“Miss her? Bless me! I wouldn’t believe it made so much difference having her about. It’s knowing she really is away, and is going to be gone for a couple of days, that’s the matter, I s’pose. Say, Aunty Rose!”
“What is it, Joseph Stagg?”
“What under the sun did we do before Hannah’s Car’lyn came here, anyway? Seems to me we didn’t really live, did we?”
Aunty Rose had no answer to make to these questions.
Uncle Joe missed kissing the little girl good-night. He even missed the rattle of Prince’s chain at the dog-house when he came back from the store late in the evening.
The air had grown heavy and close, and he stood on the porch for a minute and snuffed knowingly at the odour a good deal as the dog might.
“There’s a fire over the mountain, I guess,” he said to Aunty Rose when he entered the house. “We’re having a dry spring.”
They went to bed. In the morning there was a smoky fog over everything—a fog that the sun did not dissipate, and behind which it looked like an enormous saffron ball.
Mr. Stagg went down to the store as usual. On the way he passed the Parlow place, and he saw the carpenter in his shop door. Parlow was gazing with seeming anxiety into the fog cloud, his face turned towards the forest. Joseph Stagg did not know that, in all the years of their estrangement, the carpenter had never been so near speaking to the hardware dealer.
The smoky tang in the air was as strong in Sunrise Cove as out in the country. The shopkeepers were talking about the fire. News had come over the long-distance wires that thousands of acres of woodland were burning, that the forest reserves were out, and that the farmers of an entire township on the far side of the mountain were engaged in trying to make a barrier over which the flames would not leap. It was the consensus of opinion, however, that the fire would not cross the range. It never had on former occasions, and the wind was against such an advance. The top of the ridge was covered with boulders and the vegetation was scant.