Rose of Old Harpeth | Page 2

miles across the meadows there runs a train that ought to put me into New York in a little over forty-eight hours. Won't you, won't you let me go--back to my frantic and imploring employers?"
"Why no, I can't," answered Rose Mary as she pressed a yellow cake of butter on to a blue plate and deftly curled it up with her paddle into a huge yellow sunflower. "Uncle Tucker captured you roaming loose out in his fields and he trusts you to me while he is at work and I must keep you safe. He's fond of you and so are the Aunties and Stonewall Jackson and Shoofly and Sniffer and--"
"And anybody else?" demanded Everett, preparing to dispose of the last bite.
"Oh, everybody most along Providence Road," answered Rose Mary enthusiastically, though not raising her eyes from the manipulation of the third butter flower. "Can't you go out and dig up some more rocks and things? I feel sure you haven't got a sample of all of them. And there may be gold and silver and precious jewels just one inch deeper than you have dug. Are you certain you can't squeeze up some oil somewhere in the meadow? You told a whole lot of reasons to Uncle Tucker why you knew you would find some, and now you'll have to stay to prove yourself."
"No," answered Mark Everett quietly, and, as he spoke, he raised his eyes and looked at Rose Mary keenly; "no, there is no oil that I can discover, though the formation, as I explained to your uncle, is just as I expected to find it. I've spent three weeks going over every inch of the Valley and I can't find a trace of grease. I'm sorry."
"Well, I don't know that I care, except for your sake," answered Rose Mary unconcernedly, with her eyes still on her task. "We don't any of us like the smell of coal-oil, and it gives Aunt Viney asthma. It would be awfully disagreeable to have wells of it right here on the place. They'd be so ugly and smelly."
"But oil-wells mean--mean a great deal of wealth," ventured Everett.
"I know, but just think of the money Uncle Tucker gets for this butter I make from the cows that graze on the meadows. Wouldn't it be awful if they should happen to drink some of the coal-oil and make the butter we send down to the city taste wrong and spoil the Sweetbriar reputation? I like money though, most awfully, and I want some right now. I want to--"
"Mary of the Rose, stop right there!" said Everett as he came over from his post by the door and again seated himself on the corner of the table. "I will not listen to you give vent to the national craving. I will hold on to the illusion of having found one unmercenary human being, even if she had to be buried in the depths of Harpeth Valley to keep her so." There was banter in Everett's voice and a smile on his lips, but a bitterness lay in the depths of his keen dark eyes and an ugly trace of cynicism filtered through the tones of his voice.
"And wasn't it funny for me to count the little well-chickens before they were even hatched?" laughed Rose Mary. "That's the way of it, get together even a little flock of dollars in prospect and they go right to work hatching out a brood of wants and needs; but it's not wrong of me to want those false teeth so bad, because it's such a trial to have your mouth all sink in and not be able to talk plain and--"
"Help, woman! What are you talking about? I never saw such teeth as you have in all my life. One flash of them would put a beauty show out of business and--"
"Oh, no, not for myself!" Rose Mary hastened to exclaim, and she turned the whole artillery of the pearl treasures upon him in mirth at his mistake. "It's Aunt Viney I want them for. She only has five left. She says she didn't mind so long as she had any two that hit, but the hitters to all five are gone now and she is so distressed. I'm saving up to take her down to the city to get a brand new set. I have eleven dollars now and two little bull calves to sell, though it breaks my heart to let them go, even if they are of the wrong persuasion. I always love them better than I do the little heifers, because I have to give them up. I don't like to have things I love go away. You see you mustn't think of going to New York until the spring is all over