my thinkin’, likewise friends, Doc!” When young Van Camp, arriving at the shore one day at dawn for his first expedition, saw his new employee and his aged dog, he shuddered visibly and for a moment inwardly questioned father’s sanity; but having been about with half-breed guides too much to judge the outdoor man by mere externals, he laughed good-naturedly and abandoned himself to the tender mercies of the Markis and the Major, saying lightly as he glanced at the faded sweater and soft hat, “It’s cold down here; I’m sending you a reefer and some better togs to-morrow.” So the three went out across the still-water to the ducking grounds and brought back such a bunch before the fog closed in the afternoon that Van Camp clapped the Markis on the back and declared the Major must be a Mascot, and that he deserved the finest sort of collar! “A Mascot! that’s what he is, in addition to being the wisest smell-dog on the shore!” affirmed the Markis solemnly, the eyelid on the off side drooping drolly. “All he has to do is to smell the tide when it turns flood, and he knows jest where the ducks’ll bed next night!” All of which Van Camp, Junior, believed, because it seemed suitable that the dog he hired with the man should be superlatively something; and next day there arrived, together with the reefer, a yacht captain’s cap, a set of oil-skins, and a great tin of tobacco,—a broad brass-studded collar, such as bull-dogs wear, but an ornament unknown to self-respecting “smell-dogs” even if, like the Major, they were bar sinister. The morrow was New Year’s day, and the day after, just at evening, the Markis, clad in a trim sailor suit from cap to trousers, was seen sauntering down the village street toward the cross-roads at the Centre, where his tangled trails to and from the two saloons had before-times often puzzled the Major’s acute sense of smell. Behind the Markis loped the Major with drooping tail and the heavy collar, too large for his lean neck, hanging about his ears. But had not his master fastened the hateful thing upon him? That was reason enough for wearing it, at least for the time being! Slowly the Markis passed the two saloons and nonchalantly entered the market, where he carefully selected a whole bologna and a ham! Crossing to the grocery he bought a month’s provisions to be sent to “Van Camp’s Boat House, for Capt’n Burney!” Then pulling on a fresh corn-cob pipe in leisurely fashion he stopped at the paint shop, from whence he took a sign board, that he carried, letters toward him; next he repassed the saloons and gradually gained the wooded lane that skirts the marsh meadows. Once under cover he pulled off the new reefer, wrapped it around the board, and began to run, never pausing until he gained the boat house. Throwing open the door he quickly stripped off the new stiff, confining garments, and slipped eel-like into loose trousers and the gray sweater that made him one with the seaweed and the sands. Then drawing the old soft hat well down to his very eyes he opened the tool chest that stood under the window and, taking therefrom gimlet, screw eyes, and hooks, he mounted an empty box, and proceeded to fasten the sign he had brought over the door. When it hung exactly even and to his liking, he walked backward, slowly surveying his handiwork, talking to the dog meanwhile. “What do you think of that, Maje? You and me hev got a business, we hev! employment with a name to it! Don’t yer remember what she said? No, you wasn’t the dog, though; ’twere old Dave, yer granddad! There’ll be jest two o’ us in the business, man and dog. You know the saying as two’s a company. Onct maybe I’d chose a woman partner! when they’re young wimmen’s prettier, but fer age give me er dog! Dogs is more dependable, likewise they don’t talk back, eh, Maje?” On the swinging white board, edged with bright blue, in blue letters he read these words aloud, slowly, and with deep-drawn satisfaction:— THE MARKIS AND THE MAJOR.
Decoys and Fishing Tackle to Rent. Sailing, Gunning, Fishing and Retrieving done with Neatness and Dispatch. ReËntering the boat house he gazed about with a sigh of perfect content, dropped into the ship-shaped bunk that was his bed, hat still on his head, and stretching himself luxuriously, said to the Major, who crouched beside, “I reckoned we’d hev ter make a change long first o’ the year, and I reckon we hev!” The coffee-pot upon the new stove in the far corner brooded comfortably and gave little gasps before being fully minded to excite itself to boiling, while the wild blood, even a few drops of which often makes its owners think such long, long thoughts that stretch back to the dawn of things, coursed evenly on its way until a delicious sleep, such as had been unknown for months, laid its fingers on the eyelids of the Markis. Cautiously the Major rose to his feet, looked about the room narrowly, sniffed the floor and then the air, shook his head and pawed persistently until the heavy new collar slipped over his ears and clattered to the floor. For a moment, minded to lie down again, he paused, sniffed the fresh air from the open window in the corner, then lifting the offending collar carefully in his mouth he gripped it firmly and crossed the room, jumped for the open sash, missed, tried again, and disappeared in the boat house shadows. A loon laughed far out on the water, and the Major trembled guiltily. Gaining the beach crest