“Break it very gently, Huldah,” I cautioned. “You know we’ve borne a good deal.”
“Your uncle Issachar was here for a couple of days.”
She certainly had made a sensation.
“Not Uncle Issachar! Not here?” exclaimed Silvia incredulously.
“Yes, ma’am. He came the next day after Beth and Mr. Rossiter and Polly left. I told him you’d gone away for a little vacation and rest. I didn’t let on that I knew where you had gone, because I didn’t want him straggling up there, too, or sending for you to come back. He said your absence would make no difference to his plans; that he never let nothing do that. He come to pay a visit and he should pay one.”
“Yes,” said Silvia feebly. “That sounds like Uncle Issachar.”
“I told him to make himself perfectly at home; that every one did that to this place, and he said he would. I’d just slicked up the big front room upstairs and I seen to it that he had everything all right. I cooked the best dinner I knew how, and he said it was the first white man’s meal he had eat since his ma died, so I found out what she used to cook and fed him on it. Them three kids and him eat like they was holler. I guess if Polly hadn’t took them away your grocery bill would ’a looked like Barb’ry Allen’s grave.
“Well, as I was saying, your uncle he eat till he got over his grouches, and like enough he’d be here eating yet, if he hadn’t got a telegraph to hit the line for home, some big business deal, he said, and I 237 guess it was a great deal, for he licked his chops and smacked his lips over it, and he give me a ten dollar bill to get a new dress and each of Them Three one dollar fer candy.”
“The old tightwad!” I exclaimed. “It was your cooking, sure, that made him loosen up that way.”