“Well, you drive,” he said. “We'll walk on to the top an' take a peep. I agree with you, Mandy. I don't feel like I'll ever want to leave this country ag'in. I want to die an' be buried among my kin.”
The two moved faster than the tired horse, and Addie saw them on the brow of the mountain, outlined against the blue expanse beyond. She noticed Jeff pointing here and there and waving his hand; even at that distance the glow of his animation was observable. Reaching the top, Mrs. Rundel caught their words, and in the depths of her despondency she wondered over their gratification.
“Not a new buildin' of any sort that I kin make out,” she heard her husband saying. “Thar, you kin see Jim Hoag's house above the bunch o' trees. It's had a fresh coat o' paint lately; look how bright the window-blinds are!”
“An' how green an' fresh everything seems!” commented the more poetic spinster. “Looks like thar's been plenty o' rain this summer. Oh, I love it—I love it! It's home—the only home I ever knowed.”
The horse paused close by them. The cow mooed loudly, and the calf trotted briskly up to her and began to butt her flabby bag with his sleek head.
“That looks like a different-shaped steeple on the Methodist meetin'-house,” Amanda commented, as she shaded her eyes from the sun and stared steadily off into the distance.
“I believe you are right, by hunky,” Jeff agreed. “This un is fully ten foot taller, unless them trees around it has been topped since we left.” He turned to his wife, and a shadow of chagrin crept across his face as he said: “I see the house whar you an' Rafe used to live—thar, just beyond Hoag's flour-mill. Well, thar's no use cryin' over spilt milk, old girl; you ain't goin' back to comfort like that, as scanty as it seemed when you had it, an' I was goin' to do such wonders in the money line. We'll have to swallow a big chunk o' pride to put up with a hut like our'n among old friends, but we've got to live life out, an' the cabin is the best we kin get at present, anyway.”
Addie, holding the reins in her thin fingers, rose to her full height, her weary eyes on her old home, which stood out with considerable clearness on the red, rain-washed slope beyond a stretch of green pasture. She saw the side porch, and remembered how Paul's cradle had stood there on warm afternoons, where she and Amanda had sat and sewed. Again that sense of lost motherhood stirred within her, and she was conscious of a sharp contraction of the muscles of her throat. Surely, she mused, after all there was no love like that of a mother's for her child, and in her own case there was so much to regret. The child had been beautiful—every one had noticed that. Its little hands were so chubby and pink; its lips like a cupid's bow. As a baby it had smiled more than any baby she had ever seen, and yet in boyhood the smile had gradually given way to a scowl of ever-increasing discontent and weariness of life and its clashing conditions.
Amanda and Jeff were now descending the mountain, and the horse plodded along behind them. They must hurry on, Jeff said, for the sun would soon be down and they must get to the cabin before dark, so as to unload and shape things up for the night. Fortunately, as he took care to remind them, they would not have to pass through the village, as the hut stood in the outskirts of the place, close to Hoag's property line.
Reaching the foot of the mountain, they took a short cut through some old unfenced fields to the cabin. Here their forebodings were more than realized. The two-roomed hut was worse than they had expected. It was built of logs, and had a leaning chimney made of sticks and clay. The rain had washed the clay out of the cracks between the logs of the walls, and the openings were stuffed with rags, paper, and dried moss. The door shutter, with broken hinges, was lying on the ground. The doorstep was a single log of pine, which the former inmate of the hut had chopped half away for kindling-wood. The wooden shutters to the tiny, glassless windows had gone the same way, along with several boards of the flooring.