he kept on to tide-water mark, where, digging deep, he buried the offending bit of leather, covering it well, kicking backward at it, dog fashion, with snorts of contemptuous satisfaction. Then trotting gaily back he entered by the window, and soon two rhythmic snores, added to the bubbling of the overboiling coffee-pot, told that the Markis and the Major slept the peaceful winter sleep, while the sharp crescent moon of January slipped past the window, lingering over still-water to cover the bedded wild-fowl with a silver sheet. FEBRUARY—THE COON MOON He was no kin to the man of Whittier’s eulogy, though he might well have been; Jim Bradley was only the conductor on the milk freight that fussed and fumed its way down the valley of the Moosatuck every evening, at intervals leaving the single track road of the Sky Line to rest upon the sidings while a passenger train or the through express took right of way. To Miranda Banks, however, Bradley seemed a hero as he sprang from the caboose, swinging his lantern, when his train took the switch and halted on the side track below the calf pastures. To be sure his claim to heroism had, so far, rested upon the fact that both he and his vocation moved. In Hattertown very few people or things had moved these ten years past; they had groped as being between daylight and dark. The beginning of this twilight period was when the trade that gave the town both its name and reason for being, owing to change of methods and market, vanished across the low gentian meadows of the Moosatuck to install itself anew in Bridgeton, fifteen miles away. The empty factory, long and vainly offered for sale, became a storage place for the hay that speculators bought on the field from the somnolent hillside farmers and held for the winter market. At the same time the hay gave the building a good reputation among the travelling brotherhood of the back roads, who work a week and tramp on again (an entirely distinct clan from the hoboes who follow the railroad through villages and alternate thieving with stolen rides upon freight trains), and the factory became a wayfarers’ lodging-house, until gradually the unpainted boards turned black and the building grew hollow-eyed as its window panes were shattered. When man wholly forsook it, swallows and swifts brought primitive life to it again, the one nesting against its warped rafters, the others lining the chimney, now free from plaster and very hospitable, with their bracketed homes, until their flocks pouring forth from its mouth at dawn and swirling and settling at evening, seemed in the distance a curling column of smoke. The row of cheap wooden houses where the factory hands had lived, had also mouldered away and joined the general ruin, only a starved grape-vine or rose-bush telling that they had once been homes; until, at the time I first saw the place, the most depressing of all palls seemed over it,—the shadow of a dead industry. It was an October morning when Lavinia Cortright and I drove up into the hill country with father, who went to see a woman who had applied for a free bed in the Bridgeton hospital, an aunt of Miranda Banks, she afterward proved to be; and while father went into the little farm-house, that had bright geraniums in the windows and wore more of a general air of thrift than any of those we had passed in the last mile of our uphill ride, Lavinia and I sauntered along the road and finally settled ourselves on a tumble-down stone wall in the midst of a wild grape-vine whose fruit was black with sun-ripeness and bore the moist bloom of the first light frost. As we gazed idly over the fields toward the river, that seemed, as we looked down upon it, to filter through the glowing branches of the swamp maples, washing their colours with it, rather than to flow between banks of earth, we sipped the pure wild grape wine where alone it may be found,—between the skin and pulp of the grape itself, a few drops to each globe,—and fell to moralizing. “You like to find a reason for everything, Barbara,” said Lavinia Cortright, after a long pause; “can you tell me exactly why the country hereabout seems so desolate and impossible? It has all the colour and atmosphere of the perfect autumn landscape, and yet the idea of living here would be appalling.” I had been thinking the same thing as Lavinia spoke; there was something in the very wind that blew over the ruined factory settlement that was deterrent; funerals might take place there, but how could enough impetus ever exist to cause weddings or christenings? At this moment the door of a small building, the schoolhouse at the cross-roads immediately below, opened, and a dozen or more children rushed out pell-mell, followed by the slim form of a young woman, evidently the teacher, who closed the door and prepared to take a cross cut through the fields, the worn track leading up to the pasture bars close to where we were sitting. No bell, no whistle, no exodus of labourers from the fields to mark the noon hour, the impulsive rush of childhood breaking bounds was the only clock. The woman disappeared in a dip of the land, and then presently her head emerged from it and the whole figure appeared again walking between the deep green bayberry bushes that make the dark patches in the waste hillside fields. She walked without either energy or fatigue, looking neither to the right nor left; the freckled face, tending to