Suddenly from the basement below there came a faint odor of something burning, and stepping to the door, Mrs. Pledger called:
“Sherry, Sherry, won’t you go down to the kitchen and shove back the chicken stew? It is bilin’ over.”
“Yes, auntie,” came in a clear, young voice, and Alex. heard the swish of a gown on the stairs and through the hall down to the basement.
He did not sit where he could see the girl, but he arose as if to go, and, stepping near the door, waited for her to come back. But she didn’t come back, and as Mrs. Pledger, too, arose, as if expecting him to go, he left the house, forgetting to inquire for any Crosbys who might be living and would be her relatives and friends of Amos Marsh.
“Well, no matter,” he thought. “They have nothing to do with it. I’ve found that Uncle Amos was a good man, who never could have done anything really wrong, and I’ve learned that her name is ‘Sherry.’ Pretty, but odd for a girl. I wish I could have seen her.”
If Alex. had looked back in time he might have seen a girl’s face close against the window of the dining-room, where Sherry was trying to get a glimpse of him, while Mrs. Pledger was saying: “A very nice mannered young man, but I don’t see why under the sun and moon he was so anxious to know if we ever knew Amos Marsh, and if he was a good man. Good indeed! The Lord never made a better!”
CHAPTER IV
THE ABANDONED FARM
There are many of them scattered through New England, some on hillsides, some in valleys, some on public highways and some among the mountains, where rocks and ferns seem the only products of the soil. There are houses with slanting roofs, big chimneys, high window stools and small panes of glass; houses whose owners lived their quiet, monotonous lives, with no thought of change for themselves. They were content to till their barren fields, with only an occasional thought of the far West and the capabilities it held for them if they were younger and could get there. Their sons did get there when the fathers and mothers were laid away to rest, and the old homesteads and farms were left for other and distant fields. A few of the houses are in a fair state of preservation, but they look desolate and dreary, with no sign of life around or in them, except the rats or the squirrels, which, finding ingress through some broken window, make themselves a nest in the garret, where they hold high carnival through the winter until the warm sunshine of spring calls them back to their woodland home. After a lapse of time the strongest built house begins to show signs of decay, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the house to which Alex. came on a February day, a few weeks after his receipt of Amos Marsh’s letter. He had been to Denver and consulted with the lawyers, had visited the ranch and the house where his uncle had lived when in town, and had appropriated the Scotch collie, who had been his uncle’s companion since he was a puppy. He was a fine specimen of canines, with his intelligent face, his long wool and shaggy mane, and Alex., who was fond of dogs, fancied him at once. “Laddie” was his name, but Alex. rechristened him “Sherry,” greatly to the disgust of Chinaman Lee, who had been Mr. Marsh’s servant, and who said, “Sherry bad name; he not come for Sherry; he no like wine.”
Alex. laughed and patted the big fellow, who took kindly to him, and if he did not answer at once to Sherry, he soon learned the whistle with which his new master called him. Alex. would like to have taken the cat, but as that was impracticable he left it for Lee, with many injunctions that it should be well cared for, and with his dog started for home, turning aside from the main route to see the farm, about which he had a great deal of curiosity. At the station, which was a mile from the house, he took the only available conveyance, a box sleigh, drawn by a spavined horse and driven by a loquacious man, who informed him that his name was Bowles—“a carpenter by trade in the summer and a jack-at-all-trades in the winter, when folks didn’t have much tinkerin’ of houses to do.”
“Know the Marsh place? You bet,” he said, slapping the reins on Spavin’s back with an injunction to “ca-dap.” “I used to tinker there by odd spells before the old gent went away, and he left me to look after things,—kind of an agent. Nice man? Wall, I guess he was ’bout as good as they make ’em; never heard a breath against him. Little queer sometimes, and talked to himself a good deal; but, land sakes, there was nobody else to talk to half the time, he lived alone so much. It beats all how curis some folks is about an old house,—real old like this one which must have heard the thunder of the Revolution, if it had thundered this way. The grandees who come to the mountains in the summer drive up here, rafts of ’em, and, oh, my suz, what a time the women make over the old place, and how they want to buy things if they was for sale. Why, I could have sold an old chest in the garret a dozen times. It’s full of clothes, women’s clothes, and when I told ’em that they was crazy to see ’em. But I said no;—they wasn’t mine to sell, nor to show. I’ve been a faithful steward, I have. And you are goin’ to take the place? Well, I’m glad to have somebody see to it besides me. It’s a sin the way things has gone on sence he quit rentin’ it square. Old mother Chase and her brood squatted on it one winter. I let ’em in, to be sure, at a nominal rent, but, land sakes, I never got a cent, and they split up the back room floor for wood and half the suller stairs, and then decamped in the night. Farmer Jones kept his cows there in the summer, and somebody else their horses,—in the pasture, I mean,—and I can’t collect a cent. ’Twas the finest farm in these parts once, and might be again with a little care. Going to farm it yourself?”