WHEN NICK NORDMAN CAME BACK HOME
I was awful nervous about going up to meet Nick Nordman. It had been near thirty years since I'd seen him, and he'd got so rich that one house and one automobile weren't anything. He had about three of each, and he frisked the world in between occupying them. Still, when he wrote to me that he was coming back to visit the village, I made up my mind that I'd be there to welcome him, being as we were boys and girls in school together.
It was a nice October evening when I started out. When I came down through town, I saw the council chamber all lit up, being it was the regular meeting night. And sitting in there I saw Silas Sykes and Timothy Toplady and Eppleby Holcomb and some more, smoking to heaven and talking to each other while the mayor addressed them. I wondered, as I went along, which of the thirteen hundred things we needed in the village they were talking about. I concluded they were talking about how to raise the money to do any one of them—some years away.
In the middle of town I came on Lucy Hackett. She was down buying her vegetables; she always bought them at night, because then they give her a good deal for her money and some cheaper. Lucy was forty-odd, with long brown hair, braided round and round her head, crown after crown. She was tall and thin, with long arms, but a slow, graceful way of walking and of picking her way, holding up her old work skirt, that made you think of a grand lady moving around. And she had lovely dark eyes that made you like her anyway.
"Oh, Lucy," I says, "guess who I'm up here to meet—Nick Nordman."
She just stared at me. "Nick Nordman?" she says. "Coming here?"
"First time in twenty years," I says, and went off, with her face a-following me, and me a-chiding myself energetic: What was the matter with me to spring that onto her all of a sudden that way, and clean forget that her and Nick used to keep company for a year or more before he went off to town?
"Paper? Paper, Miss Marsh? As soon's we get 'em off the train?" says somebody. And there I saw from four to six little boys, getting orders for the city paper before the train had come in. But it was just whistling down by the gas works, and I was so excited I dunno if I answered them.
My gracious, what do you s'pose? On the back of the Dick Dasher accommodation train—we called it that because Dick Dasher was the conductor—came rolling in a special car, and a black porter bounced off and set down a step, and out of the car got one lonely, solitary man.
"Is that a show car hitched on there, or what?" I says to Mis' Sturgis, that got off the train.