Miss Letitia Bascom came hurrying out of the house with a dark, oblong object in her hands.
“There now, Jeff Whiting, I know you just tried to forget this on purpose. It’s too late to put it in the trunk now; so you’ll just have to put it in your overcoat pocket.”
Jeffrey groaned in spirit. It was a full-grown brick covered with felt, a foot warmer. Aunt Letty had made him take one with him when he went down to the Academy at Lowville last winter, and he and his brick had furnished much of the winter’s amusement there. The memory of his humiliations on account of that brick would last a lifetime. He wondered why maiden aunts could not understand. His mother, now, would have known better. But he dutifully put the thing into the pocket of his big coat––he could drop it into the first snowback––and turned to kiss his aunt.
“I know all about them hall bedrooms in Albany,” she lectured. “Make your landlady heat it for you every night.”
A noise in the road made them all turn.
Two men in a high-backed, low-set cutter were driving into the yard.
It was evident from the signs that the men had been having a hard time on the road. They must have been out all night, for they could not have started from anywhere early enough to be here now at sunrise.
Their harness had been broken and mended in several places. The cutter had a runner broken. The horses were cut and bloody, where they had kicked themselves and each other in the drifts.
As they drove up beside the group in the yard, one of the men shouted: