But June was ready with a quite feasible explanation, which was that the car had been loaded onto a truck and hauled there. “Reckon in the summer this yere field is all dried up, Mas’ Wayne.”
As it was getting on toward the middle of the afternoon by now it behooved them to set about preparing the domicile for occupation. They discarded their coats and set to work and in an hour had accomplished marvels. The floor was cleared of rubbish, Wayne requiring June to carry it well away from the vicinity of the car before disposing of it, dust was obliterated with the fragment of curtain, some loose boards were nailed back into place over the windows—the broken skillet served as a hammer—the stove door was rehung with a bent nail, ashes were removed, and the refractory rear door was coaxed into obedience by digging away the dirt beneath it with a pocket knife.
After that the principal demands were stovepipe and covering for the broken windows. They thought later of many other things that were sorely needed, but just now those wants took precedence. It was out of the question to find stovepipe nearer than town, unless, as June suggested, some rubbish dump supplied it, and so they tackled the matter of covering the windows. For that they needed boards, or some other material, and nails. And a hammer would have helped a lot, although the skillet did fairly well in the emergency. There was enough of the partition left to supply boards for one window, but they had no nails, and a search through the ash pile failed to provide more than four bent and rusted ones. So it was decided that June should walk back to the stamping works and see if he could find, beg, or borrow some. Also, he was to be on the lookout for anything that might be used in making the new home weather tight. In the meanwhile Wayne was to “projeck ’roun’,” as June phrased it, and collect anything useful that could be found.
June went off, whistling blithely, and Wayne began his search. The new abode stood about two hundred yards from the railroad embankment, at this point a good eight feet above the meadow, and possibly half again as far from the nearest building which was the stamping works. Beyond the latter were a number of other factories, puffing steam or smoke into the afternoon sunlight, and beyond these began the town. Standing on the front porch, which was the term ultimately applied to the rear platform, the view to the left ended at the railroad embankment, but to the right Wayne could see for nearly a mile. A few scattered houses indicated the dirt road in that direction and beyond the houses was some tilled land, and, finally, a fringe of trees. In front lay the edge of the town, with the town itself, overhung by a haze of smoke, a good mile beyond. On the fourth side, visible when Wayne stepped off the “porch” to the soggy ground, the meadow continued for another hundred yards to a rail fence. Beyond the fence was a ploughed field which sloped off and up to meet the blue March sky. Between car and railroad a group of trees attracted Wayne’s attention, and he set out for it across the squishy meadow. Half-way to it he caught sight of water and recalled June’s mention of a “branch.” It proved to be a tiny brook that, emerging from a culvert under the tracks, wandered as far as the tiny grove and then curved off to the rail fence and followed it across the fields in the direction of the road. The water was clear and cold and tasted very good to the boy. Just now the brook was overflowing its bed in places, but the little knoll on which the cluster of trees grew was high and dry underfoot.
The brook offered treasure-trove in the shape of a number of short planks and pieces of boxes rudely nailed together, doubtless representing the efforts of some boy to construct a raft. Wayne doubted its seaworthiness after he had experimentally pushed it back into the water and tried his weight on it. He floated it along to the nearest point to the car, getting his feet thoroughly wet in the process, and then, not without much panting and frequent rests, dragged it the balance of the way. After that he ranged the field in all directions, returning several times with his loads of wood for fuel or window repairs. He had quite a respectable pile on the front platform by the time June returned.
The darkey brought a whole pocketful of nails and a number of sheets of tin of various sizes which he had salvaged from the waste heap. Few were larger than fifteen or sixteen inches in any direction, but together they would turn the wind and rain at one window at least. The nails had been given him by a man in the office. He had, he said, requested a hammer, too, but the man’s generosity had balked there. They set to work with the materials at hand and inside of the next hour accounted for four windows and part of a fifth, leaving six still open to the winds of Heaven. They made a systematic search for more boards, but failed to find any. Foiled, they entered their new home and sat down for a brief rest.
The sight of the groceries presented a new quandary to Wayne. “Look here, June,” he exclaimed. “We’ve got coffee and milk and sugar, and we know where there’s water, but we haven’t anything to boil it in!”
“My goodness!” said June. “Ain’ that a fac’? What we-all goin’ to do, Mas’ Wayne?”
Wayne shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I reckon that skillet wouldn’t do, would it?”