thinness, interested me from the first glance, for though it wore very little expression, it was in no wise vacant; the chin was firm, and there was a good space between the eyes, which opened wide and had none of the squinting shrewdness I have met with in my wanderings with father among remote rural communities. It was an unawakened face, and as I began to wonder what could ever come to give it the vital touch, she reached the bars and seeing us for the first time, paused, scrutinized us slowly, and then said with a tinge of irritation in the tone:— “I wish you wouldn’t spoil those grapes, I’m going to spice them on Saturday. I should have done it last week, but they are always better for a touch of frost.” I straightway disentangled myself from the vine with a guilty feeling, and murmured the usual apology of the roadside depredators; that is, when they deign to make excuses, about the grapes being wild and not knowing that they belonged to any one, but my words fell upon deaf ears. “There were full ten pounds of grapes here this morning, but with what you’ve eaten and more that you’ve shaken off, there isn’t more than six pounds left. How came you up here, anyhow? Nobody ever passes this way; even the mail-man turns ’round below at four corners. I’m Randy Banks.” This gave me my chance to explain father’s errand. “Do you think Dr. Russell can get Aunt Lucy in?” she asked, eagerness bringing a pretty colour to her cheeks. “It isn’t the care of her we mind, Ma and I,” she added hastily, “but it’s the loneliness for her of days in winter when I’m at school and Ma out nursing mebbe; being chair-tied at best, there’s just nothing to break the time, for nothing ever happens.” “Now that you have the Rural Free Delivery, you get your mail and papers every day without having to go down to the Hattertown post-office,” I said, trying to find a cheerful loophole. “That’s no advantage to us, rather the other way. When town was alive and we drove down to the post-office, even if we had no mail, and we never do except the newspaper, somebody else had and maybe opened it right there and told the news for the sake of talking it over with some one else. Then market and store were in the same building and chances were you’d be reminded of something you needed by seeing it, or maybe a bit of fresh meat would look tempting and be sold reasonable, too, if it was near week-end. But to go to that box at cross-roads, though it’s only a step, and find it empty, it’s as lonesome and strange as a draught coming from a shut-up room.” Then as she realized that she was in a way complaining of her lot to a stranger, a thing that the etiquette of the entire hill country quite forbade, she broke off, and turning toward the house, said in a perfectly unembarrassed way: “Won’t you come in? Mother will have dinner ready. She’d be pleased to see you. I have to hurry back to school to-day, for the committee man is coming to see if the old stove can be mended or if we must have a new one, for it’s never done well since Joel Fanton put a shotgun cartridge in it last winter.” Then we went in, wondering if events would ever so shape themselves that she would become an active factor on a wider path than that between the corner school and the old farm-house. It was three years before I saw Miranda again; meanwhile, a far-away city had thrown a lariat of steel across country, and it had encircled Hattertown; a railway that ran down the valley needed a southern outlet. The survey ran by the ruined factory, and rounding Nob Hill, crossed the river below the Banks’ farm, and disappeared on trestles over “calf pastures,” a name given strangely enough to many a bit of waste river meadow, as if calves did not need the best of material to become successful cows. At the sound of the first locomotive whistle, announcing that the branch road was a thing accomplished and neither a scare nor a phantom boom, the Rip Van Winkles awoke and rubbed their eyes. They had slept a half-famished sleep. Rather than push and plan a way to sell their produce, they had ceased producing. The Sky Line Railroad had come. Cruft’s store was rented as a temporary station and the name Hattertown appeared in dazzling white letters on the black sign over the door. In one room were scales for weighing freight and a baggage truck, in the other, a ticket booth took the place of the old post-boxes, while on a shelf behind the little window, a telegraph instrument ticked and told the doings of the outer world to the only man in the neighbourhood that could interpret it. Time-tables were tacked above the two benches in a corner that made the waiting-room, but the greatest excitement of all was contained in a great poster that was not only stuck in conspicuous places in all the settlements along the line, but put in the mail-boxes as well, announcing that a milk train would be run nightly, Sundays included, and urging all farmers, if they had no milk to market, to make immediate arrangements for producing that commodity. The Widow Banks had three cows. A dealer in Bridgeton had tried to buy them late in the autumn when fodder was at a premium, but she had withstood temptation and taken the risk of wintering them; if she had not, Miranda would never have met Jim Bradley during the negotiations for the transportation to the city of the polished tin can that cost the little teacher many days’ pay, and was regarded by her as