“Yes. The old Rorth Glassworks.”
“You’ve found it,” Bill answered.
“But there’s nothing here any more, Mr. Caldwell,” Ronnie added quickly. “I mean, they don’t make glass now—not for the last seventy-five or eighty years, near-abouts.”
“I know.” The man smiled faintly. “Anybody who’s traveled up that dirt road could guess that there’s been no activity here for years.”
Ronnie grinned. “Now that you’re here, what are you fixing to do?” he asked.
“Well, what I’d like to do is look the place over. But I suppose I’ll have to get permission first.”
Ronnie shook his head. “You won’t have to do that, Mr. Caldwell. This land belongs to my grandfather. He’ll let you look. Maybe you’d like to have us show you around?”
“I’d like that very much!” Mr. Caldwell answered.
As Ronnie led the man down the cobbled street, a hundred stories Grandfather had told him about the village leaped to his mind and begged to be told. He remembered the evening Grandfather and he had sat on the top of the bluff overlooking the village, with the bats circling overhead and the buildings standing silent below and fading from sight among the trees in the gathering darkness. How vividly Grandfather had told the story of the great fire of 1871 when ten of the workers’ cottages had burned to the ground, and Great-great-grandfather Ezra had worked beside his men, battling the blaze until he had fallen from smoke poisoning.
Or, the winter of the great blizzard when the roof of the Glassworks had caved in from the weight, and when the drifts were so high it took three days to dig out the road so that supplies could be procured from the storehouses.