With conviction Jacqueline shook her head. How should she ever have heard of Caroline’s ancestresses?
“Well, now!” said Grandma pityingly, and wiped her spectacles.
“Tell me, please—please!” cried Jacqueline, bouncing up and down in the aged hammock.
“Land sakes, child, it’s lucky that hammock is strung up good and strong, or you’d come down ker-flummocks! Just you go on with your darning, whilst I tell you what there is to tell. ’Taint much. Hetty Tait wasn’t aunt to anybody then, nor was she old. She was a young, blooming girl from down river, born in Allingham, that Nathan Tait fetched here a bride, when first this settlement was made. Their farm was up to the north end of town, and the woods ran right down into their pasture land. One day Hetty was making soft soap at the big fireplace in the kitchen, with her two babies asleep in the cradle right at hand.”
“Grandma! Don’t say anything happened to the babies!” cried Jacqueline, with a swift thought of Annie’s golden head.
Sphinx-like, Grandma went on:
“It was a balmy day in spring, and the door stood wide open. Nathan Tait had gone into town. Hetty was alone on the place. All at once, though she hadn’t heard a sound, she sensed she wasn’t alone. She whirled round quick as scat, and lo and behold you! there was a great big six-foot savage, with a scalp tied to his belt and a knife in his hand, just stepping cat-footed into her kitchen, and his eyes on her babies.”
“Go on, Grandma! Go on, or I’ll scream!”
“That’s just what Hetty didn’t waste time a-doing, Jackie. Quicker ’n you can say Jack Robinson, she scooped up the scalding hot soap in the great huge ladle she had in her hand, and let drive fair and square at the Indian’s face. He didn’t linger after that. He took out at the door, and Hetty bestowed another ladleful upon his naked back, to speed his footsteps. Then she double barred the door and took down her husband’s fowling piece and kept watch till her husband’s return, not knowing, of course, whether he would return, or whether he’d be ambushed on the road from town, as many a man was in those old days. You can’t blame those folks, Jackie, if they were sort of hard. Life wasn’t what you might call soft with them.”
“I’ll play that game to-morrow,” Jacqueline announced with snapping eyes. “I’ll be Hetty, and Freddie and Annie can be the babies, and Neil shall be the Injun—only of course I’ll throw cold water on him, not hot soap. It won’t hurt him really, Grandma.”