CHAPTER SIX
KEN’S SECRET SORROW
It was Saturday, which was the busiest of the whole week in Woodford’s Cañon, for it was house-cleaning day in the old log cabin which was guarded by two spreading pine trees, but this Saturday was especially busy.
“Carol, please do stop frittering,” Dixie called as she turned from the stove which she was polishing with as much care as though it had been a piano. “Don’t you know who is coming to call this very afternoon, and I’d feel just terrible, I certainly would, if Miss Bayley sat on dust, and that’s what she’s likely to do if you skip places at dusting, as you usually do, and I haven’t time to-day to rub them over and see.”
The younger girl, who had been leaning far out the window, supposedly to shake a duster, but who had continued to linger there, watching two squirrels playing tag among the dry pine needles, returned reluctantly to the task she so disliked.
“O dear! it’s just mean-hateful being poor folks the way we are,” she complained, “and having to do our own work with our own hands. I’ve heard my beautiful mother say so time and again. When she was a girl she had two little darkies to wait on her. She never had to pick up anything, if she dropped it. She didn’t have to even lift a finger.”
Dixie straightened up to rest her tired shoulders, for polishing a stove was hard work at best, and almost unconsciously she glanced down at her own fingers that were jet-black just then, and for a bit of a moment she sighed, and was half tempted to think that, maybe after all, it would be nice to have nothing to do but sing and read, or live in the out-of-doors that she so loved. But a second later she was her own optimistic, practical self. “Carol Martin,” she announced, “just for that, now, we’re going to count our blessings. You begin! One?”
“O dear!” the other little maid sighed as she knelt to dust the rungs of an old grandfather’s chair. “I ’spose I ought to be thankful that I’m beautiful, like my mother.”
Dixie laughed as she whirled about, her expressive freckled face at that moment being far more attractive than that of her prettier, younger sister.
“Of course you should,” she declared good-naturedly, “and I’m thankful that I have Jimmy-Boy, and here he comes this minute to ask me to give him some bread and molasses.”
The door burst open and the small boy ran straight to his little mother, but it was not of bread and molasses that he spoke. “Dixie, dear,” he said, and his brown eyes were wide with wonder, “Buddy Ken is in the old barn an’ he won’t speak to me or nuffin’. I fink he is crying.”