The woman remained standing in the road, her hands spread out on her hips. She had suddenly remembered that the guest of last night had said that Nicholas Parks was going away!
At noon the miller and her little girl set out up the mountain.
They did not go by the road that wound tortuously through the forest to the summit. They followed a path that ascended more directly, crossing the road now and then, and climbing up steep ascents to the top, where it ended in the road running along the high ridge, through the little mountain farm.
The farm was inclosed on either side by a rail fence. Below it was a cornfield of several acres, above a bit of fertile meadow, in which, on the very ridge, stood two gigantic trees lifting their branches eighty feet into the sky.
A dozen paces of beautiful green turf lying between the great shellbarks.
Farther out stood a log house with a clapboard roof and a chimney built halfway up with stone and finished with crossed sticks, daubed with yellow clay. Behind it was a garden inclosed with palings split out of long cuts of hickory timber. Midway between the garden and the house, opposite the door, was a whitewashed well curb. From a long pole, suspended in a forked tree on a round locust pin, hung a sapling fastened to a bucket. Everything about the little farm was well kept. The chimney and the palings were whitewashed, the fence was well laid up, the bit of land was clean. Midway in the meadow, a path entered through wooden bars and ran along inside the rail fence to the house.
There was a little crowd of some half dozen men standing about these bars, when the woman and child came up.
The woman stopped in the road.
“What are you all standin' around for?” she said.
The men did not immediately reply. Finally one of them answered.