A cloud passed between her and the morning sun. She felt the premonition of tragedy and suffering lowering down like a storm on her hills. How foolishly she had thought that all life and all the great, seething business of life was to be done down in the towns and the cities. Here was life now, with its pressure and its ugly passions, pushing right into the very hills.
She shivered as she picked up her prize of the morning and her fishing tackle and started slowly up the hill toward her home.
Her farm had been rented to Norman Apgarth with the understanding that Ruth was to spend the summer there in her own home. The rent was enough to give Ruth what little money she needed 80 for clothes and to pay her modest expenses at the convent at Athens. So her life was arranged for her at least up to the time when she should have finished school.
It seemed very strange to come home and find her home in the hands of strangers. It was odd to be a sort of guest in the house that she had ruled and managed from almost the time that she was a baby. It would be very hard to keep from telling Mrs. Apgarth where things belonged and how other things should be done. It would be hard to stand by and see others driving the horses that had never known a hand but hers and Daddy Tom’s. Still she had been very glad to come home. It was her place. It held all the memories and all the things that connected her with her own people. She wanted to be able always to come back to it and call it her own. Looking down over it from the crest of the hill, at the little clump of trees under which lay her Daddy Tom and her mother, at the little house that had seen their love and in which she had been born, she could understand the fierceness with which men would fight to hold the farms and homes which were threatened.
Until now she had hardly realised that those men whom people vaguely called “the railroad” would want to take her home and farm away from her. Now it came suddenly home to her and she 81 felt a swelling rage of indignation rising in her throat. She hurried down the hill to the house, as though she saw it already threatened.
She deftly threw her fishpole up on to the roof of the wood shed and went around to the front of the house. There she found Mrs. Apgarth weeding in what had been Ruth’s own flower beds.
“Why, what a how-dye-do you did give us, Miss Ruth!” the woman exclaimed at sight of her. “I called you three times, and when you didn’t answer I went to your door; and there you were gone! I told Norman Apgarth somebody must have took you off in the night.”
“Oh, no,” said Ruth. “No danger. I’m used to getting up early, you see. So I just took some cakes––Didn’t you miss them?––and some milk and slipped out without waking any one. I wanted to catch this fish. Jeffrey Whiting and I tried to catch him for four years. And I had to do it myself this morning.”
“So young Whiting’s gone away, eh?”
“Why, no,” said Ruth quickly. “He went over to Wilbur’s Fork about half an hour ago. Who said he’d gone away?”