[Cover Illustration]
JEAN OF GREENACRES
BY
IZOLA L. FORRESTER
THE WORLD SYNDICATE PUBLISHING CO.
CLEVELAND, O. NEW YORK, N.Y.
_Copyright, 1917, by_
_George W. Jacobs & Company_
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration]
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A Knight of the Bumpers 9
II Christmas Guests 25
III Evergreen and Candlelight 43
IV The Judge’s Sweetheart 59
V Just a City Sparrow 81
VI “Arrows of Longing” 99
VII The Call Home 115
VIII Seeking Her Goal 133
IX Jean Mothers the Brood 153
X Cousin Roxy’s “Social” 171
XI Cynthy’s Neighbors 183
XII First Aid to Providence 199
XIII Mounted on Pegasus 223
XIV Carlota 239
XV At Morel’s Studio 253
XVI Greenacre Letters 269
XVII Billie’s Fighting Chance 285
XVIII The Path of the Fire 301
XIX Ralph’s Homeland 317
XX Open Windows 331
JEAN OF GREENACRES
CHAPTER I
A KNIGHT OF THE BUMPERS
It was Monday, just five days before Christmas. The little pink express
card arrived in the noon mail. The girls knew there must be some
deviation from the usual daily mail routine, when the mailman lingered
at the white post.
Jean ran down the drive and he greeted her cheerily.
“Something for you folks at the express office, I reckon. If it’s
anything hefty you’d better go down and get it today. Looks like we’d
have a flurry of snow before nightfall.”
He waited while Jean glanced at the card.
“Know what it is?”
“Why, I don’t believe I do,” she answered, regretfully. “Maybe they’re
books for Father.”
“Like enough,” responded Mr. Ricketts, musingly. “I didn’t know. I
always feel a little mite interested, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” laughed Jean, as he gathered up his reins and jogged off
down the bridge road. She hurried back to the house, her head sideways
to the wind. The hall door banged as Kit let her in, her hands floury
from baking.
“Why on earth do you stand talking all day to that old gossip? Is there
any mail from the west?”
“He only wanted to know about an express bundle; whether it was hefty or
light, and where it came from and if we expected it,” Jean replied,
piling the mail on the dining-room table. “There is no mail from
Saskatoon, sister fair.”
“Well, I only wanted to hear from Honey. He promised me a silver fox
skin for Christmas if he could find one.”
Kit’s face was perfectly serious. Honey had asked her before he left
Gilead Center just what she would like best, and, truthful as always,
Kit had told him a silver fox skin. The other girls had nicknamed it
“The Quest of the Silver Fox,” and called Honey a new Jason, but Kit
still held firmly to the idea that if there was any such animal floating
around, Honey would get it for her.
Jean was engrossed in a five-page letter from one of the girl students
at the Academy back in New York where she had studied the previous
winter. The sunlight poured through the big semicircular bay window at
the south end of the dining-room. Here Doris and Helen maintained the
plant stand, a sort of half-moon pyramid, home-made, with rows of potted
ferns, geraniums, and begonias on its steps. Helen had fashioned some
window boxes too, covered with birchbark and lined with moss, trying to
coax some adder’s tongue and trailing ground myrtle, with even some wild
miniature pines, like Japanese dwarfs, to stay green.
“It has turned bleak and barren out of doors so suddenly,” said Helen.
“One day it was all beautiful yellow and russet and even old rose, but
the next, after that heavy frost, it was all dead. I’m glad pines don’t
mind frost and cold.”
“Pines are the most optimistic, dearest trees of all,” Kit agreed,
opening up an early spring catalogue. “If it wasn’t for the pines and
these catalogues to encourage one, I’d want to hunt a woodchuck hole and
hiberate.”
“Hibernate,” Jean corrected absently.
Now, one active principle in the Robbins family was interest in each
other’s affairs. It was called by various names. Doris said it was
“nosing.” Helen called it “petty curiosity.” But Kit came out flatly and
said it was based primarily on inherent family affection; that
necessarily every twig of a family tree must be intensely and vitally
interested in every single thing that affected any sister twig.
Accordingly, she deserted her catalogues with their enticing pictures of
flowering bulbs, and, leaning over Jean’s chair, demanded to know the
cause of her absorption.
“Bab Crane is taking up expression.” Jean turned back to the first page
of the letter she had been reading. “She says she never fully realized
before that art is only the highest form of expressing your ideals to
the world at large.”
“Tell her she’s all wrong.” Kit shook her mop of boyish curls decidedly.
“Cousin Roxy told me the other day she believes schools were first
invented for the relief of distressed parents just to give them a
breathing spell, and not for children at all.”
“Still, if Bab’s hit a new trail of interest, it will make her think
she’s really working. Things have come to her so easily, she doesn’t
appreciate them. Perhaps she can express herself now.”
