“James Stuart McBirney, it is too! Ma’s hung a blue curtain over the place where my clothes hang, and she’s got a braided rug on the floor and a cheesecloth curtain at the window, and she’s covered my stand with blue and white print. The way she’s fixed up those cones and pine leaves, you’d never know the looking glass was broke. It’s the prettiest room I ever saw. Oh, Jim, do come!”
Jim pretended that he wasn’t interested, and stamped up the new stairs his father had built, and along the platform which led to the attic room which had been given Azalea for her own. Although Jim was supposed not to care anything about the room, he had, nevertheless, braided a hammock of warp such as his mother used on her loom, and this hammock had been swung out on the platform. Azalea could lie there and look straight up the mountain side. Jim had helped, too, with the making of the bedstead and the splint-bottomed chairs and the dresser, and in the bottom of his heart he thought it was just the kind of a room Azalea ought to have—she was so pretty and—well, Jim couldn’t quite find the word to describe her—but she reminded him of a pinky-white trillium. Not that he would have said so. He treated her just as if she had been his own sister, and that means that he led her rather a hard life at times. But that didn’t seem to bother Azalea at all. She would do anything for him, and she could tease back when she had a mind to, and when he “got her in a corner,” as he put it, she laughed her ringing laugh.
“Some girls would get mad to be treated the way Jim treats Azalea,” ma used to say. “But she’s got the sweetest disposition of anybody I ever saw.”
“Not too sweet to hold her own,” answered Thomas McBirney. “At first I thought to myself, have to pitch in and take that girl’s part, but after a time I says to myself, I reckon I’ll leave them two young uns to take care of theirselves.”
They used to buy each other to do things, by promising to tell stories. If Jim wanted Azalea to help him gather firewood, he offered to tell her a story in payment for her help. If Azalea wanted Jim to help her scrub the floor, she promised him a story of things that had happened to her when she was “on the road.” One day Jim told Azalea the story his father had told him that day on the mountain, about the old Atherton mansion, and how it had stood vacant for years and years, with the swallows flying in and out its chimneys, and the snakes and squirrels and birds having their way with it.
“There’s snakes in the grass and bats in the porches and wild doves in the barn,” said Jim. “A boy I know told me about it. He says you can’t count the squirrels and the catbirds and the robins and the thrushes. Some think it’s haunted, but I don’t reckon there’s much in that story. I’m not long on ghosts.”
“It might have a ghost,” said Azalea wistfully. “Anyway, I’d like to see it—the house, I mean. Oh, Jimmy, I’d just love to see it! Let’s ask ma if we-all can’t go picnicking down there.”
Ma was doubtful. She said she’d fooled away altogether too much time lately—that she’d never been so lazy. But at this her whole family laughed so, for they almost never caught her for a moment idle, that she gave in and agreed to go the next Saturday.
“Pa’ll be driving to town, and we-all will go along. We can get out at the Old Green Place and cut off across to the Atherton Place and eat our lunch there, and then pa, he can meet us at the Green Place again on the way home.
“The road to town used to run by the Atherton house,” pa said. “But it did seem as if it picked up every hill in the whole county, and now that the road ain’t been taken care of for a dozen years, it’s just a pesky lot of sink holes. Why, it’s as much as a horse’s life is worth to take it over that there road.”