“As I say, I didn’t expect to find two boys when I opened the door, but you are none the less welcome, if that is in good form as coming from a poor relation. And you’re hungry, you say! Well, just come with me to the kitchen and I’ll see what I can find for you. I haven’t had supper myself, figuring I’d wait until Pa and Miss Ruth got here, so I may take a bite with you for company’s sake, for Pa may not get here for another hour. Such an old car as we have! But it’s all we can afford. You never know what is liable to happen to it when you start out. A wheel ran off the day we came here, which was a week ago yesterday. Oh, dear! It’s awful to be poor. I sometimes wonder how it would seem to be a rich relation for once instead of a poor relation.... Do you like cold meat sandwiches? Or shall I fry some potatoes?”
“Don’t go to any bother,” Poppy told her quickly. “For anything in the way of grub is good enough for us.”
Having followed the woman to the kitchen, we now watched her, grinning at each other, while she worked and talked. Her hands and tongue moved together, though for the most part what she said passed over our heads. She kept referring to “Miss Ruth” and “Pa.” “Miss Ruth’s ma,” we learned, had been a Hardy before her marriage into the Danver family. And considering her stock she was acting much too big for her shoes—whatever that was. But “Miss Ruth’s pa” was a gentleman of real stock—a Danver, if you please! And “Miss Ruth” herself was just like her pa and her grandpa.
What interested us more than the woman’s chatter was the fine supper that she set out for us. Boy, did food ever taste so good to us! I’d be ashamed to tell you how many sandwiches we ate. But however much we stuffed ourselves, we didn’t eat half enough to suit the little old lady, who, having talked all the time she was getting the “eats” ready, was still talking. Her one great ambition, it seemed to me, was to tell all she knew!
Once she left us, to see if “Pa and Miss Ruth” were coming. We heard her open the front door and go outside.
“She sure has a limber tongue,” grinned Poppy, murdering his tenth sandwich. “But she’s all right,” he tacked on hastily, not wanting me to get a wrong idea of what he meant.
“What do you make out of her talk?” says I, looking around the big kitchen, which was as fine a kitchen as I ever had been in.
“As I understand it, she and ‘Pa,’ her husband, came here a week ago to open up this house, which had been closed since the funeral—whoever it was that died here.”
“I got that part—it was Miss Ruth’s grandfather, Mr. Corbin Danver. He was the man who built this place.”
“But who is Miss Ruth?”