When her ailments were exhausted, she began on her neighbors’. Mrs. Busby caught her breath as the rocker jabbed the pine box carrying the talking-machine. “I wonder why she wants a talking-machine?” she asked herself with the grim humor which had won sturdy Sam Busby twenty years before when he had acquired the habit of buying bread at the Home Bakery in a suburb of Boston where Maria Mathes served.
Mrs. Parrish was embarked now on the sea of a neighbor’s woe, the rocker working toward the couch. A newcomer into the valley, Mrs. Dowker, was the subject of another Æneid. It transpired that Mr. Dowker had been reading desert literature, too. He had heard of wonderful cures effected by desert air. He dreamed to make a fortune and recreate a sickly wife. Mrs. Dowker from a hospital bed begged to be left behind for a year. Mrs. Parrish dwelt on the Dowker pilgrimage with ghoulish realism. Mrs. Dowker was failing under the labors of desert life; the little boy was always ailing. It was hard to get bottled water “in there.” Mrs. Dowker had to boil every drop they drank.
Mrs. Busby saw her chance and grabbed it. “I don’t believe in boiled water,” she announced. Mrs. Parrish was ready to pick up her thread, but Mrs. Busby was not to be ousted.
“I don’t believe in all this fuss about bottled water, nor in boiled water, either. The water of a place is the water one should drink. You breathe the air, why shouldn’t you drink the water?” Her logic was terrifically convincing to herself. “To be consistent, why shouldn’t you bring in bottled air? The water of a place is the water that agrees with one in that place. Why, that’s as plain as poverty! Look at the Indians. They’ve been drinking this water for a hundred years, and over. Did you ever hear of an Indian dying because he drank too much water?” It was a touch of the Maria Mathes sardonic humor.
Mrs. Busby quoted Mrs. Hadley. “Didn’t every one scare her into thinking that the canal water was not fit to drink, and didn’t she boil every drop that went down a Hadley throat?”
“But that was different,” tried to interpose Mrs. Parrish, but Mrs. Busby held the rostrum.
“And that first year, wasn’t the three of them, herself and her two grown sons, down with typhoid? Where’d they get it? Out of the air? You can’t talk to me of boiled water.”
“Do you think it was the boiled water that killed Joe Hadley?” demanded Mrs. Parrish, fear reducing her black eyes to points of startled light.
“There’s the facts,” said her guest with an oracular wave of the hand. “Take ’em, or leave ’em.” And then she practised passing on her second lesson. “It was the fear of the water as killed them. That’s my belief.”
“Fear?”