Part 4 (2/2)

CHAPTER VI

A VISIT FROM MRS. HORTON

I had not looked for Jessie and Ralph to return before night, but the article that I had found was scarcely hidden when, chancing to glance down the road, I saw Mr. Horton's team, with the light wagon attached, trotting briskly toward the house.

Only Jessie, Ralph, and Mrs. Horton were in the wagon, and it startled me at first to observe that Ralph was driving. My astonishment changed to amus.e.m.e.nt as they drew nearer, and I saw that Mrs. Horton's capable hands held a firm grip of the lines, just far enough behind Ralph's not to deprive him of the glory of the idea that he was doing all the driving.

”'Oo! 'oo, dere!” he called imperiously, bringing the horses--with Mrs. Horton's help--to a standstill before the gate. Jessie sprang out and turned to lift the little driver to the ground, while we all began talking at once. But our mutual torrent of questions was abruptly checked by the contumacious conduct of that same small driver, who deeply resented Jessie's invitation to him to come off his perch. ”Me is doin' tek care of 'e 'orses,” he declared, scowling defiance at his sister. ”Mis 'Orton, 'oo dit out if 'oo p'ease!”

No better description of Mrs. Horton could be given than to say that she was all that her husband was not--the dearest soul. She laughed as she surveyed the conceited little fellow and then said seriously: ”How in the world am I to get out if you don't get out first and help me down?”

Ralph was unprepared for this emergency, but the objection appeared to him reasonable; he slid slowly off the seat--he was so short that it seemed a long time before his tiny toes touched the bottom of the wagon-box--and began climbing laboriously down, over the wheel. When he had at length reached the ground Mrs. Horton stood up and with the reins held securely in one hand she gained the hub of the near wheel.

From that vantage she reached down to meet Ralph's upstretched mite of a hand, and so was gallantly a.s.sisted to alight.

To my delight Mrs. Horton announced that she had come to spend the day with us. She led the team to the barn and we proceeded to unharness them without a.s.sistance from their late driver, who had already forgotten his intention and his dignity in a romp with his friend and playmate, the cat.

”I suppose your tooth stopped aching and you decided not to have it out,” I said to Jessie, as we were helping Mrs. Horton.

”No,” Mrs. Horton explained, cheerfully; ”by the best of luck, Dr.

Green chanced to be pa.s.sing our house last night, soon after Jake brought Jessie. We called him in, and as he had his forceps--toothers, my little brother used to call them--with him, he had that aching tooth out in no time.”

”I'm afraid it hurt you dreadfully, didn't it, Jessie?” I inquired, sympathetically.

”Not so much as I thought it would; not so much as the aching did,”

Jessie replied. ”People are so cowardly about such things!” she added, and the sly look that Mrs. Horton bestowed on Jessie's sister behind her back, awoke a suspicion in my mind that, perhaps, Jessie herself had betrayed some shrinking dread before the operation took place.

”How glad I am that you didn't have to go clear over to Antonito,” I said. ”You wouldn't have been home for hours yet, and Mrs. Horton wouldn't have been making us a visit.”

”And Mrs. Horton would a good deal rather be making you a visit than driving these horses to Antonito, I can tell you!” said that lady.

”They're quiet as lambs until it comes to cars and engines, and the sight of them scares them both nigh to death, and the railway track runs along right beside the highway for a mile before you get into Antonito. I'd have been obliged to drive Jessie over, for the hired man is gone, and Mr. Horton met with an accident to one of his hands last night, and couldn't have driven.”

”An accident! How did it happen?” I inquired, with feigned carelessness.

”Why, I declare, I can hardly make out how it did happen!” exclaimed Mr. Horton's wife, with a troubled look. ”There, Jessie, that's hay enough to last them a week, and I don't expect to stay that long. You see,” she went on, slipping the harness deftly off the nigh horse, and tossing it down on the pile of hay, ”nothing would do Jake last night but he must go up to the north pasture to salt the cattle. I told him there was no need--they were salted only last Sunday--but go he would, and go he did. It got to be so late before he came back that I got real uneasy about him. It's a good bit to the north pasture, but I knew it ought not to keep him out so very late. Why, it was after twelve o'clock when he came in at last, with his clothes torn, and his hand done up in his handkerchief and just dripping with blood! Jessie and Ralph had gone to bed, hours before, and I was thankful that she wasn't up to see it, for it fairly scared me, and I'm not a mite nervous, generally. I expect I was the more scared because of Jake's way of taking it. He's as steady as iron, most times, but last night he was all kind of trembly and excited. He tried to explain to me how the accident took place, but I couldn't make out hardly what he did mean. It appears, though, that he was coming home along the ravine--where it's always dark, no matter how bright the moonlight--and he jabbed his hand, as he was walking fast, up against a sharp jack oak stub--at least, he thought it must have been some such thing--and he got an awful cut. You wouldn't believe, if you didn't see it with your own eyes, that a stub of any kind could make such a wound! There's a long, slanting cut clean through the palm of his hand. I wanted him to let me look in it for splinters, but he's real touchy about it; wouldn't even let me bathe it,” she concluded sadly.

Everybody liked Mrs. Horton, and a good many things that her husband did would have been less easily condoned by their neighbors if she had been as little of a favorite as he, and one of the things that people liked best, while finding it most incomprehensible, was that she believed in him and his good intentions most implicitly.

”I don't see how he could possibly have run against an oak stub in a ravine,” observed Jessie, musingly. ”Oaks, and especially jack oaks, grow only on the dry hillsides.” Jessie is very observing when it comes to a question of the flora of a country, and what she said was true, as Mrs. Horton hastened to admit.

”I never thought of it before, but I believe that's so,” she said. ”It might have been something else, but Jake himself said that there wasn't any other kind of wood that he knew of, tough enough and hard enough to make such a cut as that.”

Having cared for the horses we three started for the house. ”Did you have a good bed at Mrs. Riley's?” Jessie now asked, bestowing direct attention on me for the first time. We were just entering the house, and before I could reply Jessie cried out in surprise at the unfamiliar aspect of the bed-room, where the heavy quilt still excluded the daylight from the window.

”Why, what is that for?” she asked, perceiving the cause of the semi-darkness.

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