CHAPTER V
THE TERRIBLE MISS PRINGLE
The woman so excitedly approaching Sunnyside was a buxom person with every sign of an assertive and determined character. This first speech addressed to Hiram made him feel that he must somehow be in the wrong—that he had done something to shock Miss Pringle and the neighborhood in general.
Hiram took off his hat as Miss Pringle came near. But he did not offer his hand, for he was not at all sure that her greeting was intended to be a friendly one.
"I suppose you are Mr. Strong?" the woman gasped, rather out of breath when she arrived.
"Yes, ma'am," replied Hiram.
"Well, for the land's sake, where have you been?"
"I guess I don't understand you," he said. "Are you Miss Pringle?"
"That's who I am," she declared with emphasis. "And I heard all about you from Mr. Bronson. You were comin' to stay at my house last night and you didn't come. Were you told to come to me?"
"Not exactly. I was advised to try at your house for lodging—"
"Who by?" she flashed at him.
"By the stationmaster."
"That dumbhead! I might have known Jase Oakley would ball it all up. When Mr. Bronson 'phoned to me that he could not get over in the storm to meet you at the depot, I turned right around and 'phoned Jason to tell you that I would be on the lookout for you. Didn't he tell you that, Mr. Strong?"
"Not in just that way," replied Hiram.
"Well, for the land's sake, where did you stop? When you didn't come along at the proper time after the train got in last evening I began calling folks on the line. I called everybody that had a 'phone, and none of 'em had seen you. It was so rough a night—"
Hiram saw at once that the terrible Miss Pringle was, after all, a kindly soul. It could not be for the mere possession of a "male creature," sight unseen, that she had taken all this trouble to locate him, a stranger in Pringleton.
"You were most kind, Miss Pringle," he said quickly. "I am sorry to have caused you any disturbance of mind."
"But where did you stay?" insisted the woman, eyeing Hiram with two very sharp brown eyes.
It was evident that very little of importance went on in Miss Delia Pringle's neighborhood that she did not see. She was kindly of disposition as well as shrewd, Mr. Yancey Battick's opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Hiram was not at all afraid of her when he looked into her plump and rosy face.
"I tell you," he said, smiling covertly, for he suspected from what the stationmaster had said how the majority of the neighbors looked upon Yancey Battick, "a heavy shower caught me and I made for the nearest house."
"And whose was that, for the land's sake?" was the instant demand.
"Mr. Battick's," Hiram said demurely.
"Yancey Battick?" almost shrieked Miss Pringle. "Why, he's crazy!"
"I shouldn't wonder if he is a little," admitted Hiram. "But I am sure he is harmless."
"I don't know about that," she demurred. "He's altogether too quick to use a gun. A poor tramp came past here last summer—he never would have stopped, I guess, only he was out of breath completely—and Battick had blown his coat-tails off with a charge of rock-salt just because the hobo had gone into the yard of the old house and around to the well. That's the coldest water anywhere in Pringleton; but nobody ever gets a drink of it but Yancey Battick now."
"I suppose he's paid for it, Miss Pringle?" said Hiram quietly.
"I don't know that he has," was her quick reply. "At least, the neighbors blame me for selling the old place to such a man. They know I didn't need the money. And Yancey Battick certainly ain't what you can call with truth a good neighbor. We count on getting good neighbors into the Pringleton district if we can. That is why I was so glad to sell Sunnyside to Mr. Bronson.
"And do you really mean to tell me that you spent the night with Mr. Battick?" she added.
"And he did not eat me up," laughed Hiram.
"Well! All I've got to say, young man, is that you're a regular Daniel. You'd find it cozy and comfortable, I guess, in a lion's den. Never heard of anybody's even getting inside of the old house before since Battick got into it. He did let you inside, didn't he?"
"I don't look as though I had stayed out on that leaky old porch of his, do I?" asked Hiram, still much amused.
"You're as dry as a bone, as I said before."
"Not only did he entertain me for supper and breakfast, but he gave me his own bed in which to sleep."
"For the land's sake!" Miss Pringle shook her head in wonder. Then her brown eyes suddenly snapped. All the inquisitiveness in the woman's nature came to the surface; perhaps it was her single sin. "What's he got in that house he's so afraid the neighbors might see, Mr. Strong?"
"I did not see anything particularly mysterious—nothing at all," Hiram assured her.
