I
When pretty Mary Farrell came to Brine’s Rip and set up a modest
dressmaker’s shop quite close to the Mills (she said she loved the sound
of the saws), all the unattached males of the village, to say nothing of
too many of the attached ones, fell instant victims to her charms. They
were her slaves from the first lifting of her long lashes in their
direction.
Tug Blackstock, the Deputy Sheriff, to be sure, did not capitulate quite
so promptly as the rest. Mary had to flash her dark blue eyes upon him
at least twice, dropping them again with shy admiration. Then he was at
her feet—which was a pleasant place to be, seeing that those same small
feet were shod with a neatness which was a perpetual reproach to the
untidy sawdust strewn roadways of Brine’s Rip.
Even Big Andy, the boyish young giant from the Oromocto, wavered for a
few hours in his allegiance to the postmistress. But Mary was much too
tactful to draw upon her pretty shoulders the hostility of such a power
as the postmistress, and Big Andy’s enthusiasm was cold-douched in its
first glow.
As for the womenfolk of Brine’s Rip, it was not to be expected that they
would agree any too cordially with the men on the subject of Mary
Farrell.
But one instance of Mary’s tact made even the most irreconcilable of her
own sex sheath their claws in dealing with her. She had come from
Harner’s Bend. The Mills at Harner’s Bend were anathema to Brine’s Rip
Mills. A keen trade rivalry had grown, fed by a series of petty but
exasperating incidents, into a hostility that blazed out on the least
occasion. And pretty Mary had come from Harner’s Bend. Brine’s Rip did
not find it out till Mary’s spell had been cast and secured, of course.
But the fact was a bitter one to swallow. No one else but Mary Farrell
could have made Brine’s Rip swallow it.
One day Big Andy, greatly daring, and secure in his renovated allegiance
to the postmistress, ventured to chaff Mary about it. She turned upon
him, half amused and half indignant.
“Well,” she demanded, “isn’t Harner’s Bend a good place to come away
from? Do you think I’d ought to have stopped there? Do I look like the
kind of girl that _wouldn’t_ come away from Harner’s Bend? And me a
dressmaker? I just couldn’t _live_, let alone make a living, among such
a dowdy lot of women-folk as they’ve got over there. It isn’t dresses
_they_ want, but oat-sacks, and you wouldn’t know the difference,
either, when they’d got them on.”
The implication was obvious; and the women of Brine’s Rip began to allow
for possible virtues in Miss Farrell. The postmistress declared there
was no harm in her, and even admitted that she might almost be called
good-looking “if she hadn’t such an _awful_ big mouth.”
I have said that all the male folk of Brine’s Rip had capitulated
immediately to the summons of Mary Farrell’s eyes. But there were two
notable exceptions—Woolly Billy and Jim. Both Woolly Billy’s flaxen mop
of curls and the great curly black head of Jim, the dog, had turned away
coldly from Mary’s first advances. Woolly Billy preferred men to women
anyhow. And Jim was jealous of Tug Blackstock’s devotion to the
petticoated stranger.
But Mary Farrell knew how to manage children and dogs as well as men.
She ignored both Jim and Woolly Billy. She did it quite pointedly, yet
with a gracious politeness that left no room for resentment. Neither the
child nor the dog was accustomed to being ignored. Before long Mary’s
amiable indifference began to make them feel as if they were being left
out in the cold. They began to think they were losing something because
she did not notice them. Reluctantly at first, but by-and-by with
eagerness, they courted her attention. At last they gained it. It was
undeniably pleasant. From that moment the child and the dog were at
Mary’s well-shod and self-reliant little feet.