CHAPTER V
THE HIGH WOODS
“Signs ain’t no great, I never ’lowed,” said Ella thoughtfully. Sweeping her knife in a neat semicircle, she pared the dough round the edge of a tin plate. The sweet, steamy breath of apple pies filled the kitchen, consorting genially with the soft, high sunshine reflected upward from snow-fields without. “No more ducks’ breast-bon’s for me! November, and see there!” She pointed at the frosty window-panes. “Open winter! What’s a shut? And for cold, why, ’fore breakfast, the what’s-name’s ’way down below the other thing.”
She knelt before the stove, cautiously placed her newest product, and rose muttering, her freckled cheeks, powdered with flour, rouged with heat from the oven.
“Don’t tell me!” she grumbled, as though taxing Miles with the weather’s iniquity. “Yisterday, fall. To-morrow, winter. Onseasonable, and ondignified, like’s if the powers was playin’ us tricks. ’Tain’t the wet kind that goes, but the dry that keeps aholt. Below what’s-name, too. Beats Old Roper!”
Through the glistening stillness came a thin, mellow jingle.
“Sleigh-bells!” Ella nodded, with an air of angry wisdom. “Another year gone. Shoo-fly! No more’n last week, first mud to out on wheels; and here’s them things a-calangalin’ round again!”
Helpless against this revolution of the seasons, Miles laughed.
“Not my fault, Ella.” Listening to the jog-trot cadence of the bells, he added, “They’re coming here.”
“Ain’t neither—yes, they are too!” Ella bustled to the back window, and, twisting her apron into knots, stared eagerly up the smooth, white heave of the hill. “Who’ll it be, s’pose? All is, he’ll break out our ro’d for us! I’d ought to reco’nize any bells o’ twenty mile round—do, too. Them’s either Old-Hab, or Lazy-Hab, or Cal Martin the tinker.”
Against the pale sky, with a slow and broken jangling of bells, appeared a sorrel horse. He shambled steeply down, knee-deep in drifts, yet straining to hold back a broad sled. The driver, swathed to the eyes, precariously embraced a sled stake, like a trained bear hugging his pole.