“My Dearest Little Heroine:
“We got here all right and Tipkins met us to the station. He’d come up ahead of us on the boat with Buster and Buster was the trouble. The broncho was all right on that boat and being led up to the cottage—it’s just lovely! No bigger than lots in California, so I like it better. Buster had never been harnessed, never in all his darling life. But I don’t know how we should get along without him, ’cause he’s the only horse we have. Now. Think of that! Just one little bit of a broncho to do all the teaming and plowing and everything for a whole cottage full of folks. Only he won’t team and he won’t plow and he won’t—most everything. You know the span and the carriages and the coachman and footman were all sold after the fire. I mean the horses were. They went to pay our board at that big hotel where it costs a lot of money to stay even a single day. So that horse—Buster I mean, this time—he wouldn’t draw the little bit of wagon Tipkins had hired to take your grandmother and Cousin Margaret up the hill in to the cottage, and they thought they’d have to walk. Tipkins was mad and struck Buster and that made me angry, too. Ephraim lost his own temper and said he’d get ahead of that beast or bust. Fancy! ‘Forty-niner’ calling my broncho a ‘beast’!
“After all it was I that got ahead, not Ephy. I just got on Buster’s back and chirruped to him and off he went, just as if we were starting to race some other horse across the mesa. Never knew he had that wagon with folks in it behind him, till I told him to stop; and then we had got home and it was too late for him to fuss.
“Now, Ephraim says, I’ll have to ride him while he plows that garden, for he’s going to have the best, old-fashionedest Yankee kind of a garden that he’s seen since he left Concord. He’s going to raise the same old marrowfat sort of green pease that Sophia Badger used to eat when she was a girl, and I do wish you could see that dear old lady! You’re going to, soon, anyway. But she is the happiest! Why, she just picks up handfuls of green grass, even, and buries her nose in it and says it ‘carries her back to a time when she tramped barefoot after the cows in the pasture.’ I shouldn’t think that would make anybody extra happy, but it seems to, her. And this morning she came across a little plant of what she called ‘Southernwood,’ or ‘Old Man’—a queer, smelly kind of bush that you never sold, I guess, from your tray—and she burst right out crying! Said her own mother used to always carry a sprig of it to meeting when Granny was a mite of a child. She could see her mother’s face, just smelling it, she said. Fancy! Being the mother of a grandmother! Doesn’t that seem almost too old to be believed?
“My Cousin Margaret is almost as happy as your Granny. She says life is so simple up here, and it does her so much good to see anybody so glad as Mrs. Briggs. I guess we’re all pretty glad and I am so busy that I didn’t write before, because you see Ephy went right at that garden this very morning and I’ve been riding Buster to make him drag that plow without kicking it out of the furrow every other step.
“Do you know, Sophy Nestor? I—it seems almost a wicked thing to say—but, haven’t lots of happy things happened just because that old house burned up? And my Cousin Margaret is more beautiful than ever. She doesn’t worry a bit. Your grandmother and Ephraim amuse her all the time and Tipkins is even more devoted than he used to be.
“There seems to be money enough for the little we need, now we don’t have to buy so many clothes, and—Ephraim is calling me. He wants to go to a seed store at the Landing and he can’t make Buster draw the wagon to fetch him and the tools back again unless I ride on his back. What a good thing it was all around that Ephy came to this side the continent and brought Buster with him! What a good, happy, splendid thing life is, anyway! Write right away.
“Your loving, ever grateful
“Jessie.”
The reply to this long letter was brief and to the point.
“Deer Jessica Trent: