This slur escaped Peter, he was intent upon Northrup’s question.
“Seen that girl in the yellow house?” he asked. “Great girl, Mary-Clare. Great girl.”
“I stopped there on my way here to ask directions. Rather unusual looking girl.”
“She is that!” Peter nodded. Mary-Clare was about 19 the only bit of romance Peter permitted himself. “Remember the night Mary-Clare was born, Polly?”
Of course Polly remembered. Northrup felt fully convinced that Polly knew everything in King’s Forest and never forgot it. She nodded, drew her spectacles over her eyes, and continued her knitting while Peter hit the high spots of Mary-Clare’s past. Somehow the shallows Northrup was filling while he listened.
Peter was in his element and drawled on:
“The wildest storm you ever saw round these parts––snow and gale; they don’t usually hang together long, but they did that night. It was a regular night if there ever was one. Nobody stirring abroad ’less he had to. Ole Doc was out––someone over the mine-way had got mussed up with the machinery. Ole Doc was a minister as well as a doctor. He’d tried both jobs and used to say it came in handy, but he leaned most to medicine as being, what you might say, more practical.”
“You needn’t be sacrilegious, brother,” Polly interjected. “The story won’t lose anything by holding to reverence.”
“Oh, well,” Heathcote chuckled, “have it any way you want to. Ole Doc had us coming and going, that’s what I’m getting over. If he found he couldn’t help folks to live, he plumped about and helped ’em to die. Great man, ole Doc! Came as you did, son, and settled. We never knew anything about his life before he took root here. Well, that night I’m telling you about, he was on his way back from the mines when he spied a fire on the up-side of the lake. He said it looked mighty curious shining and flaming in the blinding whiteness. It was Dan Hamlin’s shack. Later we heard what had happened. Dan had come home drunk––when he wasn’t drunk you couldn’t find a decenter man than Hamlin, but liquor made him quarrelsome. His wife was going to have a baby––Mary-Clare, to be exact––and when he came in with Jack Seaver, the mail-carrier, there was a row on concerning something Seaver hadn’t brought that Hamlin had ordered for his wife. There never was any reasoning with 20 Hamlin when he was drunk, so Seaver tried to settle the question by a fight. Seaver was like that––never had any patience. Lamp turned over, set the shack on fire!” Peter breathed hard.
“Mrs. Hamlin ran for her life and the two men ran from justice. Seaver came back later and told the story. Hamlin shot himself the following day when he heard what had happened. Blamed fool! Mary-Clare was left, but she didn’t seem to amount to much in the beginning. It was this way: Mrs. Hamlin ran till she fell in a snowdrift. Ole Doc found her there.” Heathcote paused. The logs fell apart and the room grew hot. Northrup started as if roused from a dream.