To young people it seems a very small feat to climb the outside of a broad, rough, stone chimney that slopes gradually from a wide base toward the top. For Mrs. Lane—stout, thick of foot and nearer fifty than forty—it was a terrible exertion, and she paused between every step she took to catch her breath, muttering, “Lauretta Ann Lane, you are a fool if ever there was one. Suppose folks should pass by and see you creepin’ up here like a squawkin’ pigeon woodpecker hanging to a tree?”
She, however, did not in the least resemble even that heavy-bodied bird. Did you ever see a woodchuck mount a low tree when cornered by dogs? That was what Mrs. Lane looked like as she climbed. And did you ever see the same woodchuck scramble, slip, and flop down, flatten himself, and then amble to his hole, when he thought his pursuers had ceased their hunt? Well, that was the way in which Mrs. Lane came down to the cellar bottom, when she found that the brick oven had been used merely to hold broken crockery and such litter.
For a minute or two she sat flat on the floor, resting, nursing her bruised hands, and gazing idly at the outline of the sky through one of the window holes in the stone wall. Then, as she recovered herself, a bit of something fluttering from a broken staple in the scorched window-frame attracted her attention. She picked herself up and examined it. The glass had broken and fallen in, while the bit of metal had caught a narrow rag of woollen material some six inches in length. This was singed at the edges, but enough remained to show that it was a herring-bone pattern of brown and gray such as is often seen in men’s suitings.
Mrs. Lane looked at the rag thoughtfully for a moment, then, detaching it, pinned it carefully inside the lining of her waist, picked up her basket of greens which were by this time rather withered, freshened them with water from the well, and trudged home openly by the highway, saying, as she walked, “’Tain’t much, and most likely it’s nothin’—still maybe it’s a stitch in the knittin’, and if it is, another ’ll turn up sooner or later to loop on to it.”
At dinner Mr. Lane gave his wife an odd look saying: “Why, mother, where’ve you been? You look as if you’d gone a berryin’ on all fours! You’re scratched on the nose and chin, let alone your hands.”
“Be I?” answered “mother,” so fiercely that Joshua quailed, and remembered guiltily that he had forgotten her request to clear a tangle of cat brier from over a tumble-down stone wall in the turkey pasture, where his wife passed many times a day to herd this most contrary and uncertain of the poultry tribe, so he said nothing more, but held his quarter of dried apple pie before his face like a fan, while he slowly reduced its size by taking furtive bites at the corners.
About four o’clock Mrs. Lane seated herself on the front porch to sew. She was dressed in a clean print gown, with her collar fastened by a large photograph “miniature” pin of Janey when a baby, a sign that she considered herself dressed for callers. True it was Saturday and Dinah Lucky was still pounding the ironing board, but that was because she had “disappointed” on the two first week-days sacred to such work, and not through any slackness on Mrs. Lane’s part.
The weekly mending was always a knotty bit of business, and to-day doubly so, for now that Lammy was working at the fruit farm, it seemed as if he fairly moulted buttons and shed the knees and seats of his trousers as crabs do their shells. Spreading a well-worn pair of knickerbockers on the piazza floor, she trimmed the edges of the holes and dived into a big piece bag for material for the patches.
“Seems to me I can’t find two bits alike and I do hate to speckle him up all colours and kinds as if he was a grab-bag. I know what I’ll do—I’ll put in what I’ve got and clip down to the store for some blue jean, and run him up a couple o’ pairs of long overalls to cover him, same as his brother’s and Joshua’s. Wonder I didn’t think of ’em before, only I can’t realize that Lammy is big enough to be at work.”
A man’s shadow crossed the piazza. Mrs. Lane looked up quickly; she had not heard the gate click, and Twinkle, who kept both eyes open as well as ears cocked most of the time, was down at the fruit farm with Lammy.