"Not a thing? Wasn't he trying to hide anything from you? Didn't he seem afraid of anything?"
"He certainly has a great fear of rats," Hiram admitted, answering her second query but avoiding the first. "And he has good reason to. He shot a big fellow right there in the house while we sat before the fire."
"You don't say!"
"If it was me I'd get me a weasel and turn him loose in the house and then pour cement and broken glass in the rat holes."
"He knew the rats were there when he bought the old homestead," declared Miss Pringle defensively.
"And I guess he has a right to shoot them if he wishes to," laughed Hiram.
"But he is too promiscuous with his shotgun," declared the woman, shaking her head. "Well, now, Mr. Strong, I'm sorry you did not reach my house. I—and Abigail Wentworth who lives with me—would have been glad to put you up. But I am glad you made out as well as you did at Mr. Battick's. I'm glad to know he's not so bad as we all thought him."
"Perhaps the neighbors haven't approached him just right," Hiram suggested. "He wishes to be let alone."
"Then there is something wrong with him," Miss Pringle declared. "Something that he's ashamed of."
"You are jumping at a conclusion there, that may not be correct," Hiram said. "At any rate I saw nothing really wrong with Mr. Battick. And I feel grateful for his hospitality."
"Well, now, Mr. Strong," the woman said quickly, "you bring your bag right over to the house and stop with me till Mr. Bronson can make other arrangements for you."
"You are more than kind," Hiram told her. "But I understand that I may be able to go to housekeeping on my own account in one of the sheds—where the former tenant of the farm ran his incubators and brooders."
"That Jim Brandenburg! He made me a lot of trouble. But he did have ideas about hens. I suppose that shed could be made comfortable for you if Mr. Bronson wants you right on the place."
"I will try 'baching it,' Miss Pringle," Hiram said with firmness.
"Well, just as you say. But I want you to come over to-day to dinner. You ain't prepared to go right to housekeeping, I'm sure."
"Thank you; I will certainly come," Hiram assured her.
"Do so," Miss Pringle said warmly, as she turned away. "Abigail will blow the horn when it's ready."
He thanked her again. The terrible Miss Pringle did not prove to be so very formidable after all. It was evident that Battick had gained just as wrong an idea about his neighbors as the neighbors had about him.
"I will keep on the blind side of both parties," Hiram Strong told himself. "It is well to have friends in both camps. One thing I surely want—that is, to keep on good terms with everybody about Sunnyside. I don't want to have any such difficulty here as I had with the Dickersons at first, back there at Scoville," he added, remembering very poignantly a neighborhood feud that had hampered him when he first went to work on the Atterson Eighty.
When Miss Pringle had gone back to her neat little cottage across the road, Hiram began examining the buildings left standing on the Sunnyside premises. Nothing of importance but the dwelling itself had been destroyed by the fire.
The barn had a basement with swinging stanchions for ten cows and stalls for several horses. The mows were filled with a good quality of hay, and some oats in the straw—a feed that Hiram did not much approve of. For a horse or mule has to be very hungry indeed to eat oat-straw, and fed in this way a large proportion of the grain is wasted and trampled underfoot with the roughage.
"It looks to me," Hiram decided, after coming out of the barn, "that somebody tried to run a small dairy here without a silo. There are stacks of corn fodder, half of it winter-spoiled, and not a beast on the place to eat it up. It would pay Mr. Bronson to buy some young stock right now and turn it into the paddock back of the barn, and feed up all this roughage.
"Even if there is little pasture on the farm, it would pay to do this, and if the stock is not fattened by May, hire pasture for them on neighboring farms. I hate to see fodder go to waste, for it is the most expensive feed a farmer can raise."
Many an older farmer would have called in question the young fellow's statement. But Hiram was thinking no longer as a "one-horse farmer." He had got out of that class now. Here at Sunnyside, if he made a profit at all, it must be through much bigger agricultural activities than he had ever been able to compass before.
He went on to the row of poultry houses and entered the first one. This was the incubator house of which Mr. Battick had told him. It was a well-built and comfortable place. There was a good-sized pot stove and a bunk to sleep in. There was a cupboard, too, and a table and a chair.
"Guess I can make out here for a while, at any rate," he thought as he came out-of-doors again. "Of course, later I shan't have time to get my own meals; but at first—Ah! here comes an automobile. I wonder if this is not Mr. Bronson now?" and he started for the gate to meet the machine.