“I’ve scarcely had a word with you, Annie,” he said, smiling. “How is your grandmother? I needn’t ask how you are. You grow prettier everyday. And how do you get on with your school?”—for the girl was now teaching in the district school house over the hill.
She answered, “Oh, grandmother is about the same; perhaps a little weaker, but as bright mentally as ever. You are looking well, Seth, and quite the man now. Your beard becomes you—doesn’t it, Isabel? We are so sorry you can’t come to-morrow night. We see so little of you since you have become a city man.”
“Sorry that I can’t come!” repeated Seth after her.
“Come where?” Isabel interposed with a ready explanation. “There is to be a husking over at Crump’s to-morrow evening—the first of the season. There will be a big party of young people, and Crump sent over by Annie an invitation for us. But I have explained that you are here on business, which may very likely occupy you to-morrow evening, and that in any case you would have to write your leaders for the next day’s paper. We are ever so sorry, Annie,” she added, turning to the school-teacher now, “but you know this is a terribly busy time with Seth, and we mustn’t think of letting our little country sociables interfere with his work. Some time, soon, he will come for a real vacation, instead of a flying business trip, and then we can monopolize him—and we will, too, won’t we, Annie?”
Annie smiled, a little faintly, as if her heart were not altogether in it, and replied, “Yes, to be sure we will.” She added, to Seth, “I won’t say goodbye. I suppose I shall see you again.”
He assented, and went to the door with her, and stood on the steps watching her as she walked away in the autumn dusk. Decidedly she was a pretty girl!
The Pratts, father and daughter, consented upon the shadowiest suggestion of an invitation to stay and partake of the picked-up Sunday tea, and that involved their spending the evening. Aunt Sabrina came in, and the talk was dreary and general. So “Jeff Briggs” and his amatory affairs went over to the morrow.
In the morning Seth walked over to Thessaly and saw John. The interview depressed him. John had had some idea of following the Chronicle’s lead, and bolting the State ticket, but the county politicians had bullied him out of the thing by threatening the destruction of the job-printing business connected with the Banner of Liberty, and the boycotting of the paper itself. All his inclinations, too, were toward Ansdell in the Congressional race; but Albert had loaned him some money, and, beside, he couldn’t see his way clear to disregarding, openly at least, the fraternal tie. He was consequently in a savage mood.
“I’m thinking of taking out the head-line of the paper this week,” he growled, with a sardonic humor, “and putting in instead a cut of a runaway slave, with a bundle over his shoulder, which is in the job-room here, left over from the days when there was slavery in New York State, and masters used to advertise in the old paper for fugitives. ‘Banner of Liberty ’ indeed! By heaven, it ought to be ‘Banner of Bondage!”
There was no comfort or profit in discussing the situation, either general or local, with John. He neither knew nor cared, he swore, what Albert’s chances were to dissolve the deadlock on the morrow. He might or he mightn’t; it was all one to him, and apparently to the party, who were the——!