3. The Important Letter
The morning after the fire found the family at breakfast with the Judge’s family. It was impossible as yet for the girls to feel the full reaction over their loss. Kit and Billie rode down before breakfast to look at the ruins, and came back with an encouraging report. The back of the house was badly damaged, but the main building stood intact, though the charred clapboards and wide vacant windows looked desolate enough.
“It was a good thing the wind was from the south and blew the flames away from the pines,” said Kit, dropping into her chair at the table. “Doesn’t it seem good to get some of Becky’s huckleberry pancakes again? Oh, yes, we met my prisoner on the road. He was tapping chestnut trees over on Peck’s Hill like a woodpecker. You needn’t laugh, Doris, ’cause Billie saw him too, didn’t you, Bill? And he’s got a sweet forgiving nature. He waved to me and I smiled back just as though I’d never caught him in our berry patch, and had Tommy lock him up in the corncrib.”
“Was he heading this way?” the Judge asked. “I want him to look at my peach trees and tell me what ails them.”
“Tom will be glad to go up with you to the peach orchard,” put in Becky, “I want Jean and Kit and their mother to drive over and help fix Maple Grove.”
The family had taken up its new quarters at Maple Grove before a week had passed, and two of the local carpenters, Mr. Horace Weaver, Philip’s brother, and Mr. Delaplaine, had been persuaded to devote a portion of their valuable time to rehabilitating Woodhow. It took tact and persuasion to induce these men to desert their favorite chairs on the sidewalk in front of Byers’ Grocery Store, and approach anything resembling daily toil. There had been a Squire in the Weaver family three generations back, and Horace held firmly to established precedent. He might be landed gentry, but he was no tiller of the soil, and he secretly looked down on his elder brother for personally cultivating the family acres.
Mr. Delaplaine was likewise addicted to reverie and historic retrospect. Nothing delighted Billie and Doris so much as to ride down to the store and get a chance to converse with both of the old men on local history. Mr. Delaplaine’s mail, which consisted mostly of catalogues, came addressed to N. L. Delaplaine, Esq., but to Elmhurst he was just Niles Delaplaine.
Every day that first week found the girls and Tommy down at the old home prying around the ruins for any lost treasures. Frank Howard struck up a friendship with both the Judge and Mr. Craig, and usually drove by on his way from the village. He would stop and talk for a few minutes with them, but Kit was elusive. Vaguely, she felt that the proper thing for her to do was to offer an apology for even considering him an unlawful trespasser. When Frank would drive away, Jean would laugh at her teasingly.
“Gosh, why do you act so high and mighty? He seems very nice and he’s awfully good-looking, even if he does chase caterpillars for a living. I never did see anyone but you, Kit, who hated to acknowledge herself in the wrong. The rest of us all have the most peaceful, forgiving sort of dispositions, but you can be a regular porcupine when you want to be.”
“It could come from Uncle Bart,” retorted Kit. “Did you hear them all talking about him over at the Judge’s while we were there? Let’s sit here under the pines a minute until the mailman goes by. I’m sick of poking over cinders. Becky said he was the only notable in our family. Dean Barton Cato Peabody. We ought to tell Mr. Delaplaine that.”