“Express herself? For pity’s sake, Jeanie. Tell her to come up here, and
we’ll let her express herself all over the place. Oh! Just smell my
mince pies this minute. Isn’t cooking an expression of individual art
too?” said Kit teasingly as she made a bee line for the oven in time to
rescue four mince pies.
“Who’s going to drive down after the Christmas box?” Mrs. Robbins
glanced in at the group in the sunlight. “I wish to send an order for
groceries too and you’ll want to be back before dark.”
“I’m terribly sorry, Mother dear,” called Kit from the kitchen, “but
Sally and some of the girls are coming over and I promised them I’d go
after evergreen and Princess pine. We’re gathering it for wreaths and
stars to decorate the church.”
“And I promised Father if his magazines came, I’d read to him,” Helen
added. “And here they are, so I can’t go.”
“Dorrie and I’ll go. I love the drive.” Jean handed Bab’s letter over to
Kit to read, and gave just a bit of a sigh. Not a real one, only a bit
of a one. Nobody could possibly have sustained any inward melancholy at
Greenacres. There was too much to be done every minute of the day. Kit
often said she felt exactly like “Twinkles,” Billie’s gray squirrel,
whirling around in its cage.
Still, Bab’s letter did bring back strongly the dear old times last
winter at the Art Academy. Perhaps the girl students did take themselves
and their aims too seriously, and had been like that prince in
Tennyson’s “Princess,” who mistook the shadow for the substance. Yet it
had all been wonderfully happy and interesting. Even in the hills of
rest, she missed the companionship of girls her own age with the same
tastes and interests as herself.
Shad harnessed up Princess and drove around to the side porch steps. It
seemed as if he grew taller all the time. When the minister from the
little white church had come to call, he had found Shad wrapping up the
rose bushes in their winter coats of sacking. Shad stood up, six feet of
lanky, overgrown, shy Yankee boy, and shook hands.
“Well, well, Shadrach, son, you’re getting nearer heaven sooner than
most of us, aren’t you?” laughed Mr. Peck. And he was. Grew like a weed,
Shad himself said, but Doris told him pines grew fast too, and she
thought that some day he’d be a Norway spruce which is used for
ship-masts.
Mrs. Robbins came out carrying her own warm fur cloak to wrap Doris in,
and an extra lap robe.
“Better take the lantern along,” advised Shad, in his slow drawling way.
“Looks like snow and it’ll fall dark kind of early.”
He went back to the barn and brought a lantern to tuck in under the
seat. Princess, dancing and side stepping in her anxiety to be off, took
the road with almost a scamper. Her winter coat was fairly long now, and
Doris said she looked like a Shetland pony.
It was seven miles to Nantic, but the girls never tired of the ride. It
was so still and dream-like with the early winter silence on the land.
They passed only Jim Barlow, driving his yoke of silver gray oxen up
from the lumber mill with a load of logs to be turned into railroad
ties, and Sally’s father with a load of grain, waving his whipstock in
salute to them.
Sally herself was at the “ell” door of the big mill house, scraping out
warm cornmeal for her white turkeys. She saluted them too with the
wooden spoon.
“I’m going after evergreen as soon as I get my dishes washed up,” she
called happily. “Goodbye.”
Along the riverside meadows they saw the two little Peckham boys driving
sheep with Shep, their black and white dog, barking madly at the foot of
a tall hickory tree.
“Got a red squirrel up there,” called Benny, proudly.
“Sally says they’re making all their Christmas presents themselves,”
said Doris, thinking of the large family the mill house nested. “They
always do, every year. She says she thinks presents like that are ever
so much more loving than those you just go into a store and buy. She’s
got them all hidden away in her bureau drawer, and the key’s on a ribbon
around her neck.”
“Didn’t we make a lot of things too, pigeon? Birchbark, hand-painted
cards, and pine pillows, and sweet fern boxes. Mother says she never
enjoyed getting ready for Christmas so much as this year. Wait a
minute.” Jean spied some red berries in the thicket overhanging the rail
fence.
She handed Doris the reins, and jumping from the carriage, climbed the
fence to reach the berries. Down the road came the hum of an automobile,
a most unusual sound on Gilead highways. Princess never minded them and
Doris turned out easily for the machine to pass.
The driver was Hardy Philips, the store keeper’s son at Nantic. He swung
off his cap at sight of Jean. She surely made an attractive picture with
the background of white birches against red oak and deep green pine, and
over one shoulder the branches of red berries. The two people on the
back seat looked back at her, slim and dark as some wood sprite, with
her home crocheted red cap and scarf to match, with one end tossed over
her shoulder.
“Somebody coming home for Christmas, I guess,” she said, getting back
into the carriage with her spoils. “Princess, you are the dearest horse
about not minding automobiles. Some stand right up and paw the air when
one goes by. You’ve got the real Robbins’ poise and disposition.”
