The newcomer introduced himself as Malcolm Creede. He had stopped for a few minutes in Aura, that morning, for provisions, and had heard the gleeful accounts of the villagers as to their treatment of the stuck-up millionaire. Wherefore, Creede had climbed the hill, in order to offer the scanty hospitality of his own farmhouse to Osmun, until such time as the roads from the Valley should be open.
Osmun greeted the offer with a delight born of chill and starvation. Leading his horse, he followed Creede across a trackless half-mile or so to a farm that nestled barrenly in a cup of the hills. During the plungingly arduous walk he learned something of his host.
Creede was a Scotchman, who had begun life as a schoolmaster; and who had come to America, with his invalid wife, to better his fortunes. A final twist of fate had stranded the couple on this Berkshire farm. Here, six months earlier, the wife had died, leaving her heart-crushed husband with twin sons a few months old. Here, ever since, the widower had eked out a pitifully bare living; and had cared, as best he might, for his helpless baby boys. His meager homestead, by the way, had gleefully been named by luckier and more witty neighbors, “Rackrent Farm.” The name had stuck.
Before the end of Osmun Vail’s enforced stay at Rackrent Farm, gratitude to his host had merged into genuine friendship. The two lonely men took to each other, as only solitaries with similar tastes can hope to. Osmun guessed, though Creede denied it, that the Good Samaritan deed of shelter must rouse neighborhood animosity against the Scotchman.
Osmun guessed, and with equal correctness, that this silent and broken Scot would be bitterly offended at any offer of money payment for his hospitality. And Vail set his own ingenuity to work for means of rewarding the kindness.
As a result, within six months Malcolm Creede was installed as manager (“factor,” Creede called it) of the huge new Berkshire estate of Vailholme and was supervising work on a big new house built for him by Osmun in a corner of the estate.
Creede was woefully ignorant of business matters. Coming into a small inheritance from a Scotch uncle, he turned the pittance over to Vail for investment. And he was merely delighted—in no way suspicious—when the investments brought him in an income of preposterous size. Osmun Vail never did things by halves.
Deeply grateful, Creede threw his energy and boundless enthusiasm into his new duties. He went further. One of his twin sons he christened “Clive” for the inheritance-leaving uncle in Scotland. But the other he named “Osmun,” in honor of his benefactor. Vail, much gratified at the compliment, insisted on taking over the education of both lads. The childless bachelor reveled in his rôle of fairy godfather to them.
But there was another result of Osmun Vail’s chilly vigil in the half-finished hilltop mansion. During the hour before Creede had come to his rescue the cold and hungry multimillionaire had taken a vow as solemn as it was fantastic.
He swore he would set aside not less than ten of his house’s forty-three rooms for the use of any possible wayfarers who might be stranded, as he had been, in that inhospitable wilderness, and who could afford to pay for decent accommodations. Not tramps or beggars, but folk who, like himself, might come that way with means for buying food and shelter, and to whom such food and shelter might elsewhere be denied.