“That is certainly complimentary, and I appreciate it. I am being treated with the fat of the land. I am afraid from the spread you have here that you have robbed the family of a week’s provender; you know I am very well acquainted with the resources of the place.”
“Ah but, ‘it’s nae loss what ye gie a freen’,’ as the old saying is, and ye need think nae more of it.” Polly was in high spirits. The prospect of any kind of frolic always put her in the best of humors.
The dinner over, Parker took his departure, and his invited guests set out in due time to meet him on the other side of the river. The days were now so long that there was no fear of their being belated in getting back, and a short stay was not to be thought of when one went out to supper; it meant the whole afternoon and the evening too, if possible. Polly was full of her quips and jokes, and pulled lustily across the stream, but she sobered down when she got across. “Ye’ll not be far from yer ain, Mrs. Kennedy,” she said, “for Parker’s got the land next yer father’s, an’ ye’ll be seein’ what it’s like. I’ll be bound Hump’ll look glum as a mustard-pot when he gets his summons to quit. I’ll miss ye all, but I’ll be glad when ye come to yer ain. Here we are and here’s Park.”
Parker came forward with two horses. “How shall we travel?” he asked. “Shall I take you, Mrs. Kennedy?”
But Polly spoke up. “I’ve bespoke her, and ye’ll be takin’ Agnes. Come, Mrs. Kennedy, up behind me,” and Agnes found herself starting off with Parker, her arm about his waist.
The way was not very long, and it should have been rarely pleasant to be riding through the leafy woods this summer afternoon, tall trees about them, and the air sweet with the smell of the grape blossoms, yet it was Polly who did most of the talking. Parker rarely spoke. Once his hand touched Agnes’s fingers, resting lightly upon his belt, but he withdrew from the contact as if it hurt him. It was of the most indifferent things that the two young persons spoke, when they spoke at all, and the girl felt that she would have been happier with Polly or her mother.
Before the door of the small cabin the horses at last stopped. The woods came close about the small dwelling, for it takes time to fell trees, and though the clearing for the corn-field and the garden had been made, the space seemed small in the midst of the limitless forest, and so small, so lonely seemed the little cabin set there in a wilderness, that one wondered how a man could be content to make it his abode.
“Welcome to my hut,” said Parker, bowing Mrs. Kennedy in. Polly followed and Agnes came last. The girl gave an exclamation of surprise and pleasure as she entered the room. It showed only the barest necessities in the way of furnishings, but the walls were festooned with vines, and upon the table stood a huge bowl of swamp magnolias. Heaped high at one end upon large leaves were ripe strawberries, and at the other were cherries as brightly red. Around the table was twisted a grape-vine, and each rough stool was covered with a piece of fringed deerskin.
Polly looked about her in surprise. “Who’d ha’ thought a man would ha’ done all this; it looks like a woman’s work, an’ a kind that we don’t see about here. I’ve niver seen the beat, even at a weddin’. How’d you get a holt o’ them cherries?”
“They came from Dod Hunter’s, and the strawberries, too,” Parker told her.