a speculation as wild and daring as any gambler staking his all on a throw of dice, nor would this story have found its way into father’s note-book. Jim Bradley came of good up-country stock, but the yeast of desire to see the world had led him upon the shining road, freight brakeman first and now conductor. Visiting New York every other day, he seemed a travelled man of the world to Miranda, whose outside life was bounded by two trips a year to Bridgeton and the paragraphs upon racial traits, habits and customs, exports and imports contained in the Geography which she had heard droned and mispronounced annually for the five seasons she had taught at the corners. A year had passed, and now when Jim Bradley ran his train into the siding at Hattertown, he could not have told which light he saw first, the railway signal or the well-trimmed lamp in the Widow Banks’ kitchen; this light, being always kept bright and clear, was lit at sunset with the regularity of a lighthouse beacon, the reflector improvised from a tin plate being turned so that the welcoming rays met the milk train as it rounded the hills and left solid ground for the trestles between eight and half-past every evening. As the whistle of the eight-fifteen morning train spelt school to Miranda, so the whistle of the milk freight, one long and two short, not only spelled but shouted Jim Bradley, and as a matter of course, she took her hand lantern if the night was dark, or else trusted to the moon and stars and following the now well-worn path through the corn patch to “calf pastures,” reached the low shed by the water-tank almost at the moment that the engine gave its final puff, and Jim Bradley swung himself from the caboose and seeing that his rear lights were properly set, promptly forgot his train for an interval ranging from twenty minutes to perhaps half an hour, when traffic on the through express was heavy. Widow Banks had long since announced to inquiries both of the really interested and maliciously curious order, that Randy and Jim Bradley were keeping company, though, at the same time, regretting with a sigh that his business didn’t allow of evenings spent in the austere “fore room” where the one visible eye of the departed deacon’s portrait done in air brush crayon, might witness the courting. Neither was it possible for Randy to exhibit him to the neighbours in a bright and shining buggy with a blue bow tied to the whip, of a Sunday afternoon, nor had they the chance for the same reason to judge of his capacity at prayer-meeting. If either Randy or Jim had been questioned as to their relations to each other, they would have been speechless upon the subject. Neither had given the matter a thought, and therefore neither was worried by the mazes of material analysis. Miranda simply obeyed a call that made the spot where Jim Bradley was the only possible place for her to be between eight and half past; but when the train left the siding, crossed the bridge over the Moosatuck and disappeared, she returned to the house and gave her mind up to the correction of the smeared papers whereon the youth of Hattertown were struggling along the Arithmetic road, and in striving to prepare for the puzzling questions that the school’s bad boy might spring upon her on the morrow. Jim regarded matters much in the same way, that is, all through that spring, summer, and autumn. When winter set in and the siding grew chilly, the tank shed with its little stove became the only shelter, for, without realizing why, it never occurred to the man that the caboose with its bunk and litter of flags and lanterns was the place for Randy. One night she noticed that Jim had a heavy cold, and the next evening she brought with her a basket in which a little pot of hot coffee and a generous wedge of equally fresh-baked mince pie kept each other warm. Jim smiled at Randy with a glance in which feigned indifference and indulgence struggled, as by way of table-cloth she spread the napkin that covered the basket, on a barrel top and motioned for him to eat, saying as she handed him a paper of sugar, “I didn’t know how you like your coffee sweetened, so I brought some sugar along.” In some way the steam from that tin kettle as he looked across it, altered the perspective of his existence and changed his terminal; for the first time he wished that Hattertown was at one end or the other of the route instead of a brief turnout in the middle. Then as Randy under his guidance dropped the lumps of sugar in the pail (cup and saucer lacking), he suddenly formulated for the first time the fact of her refinement and the difference between her and the other women that he met along the route. A sudden vision of a home other than a caboose with meals taken at depot restaurants blazed comet-like across his firmament in a way that startled—no, fairly frightened him. That night the time passed so quickly that they were obliged to hurry up hill at a pace that left Miranda flushed and with no breath for speech as she opened the narrow storm door to the back porch and swinging her lantern on a peg, turned to take the basket. Jim Bradley looked at the girl, whose cape hung about her neck by a single fastening, its hood that she had pulled up for her head covering, falling back so that the glorious hair that was usually plastered and twisted into the subjection fitting a schoolmarm, was loosed and fell into its natural curves