The second time was when she signed her application for the position of postmistress of the village. The big mill-owner, Hiram Taylor, brought her the paper.
“Got to put it all in, Miss Abbie,” he said with a laugh. “Shut your eyes and sign it and then forget it. Awful, ain't it?—but that's the law, and there ain't no way of getting round it, I guess.”
Hiram Taylor had left the village years before, rather suddenly, some had thought, when he was a strapping young fellow of twenty-two or three, and had moved West and stayed West until he came back the year before with a wife and a houseful of children. Then the lawyers in the village got busy, and pretty soon some builders came down from Boston, only fifty miles away, and then a lot of bricklayers; and some cars were switched off on the siding, loaded with lumber and lath and brick, and next a train-load of machinery, and so the mills were running again with Hiram sole owner and in full charge. One of the first things he did after his arrival—the following morning, really—was to look up Abbie's mother. He gave a littie start when he saw how shabby the cottage looked; no paint for years—steps rotting—window-blinds broken, with a hinge loose. He gave a big one when a thin, hollow-chested woman, gray and spare, opened the door at his knock.
“Hiram!” she gasped, and the two went inside, and the door was shut.
All she said when Abbie came home from school—she was teaching that year—was: “The new mill-owner came to see me. His name's Taylor.”
That same day a heavy-set man with gray hair and beard, and jet-black eyebrows shading two kindly eyes, got out of his wagon, hitched his horse to a post in front of the school-house and stepped to Abbie's desk.
“I'm Hiram Taylor, up to the mills. Going to send one of my girls to you to-morrow and thought I'd drop in.” Then he looked around and said: “Want another coat of whitewash on these walls, don't you, and—and a new stove? This don't seem to be drawin' like it ought to. If them trustees won't get ugly about it, I got a new stove up to the mill I don't want, and I'll send it down.” And he did. The trustees shrugged their shoulders, but made no objections. If Hiram Taylor wanted to throw his money away it was none of their business. Abbie Todd never said she was cold—not as they had “heard on.”
When the new school building was finished—a brick structure with stone trimmings, steam-heated, and varnished desks and seats—the craze for the new and up-to-date so dominated the board that they paid Abbie a month's salary in advance and then replaced her with a man graduate from Concord. Abbie took her dismissal as a matter of course. Nothing good ever lasted long. When she went up one step she always slid back two. It had been that way all her life.
Hiram heard of it and came rattling into the village, where he expressed himself at a town meeting in language distinguished for its clearness and force. The result was Abbie's application for the position of postmistress.
This time he didn't consult the trustees or anybody else. He wrote a private note to the Postmaster-General, who was his friend, and the appointment came by return mail.