The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

Augusta left the two of them to quarrel out the details, for there were some things which she had stipulated that Ann must have. For herself she had reserved only some cooking things and plenty of blankets.

In the meantime she had accomplished the most ambitious part of the whole enterprise. She had bought a horse. She owned Donahue.

Back in her not distant school days Augusta had known Mary Donahue. Old Greenwich village, which nowadays harbors its thousands of intellectual gypsies and free riders of every shade and hobby, used to, and does still, furnish a winter home for a circle—they were not a tribe—of Irish gypsies. They did not form a community, nor did they travel the country in caravans. Each family went out by itself in the spring, through the northern part of the state, sold its own laces, told its own fortunes, swapped its own horses. But by what seemed an unspoken agreement they all returned late in the fall to the same neighborhood. With the instinct for places, which is strong in even the most unreliable of migratory birds, they came to refuge in the rickety jumbles of houses between Washington Square and West Fourteenth street, where one street blunders into another, and gets nowhere, and turns back, until, in desperation, West Fourth street crosses West Twelfth street and ties the whole business up in a knot.

Patrick Sarsfield Donahue was one of these gypsies, coming honestly and anciently into his way of living and having no intention of leaving it for any other. But Mary Donahue, his daughter, was untrue to the traditions of her kind in that she had insisted on going to school every day of the time they were in New York. Augusta had been interested in her. Augusta would be.

Now Augusta went down across Fourteenth street to find Mary Donahue. If Mary Donahue could, and she did, manage, cook for, boss and generally hold together on the road, an enterprise that consisted of a father, six horses—more or less according to the balance of trade, four growing sisters, two wagons, two small healthy brothers, and uncounted, and wholly unaccountable, dogs; if Mary Donahue could manage this, and drive a team of horses, then Augusta could drive one horse and keep Jimmie out in the air and free from worry until he should be cured.

The idea was so simple and so much to her own liking that Augusta was almost ashamed to think of the fun she was going to have with it. And she hugged it jealously to herself so that Jimmie should not know until the wagon was at the door for him.

She knew how he would loathe and fret at the thought of going to any sort of a sanitarium or a resort. And she had a terrible dread that her money would not be enough for that. Now this way, once the horse and wagon were paid for, they would not need any money except for the things they actually ate, they and the horse. She was necessarily a little vague about the latter item. But Mary Donahue could give her the facts as an expert.

Mary Donahue, red haired, quick, a woman where Augusta was a child, understood and glowed with sympathy. But she could not entirely suppress the little smile of the professional at the ardent amateur. Mentally she gave them about three days to stay out on the road.

But then Augusta talked to her. And Mary Donahue came and saw the business-like way in which Augusta had dismantled the house. And she saw Jimmie. And Augusta talked to her more.

The result was that Patrick Donahue sold Augusta a gypsy horse and a gypsy wagon. And Mary Donahue drove the spectacle to Augusta's door one morning early and announced that she herself would pilot the expedition out of the perils of New York.