That very night a council was held of what Mr. Craig termed “the Board
of Amateur Experts.”
“I think I need Matt in here for support,” he said laughingly from his
favorite resting place, the old-fashioned, high-backed couch in the
sitting room.
Maple Grove was a large, comfortable house. There was a front entrance,
a side entrance and a well room at the back of the kitchen. There was a
parlor and a front bedroom, a side bedroom and a big sunny sitting room
that was dining room also, and finally the old kitchen with its Dutch
oven and hooks in the ceiling for hanging up smoked beef and bacon
sides.
Not that Becky ever used the Dutch oven nowadays except to store things
away in. She had instead a fine modern electric stove over which she
hovered like a sorceress from five A. M. to eleven A. M., producing such
marvels of cookery that held the girls spellbound—raised doughnuts with
jam inside and powdered sugar outside, apple turnovers made with Peck’s
Pleasants and rich Baldwins, ginger cookies, large as saucers with
scalloped edges, soft and rich as butterscotch, and pies, with rich,
flaky crust and delectable filling in endless varieties. Jean declared
that she had learned more about cooking in the few weeks she had lived
at Maple Grove than in all her life before.
“Well, there’s cooking and cooking, girls,” Rebecca had replied
placidly, fishing for brown doughnuts with her long, hand-wrought iron
fork. “It’s one thing to cook when you’ve got everything to do with, and
quite another when you are eternally figuring out how to make both ends
meet. Of course, I don’t have to do that. Land knows there’s plenty to
eat and more too, but it’s all plain food, and you’ve got to learn how
to toss vegetables around in forty different ways out here if you want
any variety.”
It was that evening that the Board of Amateur Experts discussed
everything that lay ahead of them from the said vegetables to chickens,
cows, horses, and farm implements.
Mr. Craig had seemed relieved when he was sure that his wife approved of
Woodhow. It was near Maple Grove and Rebecca, he said, and they would
surely need both many times during their first experimental year in the
country. Also, it was on the mail route, and not too large a place in
acreage for them to handle. There was a good apple orchard, a little
run-down, but it would be all right with pruning and proper care.
Besides, there were four good pear trees, two large cherry trees, white
hearts and red, and three crabapple trees.
“Guess if you hunt around, you might find some quinces too, and plenty
of berries and currants,” Rebecca said. “It’s been let go to waste the
past few years, and it’ll take a year or more to get it back into shape.
You’d better write out West and get a three-year lease, with option of
purchase.”
“We couldn’t think of buying it, even with a GI loan from the
government,” Mrs. Craig demurred, “but we might try the three-year
lease. What do you think, dear?”
“I should write tonight,” Mr. Craig told her confidently. “Even if I
should gain my health completely, we could still stay up here summers,
and you all would enjoy it, I know. Look at Tommy’s red cheeks, and Jean
looks like another girl. If I keep on much longer on Becky’s cooking, I
expect to be mowing hay in the lower meadows by July.”
So the letter was written, the wonderful letter freighted with so many
hopes. All the youngsters escorted Mrs. Craig down to the mailbox at the
crossroads the next noon. It was truly a fateful moment, as Kit remarked
solemnly. So much depended upon the nature of the answer from far-off
Saskatoon. Perched on the fence rail Tommy began to whistle loudly.
“What’s his name, Mom?” asked Kit.
“Ralph McRae,” Jean answered for her mother.
“You know, really, Tommy,” protested Doris, “if you could just see how
ridiculous you look on that fence rail, you’d come down.”
But Tommy ignored her and kept to the rail all the same, whistling. Even
Kit felt the inspiration of the moment.
“Oh, I love these April mornings! You can smell everything that’s sweet
and new in the air, can’t you, Mom? And I found arbutus buds down in the
pines too, and an old crow’s nest, and the crocuses are up.”
Mrs. Craig lifted her face to the blue sky with its great white clouds
that drifted up from the south and sighed contentedly.
“There comes the mailman down the wildwood way,” Jean called from the
curve of the road.
Already they had grown to watch for mail as the one real event of the
day. Mr. Ricketts, the rural free delivery carrier, was a typical
product of a small community, with his cap pushed back on his head, a
smile of perpetual well-being on his face.
