It stood well back from the road, a grass grown lane with a turning circle leading to it. It had what had once been a loading platform, wagon high, instead of a veranda. The lower story, a single room which they peered into through a crack in a warped unhinged door, seemed unpromising enough, a dark cobwebby place, cumbered with wooden chutes from the floor above by which, Graham explained, they rolled the apples down into barrels after they had been sorted up-stairs. A carpenter had been busy most of the morning, he added, flooring over the traps from which these chutes led down.
Mary, though, fairly cried out with delight, and even Miss Wollaston beamed appreciation when, Graham, having led them up the bank and around to the back of the building, ushered them in, at the ground level up here, to the upper story of the building. There was a fireplace in the north end of it with twin brick erections on either side which they thought must have been used for drying apples. The opposite end, partitioned off, still housed a cider mill and press, but they had contrived, he said, a makeshift bedroom out of it.
Along the east side of the room were three pairs of casement windows which commanded a view of the greater part of the farm; across the road, across Hickory Creek, across the long reach of the lower pasture and the seemingly limitless stretches of new plowed fields. The clump of farm buildings, old and new, was in the middle of the picture. Over to the left not quite a mile away, behind what looked like nothing more than a fold in the earth (the creek again, Graham explained. It swung an arc of two hundred degrees or so, about the main body of their tillable land) rose the heavily wooded slopes of Hickory Hill.
"We were surprised at this place," he said, "when we opened it up yesterday. It's the best view on the farm. It will be a fine place to build a real country house, some day, if we ever make money enough to do that."
"It is a real country house already," Mary told him briskly. "You two, living in a tent with a lovely old place like this just waiting for you! Wait until Aunt Lucile and I have had a day at it and you'll see."
He looked as if he believed her. Indeed, he looked unutterable things, contemplating her, there in that mellow old room,—wrinkling her nose a little and declaring that she could still smell apples. But all he said was that he supposed the roof leaked, but it couldn't be very bad because everything seemed quite decently dry and not at all musty. He added that he must be getting back to work, but that an odd-job man, capable more or less of anything, was at her disposal for as long as she wanted him.
She went with him to the door when he made his rather precipitate departure and stood, after she had waved him a temporary farewell, gazing up at the soft sun-bathed slope with its aisles of gnarled trees. She smiled at the sight of a decrepit long-handled wooden pump. She took a long breath of the smell of the month of May. Then she turned, with Aunt Lucile, to such practical matters as bedding, brooms and tea-kettles.
There was more to do than a first look had led them to suppose, and their schemes grew ambitious, besides, as they advanced with them, so that, for all the Briarean prodigies of Bill, the odd-job man, they went to bed dog tired at nine o'clock that night with their labors not more than half complete. They slept—Mary did, anyhow, the deepest sleep she had known in years.
She waked at an unearthly—a heavenly hour. The thin ether-cool air was quivering with the dissonance of bird calls; the low sun had laid great slow-moving oblongs of reddish gilt upon the brown walls of the big room. (She had left her aunt in undivided possession of the extemporized bed-chamber.) She rose and opened the door and looked out into the orchard. But what her eye came to rest upon was the old wooden pump.
It was a triumph of faith over skepticism, that pump. Graham had contemned it utterly, hardly allowing, even, that it was picturesque, but Bill, the odd-job man had, with her encouragement, spent a patient hour over it and in the teeth of scientific probability, lo, it had given forth streams of water as clear as any that had ever miraculously been smitten out of a rock. The partners had forbidden her to drink any of it except boiled, until it had been analyzed.