"No one who might be able to tell more than yourself?" I persisted.
A gleam of humor lit his eyes. He dropped a cardboard cylinder into Mr. Clifford Brown's mailbox and began to sort out my letters.
"Far as that goes, I guess Mis' Hill don't miss much of what goes on around here. When she hears a good bit of tattle, she has her husband hitch up, and she goes drivin' all day. Ain't a house she knows that don't get to hear the whole yarn! You know Mis' Royal Hill? Mis' Vere gets butter and cheese from her. Might ask her!"
I thanked him and drove on.
Mrs. Hill, garrulous wife of the farmer who owned the place next to ours, was on her porch when I came to a halt before the house. She granted me more interest than the other natives upon whom I had called that morning; inviting me into her parlor to "set," when she had identified me. But she knew nothing of the object of my quest.
"I guessed you must be the new owner up to the Michell place," she observed, her beady, faded brown eyes busy with my appearance, picking up details in avid, darting little glances suggestive of a bird pecking crumbs. "Cliff Brown said a lame feller had bought it. I don't see as that little limp cripples you much, the way you can rampus 'round in that fast automobile of yours! Now, I'm perfectly sound, and I wouldn't be paid to drive the thing. You'd ought to get the other fellow to run it for you; the handsome one. I guess you like to do it, though? Writer, ain't you? Books or newspapers?"
I rallied my scattered faculties to answer the machine-gun attack.
"Music?" she echoed, her narrow, sun-dried face wrinkling into new lines of inquisitiveness. "They said you had a piano in your bedroom, but I thought they were just foolin' me! Seems I never heard of havin' a piano upstairs. Most folks like to show 'em off in the parlor. Must be kind of funny, takin' your company upstairs to play for 'em. But then it's kind of a funny thing for a man to take to, anyhow! I got a niece ten years old next August who can play piano so good there don't seem anythin' left to learn her, so——! But there ain't no use of you drivin' 'round here lookin' for a fair-headed girl, Mr. Locke. The Slav folk down in the shanties by the post road are about the only light-complected ones in this neighborhood. Somehow, we run mostly to plain brown. Senator Allen has two girls, but they're only home from a boardin' school for vacation. How do you like your place?"
"Very much," I assured her. "Only, I do not know a great deal about it, yet. Its history, I mean. Are there any interesting stories about the house? You know, we city people like a nice legend or ghost story to tell our friends when they come to visit us."
She chuckled, swinging in her plush-covered rocking-chair, arms folded on her meagre breast.