“Looks like we’d get a spell of fine weather,” he called. “Tell Miss
Craig I noticed a postcard for her about her subscription being up for
her floral monthly, and if she ain’t going to renew hers, I’ll send in
my own for this year.”
“Now just hear that,” exclaimed Becky when she was given the message.
“He’s read my floral monthly regularly coming along the route. Well, I
don’t know as I mind. He’s a real good mail carrier anyhow, and all men
have failings. But Tom Ricketts knows better than to read my floral
monthly without so much as by your leave. But I’ll renew it.”
“He must have read the postcard too,” said Doris.
“Read it?” Becky sniffed audibly. “I’d like to see anything get by them
down at that post office. They know a sight more about you than you do
yourself. Postmaster Willetts could sit down singlehanded and write a
history of the local inhabitants of this town just from memory and
postcards, I don’t doubt a bit.”
The very next day the girls and Tommy went again to Woodhow. The keys
were at Mr. Weaver’s, the next house down the road from Maple Grove. It
was a rambling gray house sitting far back from the road and facing the
western hills. Philip Weaver lived there alone. He was ninety-one and
had had six wives, Rebecca told them.
“Though mercy knows, nobody holds that against him. It was a compliment
to the sex, I suppose, if he could get them. And Uncle Philly’s buried
them all reverently and properly.”
They found the old man working at a carpenter’s bench out in the
woodshed. His hair was gray and curly and his upper lip clean-shaven.
Tommy said he looked like the pictures of Uncle Sam. He was tall and
lean and stoop-shouldered, but his blue eyes were full of twinkles and
he had the finest set of false teeth, Kit remarked soberly, that she’d
ever seen, and the most Winsome smile.
“Winsome? Philly Weaver Winsome?” laughed Rebecca when she heard it.
“Well, I must say, Kit, that is the best description yet. Winsome!”
“But he is,” Kit protested, “really winsome. He gave us each a drink
from his well and showed Jean his Dutch tile stove and his grandfather’s
clock. And he’s got the cutest old chest out in that side hall, Rebecca.
I asked him how much he’d take for it, and he said no, he guessed he’d
better not, though it was worth as much as two dollars and a half, but
it had been his great-grandmother’s hope chest. Wasn’t that amusing?”
Armed with the key and waving goodbye to the old man at the top of the
hill, they started down to the crossroads. Already they called the house
home. It was so satisfying, Kit said, just to wander about the rooms and
plan. There was one large southeast room that must be the living room.
Back of this, opening out on a wide side porch, was the dining room. On
the opposite side of the front hallway was a small room they could use
for a study. Between it and the kitchen was a good-sized hallway lined
with shelves and long handy drawers beneath them.
It was the kitchen and attic, though, that the girls lingered over most.
The former extended across the entire back of the house and Doris said
there was room enough to hold a dance in it.
“Where are you, Jeannie?” Kit called. “You’re missing thrills of
discovery.”
But Jean was getting her own thrills. She had rolled up the legs of her
blue jeans and ventured down the old winding cellar steps, groped around
in the dark until she found the outside doors and removed the big wooden
bar that held them. The stone steps outside were green with moss, and an
indignant toad hopped back out of the sunlight when she threw open the
doors.
“We’ll get the moldy smell out of the cellar in a few days,” she told
the others, rolling up her sleeves and sitting down in the sunshine on
the top step. “And there’s a furnace down there, too. It looks old and
rusty, but it’s there.”
Kit stood with her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at the tall
tapering pines. They were splendid old trees, towering as high as the
house itself. Their branches spread out like great hoopskirts of green.
Underneath was a thick silky carpet of russet needles, layer on layer
from many seasons of growth. Beyond the limits of the garden lay the
strip of white road, and across that came wide fields that seemed to
fall in long waves to meet the river. On all sides they slipped away
from the old house, their square borders outlined with the gray rock
walls, each with its brave showing of springtime green, where every
clambering vine had sent forth leafy tendrils, and even the moss had
freshened up under the April showers.
“In a couple of weeks more they’ll all be green,” said Jean, her dark
eyes bright with anticipation. “And we’ll plough them and sow them, and
they’ll grow and grow, kids, and turn a real golden harvest over to us
by fall.”