Grover Cleveland and gran’daddy, side by side in the old farm wagon, took the road while it was still so dark that they must needs give the mules the rein. But there were other early risers in that community, for by sunrise Campbell and Greenlee and Brevard and others were playing away with hammer and trowel upon the Ledbetter cabin. They repaired the roof, they cemented into place the loose stones of the fireplace, and topped out the fallen chimney; between the logs they spatted clay—taken from the road in front but good as imperial Cæsar’s—and stopped the cracks “to keep the wind away.” They propped the leaning cow shed and before noon an occupant, “mighty nigh all Jersey,” was chewing her cud, while over her head was stored fodder sufficient to keep her chewing till pastures were green. Her neighbour on the other side of a partition was a Kentucky-bred roan mare, which but a few hours ago had been the property of Captain Campbell; he had appeared upon the scene riding a gray and leading the roan all saddled and ready for the road and had made her comfortable in this new home.
In durance a heterogeneous collection of chickens were making one another’s acquaintance over a collation of corn, the only unsociable one among them being Aunt Dicey’s old black hen; her powers were all employed in an effort to rid herself of a streamer of red flannel which the old lady had tied to her tail to discourage her sitting propensities.
Within doors the Christmas tree with its unshed mask still monopolized one room, but in the other cheerful hands worked a metamorphosis. Cobwebs, litter, and soil disappeared, and furniture, country made but adapted to its purpose, took its place. Upon the tough and rough old chestnut floor they levelled a bed of hay and, so that it was soft as pillows to the tread, what matter that each breadth of the rag carpet they spread upon it showed different tones of homemade dyes and the weave of a different loom? In one corner they corded together a bedstead in the good old fashion of their great-grandparents, and the bed they reared upon it was a marvel. There was a mattress of oat straw and one of corn-husks, a bed of stripped hens’ feathers and one of geese feathers, and bolsters and pillows in numbers sufficient to accommodate a family of hydras. Aunt Dicey furnished blankets spun and woven by her own hands from wool of her own shearing, and among a collection of quilts was a wonderful one of old Mis’ Jimson’s piecing. It contained, by actual count, three thousand one hundred and seventy-nine pieces and she called it “The Foundation of the Great Deep.” When at last that bed was made up, the turkey red cherubs on the pillow-shams (almost the only shams that modernity had introduced among those artless people) lay very close to the rafters. Its makers viewed it with admiration and complacency, but Deacon Higgins looked dubious:
“They’re a tollable spry old couple,” he said, “but”—and he wheeled a barrel of potatoes alongside as a suggestion of means of getting into bed.
It would take a readier pen than mine to enumerate and describe all the gifts that were brought to that plenishing. The cupboard door refused to close upon the array of ham, hominy, and honey (the three h’s of the mountaineer), the salt-rising bread, and the soda biscuit.
Major Greenlee was a carpenter. For half a day he planed, sawed, and hammered in a corner and when his work took form it was a capacious meal bin. When bagfuls of corn meal had been emptied into it till it was “plumb full” they all surveyed it with satisfaction and “reckoned the gourd wouldn’t scrape the bottom of that before spring.”
All day long pedestrians and vehicles had been coming and going before the old house as never before in its history and yet when the sun had set the sky on fire behind the Bald, the gathered people were still awaiting an arrival.
They scanned a mountain road above them, visible only in short lengths where it emerged from the forests into the clearings.
“I see ’em!” a far-sighted old man shouted with a boy’s enthusiasm, “I see Colonel Ledbetter’s white mules! Now they’re behind May’s Peak, you’ll see ’em come out on t’other side.”
And so they watched them from point to point and every time they came into view a squad ran in to re-inspect the cabin and see that every thing was in order.