and waves. Then he looked out into the dark to where one of his brakemen was waving the “time up” signal lantern furiously. Buttoning his short coat with the air of making all snug and fit that a man might have who was about to face some new and dangerous situation, he stepped into the porch so quickly that Miranda was caught betwixt him and the inner door at the moment when she had raised her arms to smooth her rumpled hair. “I want to tell you something right up and out,” he said, also breathing hard from his run up hill. “That pie was the best I ever closed teeth on, better even than ever the old lady made and she took three prizes for mince pie running at the Oldfield Fair;” then, before Miranda’s arms could drop, Jim had grasped her in a swift but complete embrace, landing a kiss at random that all the same fell squarely upon her lips, and fled down hill through the night without another word. When Miranda returned to the kitchen this evening, she did not join her mother where she sat sewing by the reading lamp, but dropped on a bench before the open wood stove and began following the pictures the embers painted, with eyes that really took no note of outward happenings. Widow Banks glanced at her daughter anxiously, then caught a glimpse of the smile that was hovering about her usually rather set lips, noticed the ruddy mane from which the hairpins rose in various attitudes of resentment, and glancing at the untouched task upon the table, gave a contented sigh and began to knit reminiscences of her own youth into the muffler she was fashioning for a missionary box. To be sure, she had planned a theological career for her only daughter. She was to have married a young theologue who had occupied the pulpit of the Pound Rock Church for a year and then gone to India, where by virtue of her experience as a teacher, Miranda was to help him convince the heathen, do credit to her religious training, and become a factor in the world. This plan belonged to seven years before when the girl was twenty, and it had not happened because the stubborn streak inherited from the deacon, stiffened Randy’s neck and perverted her judgment to the extent of preferring Hattertown to India, and declaring to her suitor and mother in one breath that if she ever felt a hankering for the heathen she could find plenty without leaving home. When February comes the romance of winter is over in the hill country, and this long short month brings only the reality. It is a betwixt and between month, fully as trying as its opposite, August, that time of general stuffiness, flies, and limp linen. January had been a month of even snow and good sleighing, but a sleet storm had made the many downhill roads that converged at Hattertown well-nigh impassable with glittering ice; while in February, coughing and snuffling, as much a part of the month as St. Valentine’s Day, sadly interfered with discipline at the Crossroads Schoolhouse. Miranda, under pressure, allowed herself to confess for the first time, that seven years was quite long enough for a woman to sit upon the selfsame wooden chair, or wrestle with the constitutional peculiarities of a sheet-iron stove. This stove, having been second-hand upon its arrival, was now wearing three patches through the ill-fitted rivets of which smoke and gas filtered, obscuring the wall map of North America that was at least three states behind the times. The season and bad weather of course had some effect upon her point of view, for given June, open doors and windows, and a glimpse of the Moosatuck to draw the eye from the faded map, the most pressing of grievances would have vanished. Somehow Miranda had never realized until now what an exasperating month February was; formerly she had used the evenings for her spring sewing and was really glad of the forced cessation of the small events that made Hattertown’s social life, but now the ice crust upon the hill slope above calf pastures made walking impossible between the house and the station siding, so that two or three and in one week five evenings went by and only the greeting of lantern signals passed between Jim Bradley and Miranda. The next afternoon on her return from school, Miranda found a letter in the box, directed in a round, bold, and unfamiliar hand; moreover, it was for her. Therefore, as it was a man’s writing it must be from Jim. Instead of opening it as she walked along, half a dozen children struggling on before or at her side, she dropped it in her pocket and then smiled to find, a few minutes later, when she reached her gate and needed a hand to open it with (the other carrying books) that it had remained inside the pocket caressing the square of paper. Widow Banks was then “accommodating” at the house of the new ticket agent and telegraph operator, who had pneumonia, as his wife was obliged to fill his place. The Banks’ house was empty save for the cat who purred before the stove, there was no necessity for seeking privacy; yet Miranda went through the kitchen and shut herself into the little storm porch before she opened the envelope, and held the sheet close to the single diamond pane in the outer door that she might read. “Respected Friend—” the words ran, “This has been the deuce of a month with ice and tie-ups. I need to see you Special to-morrow night. If the run is close so I can’t get up, I’ll fix to have Sweezy’s boy go fetch you to the depot with a