August was a month of drought and intense heat that year; by the first week in September the stream had dwindled to the merest silver thread, its wasted waters floating upward in clouds of impalpable mist at dawn and evening to be lost forever in the empty vault of heaven. Behind the closed shutters of the village houses, women fanned themselves in the intervals of labor over superheated cookstoves. Men consulted their thermometers with incredulous eyes. Springs reputed to be unfailing gradually ceased their cool trickle. Wells and cisterns yielded little save the hollow sound of the questing bucket. There was serious talk of a water famine in Brookville. At the old Bolton house, however, there was still water in abundance. In jubilant defiance of blazing heavens and parching earth the Red-Fox Spring—tapped years before by Andrew Bolton and piped a mile or more down the mountain side, that his household, garden and stock might never lack of pure cold water—gushed in undiminished volume, filling and overflowing the new cement reservoir, which had been one of Lydia Orr's cautious innovations in the old order of things.
The repairs on the house were by now finished, and the new-old mansion, shining white amid the chastened luxuriance of ancient trees, once more showed glimpses of snowy curtains behind polished windowpanes. Flowers, in a lavish prodigality of bloom the Bolton house of the past had never known, flanked the old stone walls, bordered the drives, climbed high on trellises and arbors, and blazed in serried ranks beyond the broad sweep of velvet turf, which repaid in emerald freshness its daily share of the friendly water.
Mrs. Abby Daggett gazed at the scene in rapt admiration through the clouds of dust which uprose from under Dolly's scuffling feet.
“Ain't that place han'some, now she's fixed it up?” she demanded of Mrs. Deacon Whittle, who sat bolt upright at her side, her best summer hat, sparsely decorated with purple flowers, protected from the suffocating clouds of dust by a voluminous brown veil. “I declare I'd like to stop in and see the house, now it's all furnished up—if only for a minute.”
“We ain't got time, Abby,” Mrs. Whittle pointed out. “There's work to cut out after we get to Mis' Dix's, and it was kind of late when we started.”
Mrs. Daggett relinquished her random desire with her accustomed amiability. Life consisted mainly in giving up things, she had found; but being cheerful, withal, served to cast a mellow glow over the severest denials; in fact, it often turned them into something unexpectedly rare and beautiful.
“I guess that's so, Ann,” she agreed. “Dolly got kind of fractious over his headstall when I was harnessin'. He don't seem to like his sun hat, and I dunno's I blame him. I guess if our ears stuck up through the top of our bunnits like his we wouldn't like it neither.”
Mrs. Whittle surveyed the animal's grotesquely bonneted head with cold disfavor.
“What simple ideas you do get into your mind, Abby,” said she, with the air of one conscious of superior intellect. “A horse ain't human, Abby. He ain't no idea he's wearing a hat.... The Deacon says their heads get hotter with them rediculous bunnits on. He favors a green branch.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Daggett, foiling a suspicious movement of Dolly's switching tail, “mebbe that's so; I feel some cooler without a hat. But 'tain't safe to let the sun beat right down, the way it does, without something between. Then, you see, Henry's got a lot o' these horse hats in the store to sell. So of course Dolly, he has to wear one.”
Mrs. Whittle cautiously wiped the dust from her hard red cheeks.
“My! if it ain't hot,” she observed. “You're so fleshy, Abby, I should think you'd feel it something terrible.”
“Oh, I don't know,” said Mrs. Daggett placidly. “Of course I'm fleshy, Ann; I ain't denying that; but so be you. You don't want to think about the heat so constant, Ann. Our thermometer fell down and got broke day before yesterday, and Henry says ‘I'll bring you up another from the store this noon.’ But he forgot all about it. I didn't say a word, and that afternoon I set out on the porch under the vines and felt real cool—not knowing it was so hot—when along comes Mrs. Fulsom, a-pantin' and fannin' herself. ‘Good land, Abby!’ says she; ‘by the looks, a body'd think you didn't know the thermometer had risen to ninety-two since eleven o'clock this morning.’ ‘I didn't,’ I says placid; ‘our thermometer's broke.’ ‘Well, you'd better get another right off,’ says she, wiping her face and groaning. ‘It's an awful thing, weather like this, not to have a thermometer right where you can see it.’ Henry brought a real nice one home from the store that very night; and I hung it out of sight behind the sitting room door; I told Henry I thought 'twould be safer there.”
“That sounds exactly like you, Abby,” commented Mrs. Whittle censoriously. “I should think Henry Daggett would be onto you, by now.”
“Well, he ain't,” said Mrs. Daggett, with mild triumph. “He thinks I'm real cute, an' like that. It does beat all, don't it? how simple menfolks are. I like 'em all the better for it, myself. If Henry'd been as smart an' penetrating as some folks, I don't know as we'd have made out so well together. Ain't it lucky for me he ain't?”
Ann Whittle sniffed suspiciously. She never felt quite sure of Abby Daggett: there was a lurking sparkle in her demure blue eyes and a suspicious dimple near the corner of her mouth which ruffled Mrs. Whittle's temper, already strained to the breaking point by the heat and dust of their midday journey.
“Well, I never should have thought of such a thing, as going to Ladies' Aid in all this heat, if you hadn't come after me, Abby,” she said crossly. “I guess flannel petticoats for the heathen could have waited a spell.”
“Mebbe they could, Ann,” Mrs. Daggett said soothingly. “It's kind of hard to imagine a heathen wanting any sort of a petticoat this weather, and I guess they don't wear 'em before they're converted; but of course the missionaries try to teach 'em better. They go forth, so to say, with the Bible in one hand and a petticoat in the other.”
“I should hope so!” said Mrs. Whittle, with vague fervor.
The sight of a toiling wagon supporting a huge barrel caused her to change the subject rather abruptly.
“That's Jacob Merrill's team,” she said, craning her neck. “What on earth has he got in that hogs-head?”
“He's headed for Lydia Orr's spring, I shouldn't wonder,” surmised Mrs. Daggett. “She told Henry to put up a notice in the post office that folks could get all the water they wanted from her spring. It's running, same as usual; but, most everybody else's has dried up.”
“I think the minister ought to pray for rain regular from the pulpit on Sunday,” Mrs. Whittle advanced. “I'm going to tell him so.”
“She's going to do a lot better than that,” said Mrs. Daggett.... “For the land sake, Dolly! I ain't urged you beyond your strength, and you know it; but if you don't g'long—”
A vigorous slap of the reins conveyed Mrs. Daggett's unuttered threat to the reluctant animal, with the result that both ladies were suddenly jerked backward by an unlooked for burst of speed.
“I think that horse is dangerous, Abby,” remonstrated Mrs. Whittle, indignantly, as she settled her veil. “You ought to be more careful how you speak up to him.”
“I'll risk him!” said Mrs. Daggett with spirit. “It don't help him none to stop walking altogether and stand stock still in the middle of the road, like he was a graven image. I'll take the whip to him, if he don't look out!”
Mrs. Whittle gathered her skirts about her, with an apprehensive glance at the dusty road.
“If you das' to touch that whip, Abby Daggett,” said she, “I'll git right out o' this buggy and walk, so there!”
Mrs. Daggett's broad bosom shook with merriment.
“Fer pity sake, Ann, don't be scared,” she exhorted her friend. “I ain't never touched Dolly with the whip; but he knows I mean what I say when I speak to him like that! ...I started in to tell you about the Red-Fox Spring, didn't I?”
Mrs. Whittle coughed dryly.
“I wish I had a drink of it right now,” she said. “The idea of that Orr girl watering her flowers and grass, when everybody else i............