This accounted in a measure for the number and quality of the several notes he was opening, one after another, his face lighting up or clouding as he perused their contents.
CHAPTER II
Moses was having a busy day. The front hall was packed full with a heterogeneous mass of miscellaneous furniture, the sidewalk littered with straw packing, kitchen utensils, empty bird-cages, umbrella-stands, crates of china, and rolls of carpet. Mr. Ebner Ford, late of Clapham Four Corners, State of Connecticut; Mrs. Ebner Ford, formerly Preston, late of Roy, State of North Carolina, and her daughter, Miss Sue Preston, were moving in.
Moses was in his shirt-sleeves, a green baize apron tied about his waist, a close-fitting skull-cap crowning his gray wool. There were spots on his cranium which the friction of life had worn to a polish, and, the January air being keen and searching, the old darky braved no unnecessary risks.
The force was properly apportioned. Mrs. Ford was in charge of the stowage, moving back, and hanging-up department. Mr. Ford had full charge of the sidewalk, the big furniture van and the van’s porters. Moses was at everybody’s beck and call, lifting one moment one end of a sofa, the other steadying a bureau on its perilous voyage from the curb to the back bedroom, while Miss Preston, with an energy born of young and perfect health, tripped up and down the few steps, pointing out to the working force this or that particular chair, table, or clock most needed. All this that the already tired mother might get the room to rights with the least possible delay.
It was not the first time this young woman had performed this service. The later years of her life had been spent in various intermittent moves in and out of various houses since the gentleman from Connecticut had married her mother.
Her first experience had taken place some months after the unexpected wedding, when her stepfather—he was at that time a life-insurance agent—had moved his own bag and baggage into the family homestead. Shortly after he had elaborated a plan by which the entire family would be infinitely better off if a red flag should be hoisted out of the second-story window, and the old place knocked down to the highest bidder. He would then invest the proceeds in the purchase of some town lots in one of the larger cities up the State. They would then have a home of their own, more in keeping with the aspirations of his wife, who really had married him to escape her present poverty, and the welfare of his stepdaughter, whose sole ambition was to perfect herself in music, she being the possessor of a wonderful soprano voice.
In this new venture six houses were to be built; one they would live in, rent and cost free, the income from the other five supporting them all.
Then had come a hasty packing up and rather sudden departure for Norfolk, the houses being partly built, and none of them rented or sold, Mr. Ford having abandoned life insurance and given his attention to a new dredging machine for use in the Dismal Swamp Canal. And then a third exodus to a small village near New York, where the promoter of a brilliant and entirely new adaptation of laundry machinery, never before imagined, and the formation of which was known among the favored few as The United Family Laundry Association, Limited, engrossed the distinguished engineer Mr. Ebner Ford’s sole attention.
It was from this near-by village the fourth move had been made, the van and supplementary cart having absorbed the contents of a small house, situated on the outskirts of the town, that deluded individual having exchanged a year’s rent for a delicately engraved sheet of paper, certifying that he was the proud possessor of ten shares of the company’s preferred.