“To think of it!” sighed Mrs. Lane, sitting down so suddenly in the big rocking-chair that it nearly turned a somersault in surprise, “and it was only a scrap of a mortgage, not more’n $2500, that was the cause of workin’ the O’Mores out of property that had been in her family near two hundred years. Everybody knows there was crooked business if it could only be proved. But your father can’t find any papers, and now just as he was going this afternoon to search through poor O’More’s furniture and things at the house, it had to go and burn down, and the hopes we had that something might be worked out for Bird hev all gone up in smoke,” she said, addressing the stove solemnly.
The boys went out together to take a stroll up to the scene of the fire. Hardly had they disappeared when Mrs. Lane jumped from the chair with such a bound that it completed the somersault and stood on its head facing the wall.
“I wonder!” she ejaculated, addressing the pump by the sink, and shaking her finger at it as if the gayly painted bit of iron was her husband. “Yes, it must be it. All along I allowed ’Biram Slocum fired that house for the insurance. Now, by a new light I read he did it so in case there was any papers or letters to and fro about that mortgage that they’d get burned.
“I’ve noticed he and she hev made plenty of excuses to get into the house alone, but I never reckoned it was for anything else but for general meddlin’, and pa’s keepin’ everything so close, even nailing up the cellar doors and winders, balked ’em.
“He knew the auction was ter-morrow, and that he’d rather burn the papers and furniture than risk Joshua or others finding ’em is my firm belief, and I’d like to prove it. Not that it’ll do Bird any good now, but it would be a satisfaction, even though, as Joshua says, ‘We’ve got enough business of our own to shoulder before fall and settlin’ time comes.’ I wonder if ’Biram ’ll hev the cheek to ask for the rent now.
“Yes, I’m going to do a little nosing on my own account,—yes I be!” she continued, adding more mysterious words to the back of the calendar and nodding determinedly at the pump as if it had contradicted. “Knowing never does come amiss, even if it is salted down for a spell. Shoo!” she cried presently, waving the dish towel at the chickens who had boldly ventured in, and then the tumult, caused by Twinkle’s chasing them back to their yard with much barking and sundry nips, brought her back to the present and the work of dish-washing and tidying the kitchen for the evening.
Even then her head and hands did not work together. She hung the biscuit in a pail down the well and set away the butter in the bread-box, put sugar instead of salt into the bread sponge she was setting; and, finally, before she sat down to rest remembering that the pantry door locked hard and creaked when it opened, she poured toothache drops instead of oil upon both hinges and key, and presently began to sniff about and wonder if Dinah Lucky, who had been in that day to do the weekly laundry, was doctoring for “break-bone pains” again, and hoped she had used the laudanum outside instead of in, otherwise nobody could tell when she would turn up to do the ironing.
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Next morning if Joshua Lane and Lammy had not been in such a hurry to get down to the fruit farm to prepare the crates and small boxes for the coming strawberry picking, they would have noticed that Lauretta Ann seemed to be quite excited and anxious to get them out of the way.