team, so come down sure. “Yours with Compliments, “Jim Bradley.” What did the Special mean? Was her hero going to leave the Milk Freight for a better job? That meant a passenger or possibly a through train, and neither of these would pause on the side track at Hattertown. Or—well, there was no use in guessing; “to-morrow night” was exactly twenty-eight hours away and that was all there was to it. So Randy put wood on the fire, skimmed a saucer of cream which she gave to the cat as if in some way propitiating a powerful domestic idol, lit the lamp, though it was broad daylight, and began the preparation of curling the feathers in her best hat by holding them in the steam of the tea-kettle, and then realized that as the morrow was Saturday, she would have plenty of time for both housework and preparation. The last Saturday morning of February did not really dawn, for the discouraged light merely struggled with a snowstorm so dense that the rays only penetrated by refraction. A little before noon the fall ceased, but the sky would not relax, and scowled dark and sullen as if with the pain of its recent effort, the snow lay heavy on hill and lowland, covering land and water alike; and, lodging on the ice, completely obliterated the boundary of the usually assertive Moosatuck. A few crows, cawing dismally, straggled toward what had been down stream from their cedar roosts, but all other sounds were muffled. It was almost noon before the village, headed by the first selectman with two yokes of oxen and as many ploughs, dug itself out; and a great snow-plough bound north cleared the rails for the morning mail train, now hours late. Meanwhile Mr. Sweezy, the host of the “Depot Hotel,” the wit of the reconstructed Hattertown, did a thriving trade with many usually abstemious citizens exhausted by the wielding of snow shovels, in beverages that did not bear the label “soft drinks,” and the ticket agent’s wife in the little booth struggled with and made more incoherent the reports that came over the snow-laden wires. In spite of the storm and the desirability of daylight, there were four souls under the magnetic influence, as it were, of those bands of steel rails, that wished it were night. Two that they might meet once more, and two in order that a distance might reach between them that it seemed likely would end in a more complete separation. Neither couple had ever seen or heard of the other, and yet the strands were fast weaving to draw them together and make it impossible to blot either from the other’s memory. The first couple were man and maid, the second, man and wife. Jim Bradley,—working his way slowly on the morning trip from New York in dire apprehension that the return trip would be hopelessly delayed as far as the interval at Hattertown within visiting hours was concerned,—and Miranda Banks, who looked from her watch-tower of the kitchen window over the snow waves that had enveloped all below, through which the various hay-ricks and chimney stacks emerged and seemed to drift like bits of wreckage in an Arctic sea. As she gazed she brought New England thrift to bear, and decided that hat and feathers would be an unseemly head covering on such a night, even if the meeting should be possible, and straightway put it by and began the freshening of an old hood with scraps of ribbon. The second couple, John Hasleton and Helen, his wife, stood looking at each other across a table in the richly furnished library of one of the best modern houses of the city that was the Sky Line Railroad’s eastern terminal. Everything about the room indicated a soothing combination of good taste augmented by money; the soft but not too profuse draperies and rugs, black oak shelves holding books of enticing title and suitably clothed, unique specimens of bronze and porcelain on table and shelf, prints upon the walls that through skill of dry point and gravers’ tools reflected the faces of the past,—poet, king, warrior, gallant, and court beauty, all given an added touch of reality and animation by the glowing colours the hearth fire flashed upon them. But on the two faces that gazed across the table lay an expression of animal hatred,—no, not animal, for that is direct and primitive, while human hatred is so compounded that one unimportant ingredient is often the yeast that ferments the whole inert bulk. The man was openly furious, both in speech and mien; the woman held herself verbally within that purely technical and outward quality of self-control that is so exasperating to the opposite side, who feels that something is at stake besides success or defeat in argument. This couple, of the relative ages of twenty-seven and thirty odd, had been married five years, spent largely in travel and social pleasures, satisfying their various tastes by acquisitions, and passing brief winters in the city house given by an indulgent father to his only daughter on her marriage. Until this time, no great responsibility had fallen on either to say you must or must not do this or that. But now circumstances called the husband to give his time to various interests in New York, necessitating a permanent removal. “You forget that I have not refused to leave my home and assured social position here, and if I am willing to begin again elsewhere, you have no right to forbid this visit that will not only make everything plain, but amuse me greatly as well.” The words were reasonable, but