“I’m so glad I am selling for this company that sends all goods directly to me instead of having me take orders the way the other one did. I’m just a born peddler and I know I make more when I can deliver the goods the minute they are bought and paid for. I’m going to take Buck Hill in on my rounds this year and see if all of my dear cousins won’t lay in a stock of sweet soap and cold cream.”
“There you are, calling those Buck Hill folks cousin again. Here child, don’t waste that 45 string. I can’t see what makes you so wasteful. You should untie each package, carefully pick out the knots, and then roll it up in a ball. I wonder how many times I’ve told you that.”
“So do I, Mother, and how many times I have told you that my time is too precious to be picking out hard knots. I bet this minute you’ve got a ball of string as big as your head, and please tell me how many packages you send out in a year.”
The girl’s manner was gay and bantering. She stopped untying parcels long enough to kiss her mother, who was laboriously picking the knots from the cut twine.
Mrs. Buck continued, “Wasting all of that good paper too! Here, let me fold it up. My mother and father taught me to be very particular about such things and goodness knows I’ve tried to teach you. I don’t know where we’d be if I didn’t save and if my folks before me hadn’t done so.”
It was a well-known fact that Judith’s maternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Ezra Knight, had been forced to abandon their ancestral farm in Connecticut and had started to California on a hazard of new fortunes but had fallen by the wayside, landing in Kentucky where their habits of saving string and paper certainly had not 46 enriched them. Such being the case a whimsical smile from the granddaughter was pardonable.
“There is no telling,” she laughed, “but you go on saving, Mother dear, and I’ll try to do some making and between us we’ll be as rich as our cousins at Buck Hill.”
“There you are again! I’d feel ashamed to go claiming relations with folks that didn’t even know I existed. I can’t see what makes you do it.”
“Oh, just for fun! You see we really and truly are kin. We are just as close kin as some of the people Cousin Ann Peyton visits, because you see she takes in anybody and everybody from the third and fourth generation of them that hate to see her coming. Yesterday in Louisville I looked up the family in some old books on the early history of Kentucky at the Carnegie Library and I found out a lot of things. In the first place the Bucks weren’t named for Buck Hill.”
The land owned by Mrs. Buck had at one time been as rich as any in Kentucky, but it had been overworked until it was almost as poor as the deserted farm in Connecticut. As Judge Middleton had said, the price of the right-of-way through the place sought by the trolley company had enabled her to lift the 47 long-standing mortgage. She had inherited the farm, mortgage and all, from her father, who had bought it from old Dick Buck. The house was a pleasant cottage of New England architecture, built closer to the road than is usual on Kentucky farms. Old Mr. Knight had also followed the traditions of his native state by building his barn with doors opening on the road. The barn was larger than the house, but at the present time Judith’s little blue car and an old red cow were its sole inhabitants. The hay loft, which was designed to hold many tons of hay, was empty. Sometimes an errant hen would find her way up there and start a nest in vain hopes of being allowed to lay her quota and begin the business of hatching her own offspring in her own way, but Judith would rout her out and force her to comply to community housekeeping in the poultry-house.