The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

Augusta had brought him home that other morning, out of the park, and sent him to bed. Then she had gone rapidly and ruthlessly to work as though she had been planning just what she was to do.

She saw the boarders of the house at breakfast and told them that she must close the house at once. Some of them had been friends and it pained her to give them any inconvenience. But she told them just why she was forced to do what she was doing. And, before she had finished, there was not one of them who would not have agreed to move his or her trunk out to the sidewalk on the instant, if it would help her.

Then she went to renting agents. And before another day she had sublet the house for the remainder of the term of her mother's lease.

The next part of her work was the worst. She had to bring into the house dirty, pock-marked men whose business it was to paw around with grimy hands and shake the furniture and try to bluff her into discouragement. But she had fixed upon a certain sum of cash money that she must have from the sale of the furniture. And from that determination she was not to be moved. One after another, Ann joyfully drove these men from the house, and Augusta waited.

The dealers had, of course, run around and seen each other and had agreed among themselves to force her to sell for very little cash. Her husband was sick. She had to go away with him. What could she do? It did not so much matter, they told each other, which of them got the furniture. That could be all fixed up. The thing was to protect the business, so that people shouldn't think that they ought to get new prices in cash for old stuff.

But finally Augusta's steady insistence on one price convinced one dealer that she would never sell for less. He talked with her over the phone. Then he came hurrying to the house, not because he wished to beat his brothers with whom he had agreed, but because he was afraid some one of them would beat him.

He offered Augusta half what she had demanded. Augusta did not argue. She called Ann to do her duty. The wordy battle raged down the stairs and out through the front hall to the door. On the doorstep, with Ann jamming the door on his foot where he had stuck it to prevent her shutting the door, he came to within ten dollars of the sum which Augusta had fixed. With another bang at his foot, Ann relented and let him come back to the foot of the stairs.

Augusta was standing at the head of the stairs. She did not feel any of the zest of battle which inspired Ann. Jimmie was worse that day than she had dreamed of his being. She was keeping him to his room and, as far as possible, hiding from him the things that were taking place in the house. She dreaded now to have him hear any of this argument, and she was sickened with the thought that the ten dollars over which they were haggling might some day be just the price of the difference between life and death for her Jimmie. Who could tell? The day might come when just for that ten dollars he might be denied the some one thing that would mean life for him. A wild, unknown anger flamed up in her and she took a step down the stairs, threatening in a tense, bitter voice:

"If you do not give me all, I will take everything out into the street and burn it."

The man took one look up into her flaming eyes, and—his hands dropped from the argument which they had been preparing. He turned quickly, grabbed a bill from his pocket and handed it over to Ann, to bind the contract.