This last was said because I was opening my purse with a view to ask how much I was indebted to the young man, who shook his head and nodding a good-by drove off, after a wistful look at a blue skirt visible among the rose-bushes in the garden. Then I began to look around me at the quaint old house, with big rooms, wide hall, low ceilings, and open fireplaces, with pleasant views from every window, of wooded hills, and grassy valleys, and the pine-grove, with Nannie’s Well, which was beginning to interest me so much. But the object which attracted me most was the stone house on the hill—the McPherson place. Would the young people, Reginald Travers and Irene Burdick, ever come together? and how much truth was there in the story Sam had told me? I would ask Mrs. Parks when I knew her better, I thought. She was bustling about my room, a large, airy chamber, with four windows, a high-post bedstead, surmounted with what she called a “teaster” and surrounded with what she called a “balance.” Everything was old-fashioned, but scrupulously clean and comfortable to the last degree.
“You might like the south room across the hall the best,” she said, “and I’d give it to you, only it jines another, and I’m hopin’ to have two girls who’ll take the two rooms. Nobody sleeps with nobody nowadays; everybody must be separate; different from what it was when I was young, and three sometimes slep’ together if ’twas necessary; but Charlotte Ann says the world moves, and I s’pose it does. I’ve had a letter from them girls askin’ about ’em—the rooms, I mean.”
I assured her I wanted nothing better than the room I had, with the eastern sunshine in the morning and its cool north breeze all the day.
“Charlotte Ann, Charlotte Ann! Is that you? Miss Bennett’s come. Sam brought her, but he didn’t stop,” Mrs. Parks called over the balustrade, and a young girl came up the stairs with her hands full of roses, and cheeks which rivalled them in color, while her eyes at the mention of Sam had in them a look which reminded me of the boy when I asked him who Lottie was.
She was very pretty, and within a week we became great friends and as intimate as a woman of forty often is with a girl of seventeen. I knew all about Sam, for whom Lottie cared more than for the half-dozen other boys whom she called kids and who annoyed her with attentions. I knew, too, about Sam’s father, Ephraim Walker, who had quarrelled with her mother about a line fence and claimed two feet more land than belonged to him, to say nothing of his hens, which were always getting into Mrs. Parks’ garden, until Mr. Walker built a high board fence which shut out the hens and a view of his premises as well.
“Mother gave up the two feet for the sake of getting rid of the hens, and she has never spoken to him since,” Lottie said, with a snap in her eyes which told her opinion of Sam’s father, who, she added, “hates me like pisen.”
“Hates you! For what?” I asked, and after some hesitancy she replied, “I don’t mind telling you that Sam is carrying me now more than the other boys.”
I did not quite know what carrying her meant, but ventured to guess in my mind, and she went on—“and he comes here pretty often, and his father don’t like it and is crosser than a bear when Sam takes me out with Black Beauty, and once, when he found us in the McPherson pines sitting on a log he threatened to horsewhip Sam if he found him there again philandering with me. Sam squared up to him and said, ‘Come on and try it, if you dare.’ He didn’t dare; I should think not! He whip Sam! I’d laugh!”
She did laugh a little bitterly, and, reminded, by her mention of the McPherson pines of Nannie’s Well, I asked her about it and heard much the same story Sam had told me, with a few more details concerning the superstition attaching to the well, and the number of young people who had tried the trick at noonday—some with success, they pretended, and more with none.
“I don’t believe in it, of course,” Lottie said, “but sometime I mean to try it just for fun. If those two girls come maybe they’ll try it, too. I don’t s’pose you’d care to, you are too——”