The Ragged Lady | Page 6

it all out
himself."
"Is he a ca'penta?" asked Mrs. Lander.
"No'm; but he's--I don't know how to express it--he likes to do every
kind of thing."
"But he's got some business, ha'n't he?" A shadow of severity crept
over Mrs. Lander's tone, in provisional reprehension of possible
shiftlessness.
"Yes'm. He was a machinist at the Mills; that's what the doctas thought
didn't agree with him. He bought a piece of land he'e, so as to be in the
pine woods, and then we built this house."
"When did you say you came?"
"Two yea's ago, this summa."
"Well! What did you do befoa you built this house?"
"We camped the first summa."
"You camped? In a tent?"
"Well, it was pahtly a tent, and pahtly bank."
"I should have thought you would have died."
The girl laughed. "Oh, no, we all kept fast-rate. We slept in the tents we
had two--and we cooked in the shanty." She smiled at the notion in
adding, "At fast the neighbas thought we we'e Gipsies; and the summa
folks thought we were Indians, and wanted to get baskets of us."

Mrs. Lander did not know what to think, and she asked, "But didn't it
almost perish you, stayin' through the winter in an unfinished house?"
"Well, it was pretty cold. But it was so dry, the aia was, and the woods
kept the wind off nicely."
The same shrill voice in the region of the stovepipe which had sent the
girl to the Landers now called her from them. "Clem! Come here a
minute!"
The girl said to Mrs. Lander, politely, "You'll have to excuse me,
now'm. I've got to go to motha."
"So do!" said Mrs. Lander, and she was so taken by the girl's art and
grace in getting to her feet and fading into the background of the
hallway without visibly casting any detail of her raiment, that she was
not aware of her husband's starting up the horse in time to stop him.
They were fairly under way again, when she lamented, "What you doin',
Albe't? Whe'e you goin'?"
"I'm goin' to South Middlemount. Didn't you want to?"
"Well, of all the men! Drivin' right off without waitin' to say thankye to
the child, or take leave, or anything!"
"Seemed to me as if SHE took leave."
"But she was comin' back! And I wanted to ask--"
"I guess you asked enough for one while. Ask the rest to-morra."
Mrs. Lander was a woman who could often be thrown aside from an
immediate purpose, by the suggestion of some remoter end, which had
already, perhaps, intimated itself to her. She said, "That's true," but by
the time her husband had driven down one of the roads beyond the
woods into open country, she was a quiver of intolerable curiosity.
"Well, all I've got to say is that I sha'n't rest till I know all about 'em."
"Find out when we get back to the hotel, I guess," said her husband.
"No, I can't wait till I get back to the hotel. I want to know now. I want
you should stop at the very fust house we come to. Dea'! The'e don't
seem to be any houses, any moa." She peered out around the side of the
carry-all and scrutinized the landscape. "Hold on! No, yes it is, too!
Whoa! Whoa! The'e's a man in that hay-field, now!"
She laid hold of the reins and pulled the horse to a stand. Mr. Lander
looked round over his shoulder at her. "Hadn't you betta wait till you
get within half a mile of the man?"
"Well, I want you should stop when you do git to him. Will you? I want

to speak to him, and ask him all about those folks."
"I didn't suppose you'd let me have much of a chance," said her
husband. When he came within easy hail of the man in the hay-field, he
pulled up beside the meadow-wall, where the horse began to nibble the
blackberry vines that overran it.
Mrs. Lander beckoned and called to the man, who had stopped pitching
hay and now stood leaning on the handle of his fork. At the signs and
sounds she made, he came actively forward to the road, bringing his
fork with him. When he arrived within easy conversational distance, he
planted the tines in the ground and braced himself at an opposite incline
from the long smooth handle, and waited for Mrs. Lander to begin.
"Will you please tell us who those folks ah', livin' back there in the
edge of the woods, in that new unfinished house?"
The man released his fork with one hand to stoop for a head of timothy
that had escaped the scythe, and he put the stem of it between