When the cold first swooped upon them, the people curled up like touched caterpillars, and devoted every energy not frost-bitten to keeping themselves warm. Their cabins were built on hygienic principles, and the very earth beneath them was unaccustomed to the rigor of a hard chill. After a week of it, finding themselves still living, the men began to take interest and a hunting epidemic broke out and spread.
Dan Rice, the owner of good hunting dogs, became the most popular man in the neighborhood and had his vanity so tickled that he decided to give a party, just to show the folks what a fellow he was and what a figure he could make when he set his mind to it. He had a big buck swung up by its heels in his smoke-house, and nearly two flour barrels full of small game, besides the intimate friendship of a distiller of “moonshine,” so that he felt himself in a position to invite his friends to make merry with him and “damn the expense.”
“’Twill thaw we-all up, an’ start the sap runnin’,” he explained to his wife. “Thar’s plenty to do with, so you an’ the gals buckle on an’ don’t have no sparin’ an’ pinchin’. This here shindig have got to make a record.”
Word of the extent and elegance of the preparations went around with the invitations, and also that Mrs. Rice and her daughters would appear in new calicos made specially for the occasion. Immediately every female invited felt life unendurable without similar decoration, and domestic atmosphere grew fevered with discussions of patterns and styles.
Tom Westley’s pretty little near-sighted wife secured the sweetest thing in rosebuds on a dark red ground, and stitched away at it energetically. Her baby was nearly three months old now and her interest in the outside world was returning. The grooves of her life were well defined and narrow, so that any extraneous happening became an event charged with unbalancing excitement.
There was to be a big deer hunt with Rice’s hounds, as a preliminary to the ball, and every able-bodied man about the district expected to take part in it. Westley proposed to his wife to go over to the Rice’s early in the day and let him join her there after the hunt, but got flouted. Mrs. Rice would be run off her legs with the preparations, her considerate little neighbor declared, and would be justified in regarding premature arrivals with disgust. She—Susan Westley—was a housekeeper herself and knew about these things. Besides, her own dress was unfinished, and she had a making of soap in the lye which must be attended to. Then it was arranged that Tom should meet her at a specified fence corner, a quarter of a mile from their house, just before, or on the edge of dark. The way to the fence was through a cleared field and perfectly open. She knew it as well as she did her own door yard.
“Don’t git so fired up huntin’ that you forgit me,” she admonished, as she gave her husband his breakfast on the important morning. “It’s a mile over to Rice’s an’ woods nigh all the way. The moon won’t be up, time I want to start n’other, so I’d be feared. Aim to be at the fence fust, will you?”
“All right,” Tom acquiesced easily. “I’ll be thar sure as shootin’, so thar aint no call to fluster. Don’t keep me waitin’ no longer ’n you can help for it’s tarnation cold loafin’. Wrop the youngster up tight, or he’ll freeze. He ain’t none too fleshy.”
He had the child on his knee and was feeding it with scraps of his own breakfast, calmly confident that as the boy is father to the man that which is good for him at one point of his development must be beneficial all along the line. The baby was chipper and healthy, but exceedingly small, a fact used to shame his parents by the possessors of more stalwart off-spring.