“It’s a long story, ma’am. ’Tain’t exactly a pleasant one. You see, Nat come down here from Foxboro and his old man started a shoe place over next to the Red Front Grocery. Him and his woman always had trouble and I guess ‘twa sort o’ hell for the Forge kids. Nat went to school here a piece, and then was pulled out and set to work for Gridley to the tannery. Old Cal took pity on him, the boy bein’ a good sort o’ kid, and put him in the office. Nat writ poems just after leavin’ school. They tickled old Gridley. He got Hod to print ’em in the Telegraph.”
“Gridley? Why, I know a girl named Gridley! And she came from up around here, too. She went to school with me at Mount Hadley.”
“That’s the one! Bernice! Went abroad for a spell, didn’t she? Then married a millionaire feller from somewhere out Chicawgie?”
“Yes,” said Madelaine faintly. “Please go on! It was her father, then. And what about Nathaniel?”
“Well, Johnathan got sick o’ cobblin’ folkses’ shoes. Had a chance to buy Dink Campbell’s box-shop. Didn’t do very well till young Nat got stuck on a girl from A-higher. Commenced workin’ like the devil then, Nat did, to get a stake so’s he could marry her. Caleb coached him, I guess. Leastwise the town says so, and Cal ain’t never denied it. That was ’fore his woman, the Duchess, died, and Cal started travelin’. Anyhow, Nat worked like sixty down to the box-shop and planned when he was twenty-one he’d marry the kid from A-higher. It was sort o’ too bad. She give him the Grand Bounce, married another feller. Pore Natie got it square between the eyes the night he turned twenty-one. He was plannin’ on marryin’ her the comin’ Christmas. Rotten deal! Hurt him awful!”
Madelaine’s throat was dry. She nodded.
“Care if I smoke, daughter?” the old man asked.
“Please do,” begged the girl. He was that type of picturesque old fellow who looks at a loss without a corncob pipe. Uncle Joe pulled a package of black shag from his hip, took his cob from off his desk and for several moments meditated as he applied the shag to the bowl and tamped it hard with a gnarled forefinger.
“’Course,” he went on, as the match flame leaped several times upon being applied to the top of the pipe, “it’s only natcheral that Natie should ‘a’ been sort of upset and all. Still, we didn’t calculate he’d turn so quick and crazy-like, and pull off the stunt he did. I s’pose he was just homesick for a woman, his Ma being pretty much a jawbones and the home life at sixes and sevens. Anyhow, that very night when Natie learned the other girl had married another feller, he goes plumb to work and marries ‘Cock-eye’ Richards’ eldest girl, Milly—the dumpy one that was always sloppy ’bout her shoes.”
“Married! He’s—married—then?”