the voice was hard, and the pointed white fingers, heavy with rings that seemed to touch the table top lightly, but in reality supported the swaying figure, were tense and cold. “Social position be damned! I’ve had enough of it these three years and over, but if not a soul should ever again speak to you in the street, I’ll not have it said that you have spent a single night in Tom Barney’s house, much less passed two weeks there and been thrown into the arms of the crowd they travel with!” “Don’t be coarse. Mr. and Mrs. Barney’s house,” corrected the woman’s voice; “and when I know that you spent innumerable week-ends before our marriage at one or more of their country places and that he proposed your name for the difficult Cosmopolitan Club and engineered your election. I wish to make this visit, I have accepted the invitation, and I am going.” “I repeat, I will not allow my wife to sleep under the Barneys’ roof. If, with your sharp insight, you cannot grasp the reason, then you must yield obedience to what I consider seemly.” “If that is all, the matter is possible of arrangement,” replied the woman’s voice, growing colder than the February sleet outside. “Then you will yield this point?” “Yes, I will yield the point of being your wife,” and the woman, suddenly feeling the need of greater support than the touch of finger tips upon the table gave her, moved slowly toward a deep chair before the fire and dropped from view behind its screening back. For a full minute the man stood staring at the place where she was not, then turned and crashed from the room, overturning a porcelain jar in his blind haste. Ten minutes later the front door shut. An hour later, Mrs. Hasleton’s maid was packing a suit case while her mistress, dressed in a street gown and seated at her desk, wrote half a dozen notes. Presently looking up, she said: “Elise, you will follow me on Tuesday, as I had arranged, with the trunks packed for a two weeks’ visit. I have written the directions for you.” Then, glancing through some time-tables, “Tell Peter to be here at two to drive me to the station.” “A bad day for travel? Not at all; the snow packs in the streets, that in the open country blows off and amounts to nothing.” Why she did it, she could not have told, but Mrs. Hasleton chose the least direct way of reaching her destination; and, instead of going as usual to the parlour car, entered a day coach, where she sat tapping her foot nervously, waiting for the train to pull out, without so much as lifting her heavy brown veil. It was in itself a novel sensation, this leaving with no one to say good-by, to go to a city where no one expected her; for she had determined to spend the next two days at a woman’s club to which she belonged, going to the Barneys’ on the following Tuesday, that being the time of the invitation. She had not yet told her change of destination to Elise. The man strode about the half-cleared streets until he was physically almost exhausted, and then entered his club, where he hid himself in a corner, curling up like a half-sick and surly dog who both craves and resents sympathy. A group of younger men entered, joking each other and harmlessly boisterous. Spying Hasleton, they proceeded to unearth him from his lair. Shouted one, “We have a scheme afoot for Sunday, and we want a steady head like yours to come along and collect us and see that we start for home straight on Monday morning.” “Grumpy and got a cold? Nonsense, you want some lunch.” The Milk Freight crawled in on the slippery rails at the Hattertown siding only an hour late, which was doing very well, as sleet had followed the snow and everything was a glare of ice. But now the threatening snow clouds had vanished and the stars were piercingly clear. The Sweezy boy had gone up for Miranda Banks in a sleigh before eight o’clock, and she waited patiently in the little room outside the ticket booth, with only the two benches and the air-tight stove for company. The natives who usually gathered at the station on winter evenings were mostly in bed, tired out by snow shovelling, the few remaining having collected at Sweezy’s Hotel to listen to his accounts of other February storms he had known. Inside the booth the sick operator’s wife, who was waiting until the freight and express had passed safely through before closing up, alternately dozed and started to listen to the tick-tickety-tick, that sounded to the girl outside as mysterious as the death-watch beetle in a wall. Then the milk train came in. Jim Bradley crossed the little room and inquired the whereabouts of the through express before he saw Miranda. “I haven’t heard since Oldfield,” replied the tired woman, “but I reckon you’re good for an hour’s holdup anyway.” The milk supply was low that night and quickly loaded, then Jim Bradley, throwing off his outer coat and pitching his cap at it, wholly relaxed and stretched luxuriously on the bench behind the stove, regardless of chilblains. For a few moments the unusually bad weather of the month, the present storm, and various bits of local news held their attention; then Bradley sat up erect, folded his arms, and said: “Now for my news. No, I won’t let you guess, for if you hit it, you’d knock half the wind out of the story. I’m promoted,—first of March I’m boss of the through morning local No. 11 and can pick my own crew!” |
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