The coupé door would close and down would come the faded scarlet curtains. Ali Baba, laying the whip a full eight inches above Melba’s iron-gray back, would then effect a triumphant exit out of the driveway.
So it was that Miss Clergy, sole occupant of the ghost village, drove at four each day of the year, rain or shine, save when the snow piled too high to let the old-fashioned sledge proceed. “An hour’s drive, Ali Baba, not too fast” had become a village slogan.
No one ever questioned Ali Baba concerning Miss Clergy, or commented on the appearance of the coupé with its white-haired driver and curtained occupant, until, in the year nineteen hundred and twelve, something else very thrilling happened in Birge’s Corners, something which made Abigail Clergy’s love tragedy seem remote, scarcely worth remembering.
The person concerned in the event had been told the real story of Abigail Clergy, and why Joshua Maples was called “Ali Baba,” and why Miss Clergy drove at four, always alone and with the curtains drawn, and why the children were afraid of her and called her witch, trying to make their mothers admit that the Clergy house was haunted. That person was Thurley Precore—born in Arcadia, the Corners admitted, although they did not call it by that name. They said, “Wherever Thurley Precore managed to get that smile and face and voice of hers and to sing more and more like an angel when every one knew—” and so forth and so on, the deduction arrived at being that God had let Himself realize His dream of beauty when He created Thurley Precore—Thurley with the most worthless, indifferent parents about whom the Corners had ever heard tell.
Thurley was twenty when the “thrilling event” happened. But her advent into the Corners ten years before is worth recording. To the older generation, in fact, it had been a happening of great interest, and, had it not taken place, the really thrilling event in 1912 could never have occurred. But younger generations never consider the law of cause and effect, so they shrugged their shoulders in impatience when their elders insisted on re-telling to out-of-town visitors how Thurley Precore first “sang for her supper.”
CHAPTER II
There had driven into the stableyard of the Hotel Button a queer box-car wagon on rickety yellow wheels, unwillingly pulled by tired nags. The wagon had a hope-to-die roof and a smokestack. On the driver’s seat was a ragged man and an impetuous young person in faded blue gingham. The impetuous young person was driving and singing “God Be With Us Till We Meet Again”—unconscious of the beauty of her voice.
Her father nodded approval, as the song ended and the wagon halted before the stable door. As the story goes, young Dan Birge and Lorraine McDowell, the minister’s only child, were playing hop-scotch in imminent danger of the horses’ feet. They paused to stare at the newcomers. The young person had begun in businesslike fashion: