“Maybe he thinks we’ll steal his cherries.” Horace straightened himself, scornfully.
“Huh, I guess we can buy our cherries if we want any,” said Rodney, with flashing eyes.
“Perhaps other boys have not thought so,” interposed the mother’s gentle voice; “and since the fence was there before we came, and so cannot have any possible reference to us, we will not harbor ill will against our neighbor because of it.”
“Young-ones,” muttered a surly voice on the other side of the high board fence. “Just my luck to have a pack of young-ones unloaded on me. Just one degree worse than the widder’s long tongue, I’ll venture. I’m glad the fence is good and high, and I’ll put a row of pickets on top of it if they go to climbing.”
Old Mr. Harding dropped down on a garden seat, wiping the moisture from his heated brow with a warlike bandana. He had been putting out late tomato plants, and his back ached; possibly his heart ached, too, for he was old and lonely. He could have told to a mathematical nicety, had he had the mind to do so, just why the ugly board fence divided him from his neighbor, of the quarrel between himself and the fiery widow, who owned the cottage where the children had come to live, over a boundary line, the matter of a foot or less of ground between the two places.
A quarrel is like a tumble weed in its capacity for growing in size, and, tossed back and forth by the windy tongues of the Widow Barlow, who gloried in “speaking her mind,” and old Mr. Harding, who cherished his right to the last word as religiously as a woman, the original difference had grown to be a very serious thing, indeed.
“I’ll fix her!” he had exclaimed, after the last tilt of words which occurred between them. “I’ll put up a fence so high she can’t scream over it, and if she comes inside my yard I’ll buy a dog.”
He thoroughly enjoyed that bit of spite work, and amused himself immensely in overseeing the ungainly structure as it went up, completely obstructing the objectionable widow’s view on the east side.
She had no redress, for he had given her the benefit of the disputed line, and a man could put up bill boards on his property if he wished to, and he hugged himself to think of her rage and disgust.
He did not in the least overestimate it, and he heard with glee from the neighbors and the housekeeper the savage onslaughts on his character which she was making, and it was not long before a moving van backed up before her door, a “To rent” sign appeared, and Mr. Harding was alone with victory. He was soured in the operation, it must be confessed. No man can habitually nurse hatred and spite in his bosom without becoming contaminated.