“I don’t believe Jane wants anybody,” said Nora Waddell. “She’s light-minded, and likes to enjoy herself.”
Dick Hanks stood by Jane and insisted on helping her to move the stirrer. His hair inclosed his head in the shape of a thatch, leaving but narrow eaves of forehead above his eyebrows, though his expression was open and amiable. He looked like one of Bewick’s cuts of an English carter. The Hankses, however, were a rich family, and, in spite of their eccentricities, a power in the county. Old Jimmy Hanks so dreaded the grave that he had a marble vault hewed, watching its progress for years, and getting himself ready to occupy it a few weeks after its completion. Lest he should be buried alive, his will decreed that the vault should be unlocked and the coffin examined at intervals. The sight of a face floating in alcohol and spotted with drops from the metal casket not proving grateful to his heirs, the key was soon conveniently lost.
His son Dick, hearty in love and friendship and noble in brawn, so feared the dark that he would not go into an unlighted room. When left by himself at the parting of roads after a night’s frolic, he galloped his horse through brush and mire, and it was told that he had more than once reached home without a whole stitch to his back.
But in spite of the powers of darkness, Dick was anxious to take Jane Davis under his protection. The fire and the noisy company kept him from lifting his eyes to the treetops swaying slowly overhead, and the lonesome stars. All through the woods winter-night sounds and sudden twig cracklings could be heard. Dick, however, meant to take Jane Davis home, whether he could persuade one of the Davis boys to go home with him afterward or not.
In those days neighborhoods were intensely local. The people knew what historians have not yet learned about the value of isolated bits of human life. These young folks in the sugar-camp knew nothing of the events and complications of the great world, but they all felt more or less interested in the politics of Jane Davis’s entanglements.
Her brother kept dipping a long spoon into the kettle she stirred, and dropping the liquid into a tin cup of cold sugar-water. As long as the hot stuff twined about in ropy arms, it was syrup; but as soon as it settled to the bottom in a clear mass, it was wax, and the change from wax to the grain of sugar is a sudden one.
When Eck Davis announced, “It’s waxed,” the kettle was slung off in haste, and everybody left the tree which had propped his back, or the robe on which he had leaned, and the graining sugar was served in saucers and handed around. It could be eaten with spoons or “worked” into crackling ropes. Davis’s boys took off the syrup kettles and covered them up in the bark lodge. They would be emptied into stone jars when the more important business of entertaining company was over. The fire now shone redder. Jane was cutting up pies and cakes in the bark house, all this warm light focused on her lowered eyelids, when more of her suitors arrived.
“I knowed the entire posse would be out,” said Philip Welchammer in a laughing undertone to the girls sitting beside him. “Davises never misses invitin’ anybody.”
“You’re too late, Jimmy Thompson,” called Jane’s elder brother before he noticed the preacher was in the party. “Your sheer’s e’t.” When, however, Dr. Miller from Lancaster also came forward, John stood up stiffly and put on his company grandeur. He held the town-man in some awe, and was bound to be constrained by the preacher.
Jimmy Thompson, having met Jane with awkward heartiness, said he would make the young folks acquainted with Brother Gurley. They all knew Brother Gurley; but Jimmy was a wild young man, and his audacity in “brother”-ing the preacher was more delicious than home-made sugar. He afterward explained that the preacher had been turned onto the old folks for Sunday, and he asked him along to the frolic without suspicionin’ he’d come, but the preacher, he took a-holt as if that was the understandin’.