Doris was snuggling down into the fur robe.
“My nose is cold. I wish I had a mitten for it. It’s funny, Jeanie. I
don’t mind the cold a bit when I walk through the woods to school, but I
do when we’re driving.”
“Snuggle under the rug. We’ll be there pretty soon.”
Jean drove with her chin up, eyes alert, cheeks rosy. There was a snap
in the air that “perked you right up,” as Cousin Roxy would say, and
Princess covered the miles lightly, the click of her hoofs on the frozen
road almost playing a dance _tempo_. When they stopped at the hitching
post above the railroad tracks, Doris didn’t want to wait in the
carriage, so she followed Jean down the long flight of wooden steps that
led to the station platform from the hill road above. And just as they
opened the door of the little stuffy express office, they caught the
voice of Mr. Briggs, the agent, not pleasant and sociable as when he
spoke to them, but sharp and high pitched.
“Well, you can’t loaf around here, son, I tell you that right now. The
minute I spied you hiding behind that stack of ties down the track, I
knew you’d run away from some place, and I’m going to find out all about
you and let your folks know you’re caught.”
“I ain’t got any folks,” came back a boy’s voice hopefully. “I’m my own
boss and can go where I please.”
“Did you hear that, Miss Robbins?” exclaimed Mr. Briggs, turning around
at the opening of the door. “Just size him up, will you. He says he’s
his own boss, and he ain’t any bigger than a pint of cider. Where did
you come from?”
“Off a freight train.”
Mr. Briggs leaned his hands on his knees and bent down to get his face
on a level with the boy’s.
“Ain’t he slick, though? Can’t get a bit of real information out of him
except that he liked the looks of Nantic and dropped off the slow
freight when she was shunting back and forth up yonder. What’s your
name?”
“Joe. Joe Blake.” He didn’t look at Mr. Briggs, but off at the hills,
wind swept and bare except for their patches of living green pines.
There was a curious expression in his eyes, Jean thought, not
loneliness, but a dumb fatalism. As Cousin Roxy might have put it, it
was as if all the waves and billows of trouble had passed over him, and
he didn’t expect anything better.
“How old are you?”
“’Bout nine or ten.”
“What made you drop off that freight here?”
Joe was silent and seemed embarrassed. Doris caught a gleam of appeal in
his glance and responded instantly.
“Because you liked it best, isn’t that why?” she suggested eagerly.
Joe’s face brightened up at that.
“I liked the looks of the hills, but when I saw all them mills I—I
thought I’d get some work maybe.”
“You’re too little.” Mr. Briggs cut short that hope in its upspringing.
“I’m going to hand you right over to the proper authorities, and you’ll
land up in the State Home for Boys if you haven’t got any folks of your
own.”
Joe met the shrewd, twinkly grey eyes doubtfully. His own filled with
tears reluctantly, big tears that rose slowly and dropped on his worn
short coat. He put his hand up to his shirt collar and held on to it
tightly as if he would have kept back the ache there, and Jean’s heart
could stand it no longer.
“I think he belongs up at Greenacres, please, Mr. Briggs,” she said
quickly. “I know Father and Mother will take him up there if he hasn’t
any place to go, and we’ll look after him. I’m sure of it. He can drive
back with us.”
“But you don’t know where he came from nor anything about him, Miss
Robbins. I tell you he’s just a little tramp. You can see that, or he
wouldn’t be hitching on to freight trains. That ain’t no way to do if
you’re decent God-fearing folks, riding the bumpers and dodging
train-men.”
“Let me take him home with me now, anyway,” pleaded Jean. “We can find
out about him later. It’s Christmas Friday, you know, Mr. Briggs.”
There was no resisting the appeal that underlay her words and Mr. Briggs
capitulated gracefully, albeit he opined the county school was the
proper receptacle for all such human rubbish.
Jean laughed at him happily, as he stood warming himself by the big drum
stove, his feet wide apart, his hands thrust into his blue coat pockets.
“It’s your own doings, Miss Robbins,” he returned dubiously. “I wouldn’t
stand in your way so long as you see fit to take him along. But he’s
just human rubbish. Want to go, Joe?”
And Joe, knight of the bumpers, rose, wiping his eyes with his coat
sleeve, and glared resentfully back at Mr. Briggs. At Jean’s word, he
shouldered the smaller package and carted it up to the waiting carriage
while Mr. Briggs leisurely came behind with the wooden box.
“Guess you’ll have to sit on that box in the back, Joe,” Jean said.
“We’re going down to the store, and then home. Sit tight.” She gathered
up the reins. “Thank you ever and ever so much, Mr. Briggs.”
It was queer, Mr. Briggs said afterwards, but nobody could be expected
to resist the smile of a Robbins. He swung off his cap in salute,
watching the carriage spin down the hill, over the long mill bridge and
into the village with the figure of Joe perched behind on the Christmas
box.