The Girls of Hillcrest Farm: or, The Secret of the Rocks

“She useter shovel live coals inter the oven an’ build a reg’lar fire on the oven bottom. Arter it was het right up she’d sweep aout the brands and ashes with long-handled brushes, an’ then set the bread, an’ pies, an’ Injun puddin’ an’ the like–sometimes the beanpot, too–on the oven floor. Ye see, them bricks will hold heat a long time.

“But lemme tell ye,” continued Lucas, shaking his head, “it took the know how, I reckon, ter bake stuff right by sech means. My maw never could do it. She says either her bread would be all crust, or ’twas raw in the middle.

“But now,” pursued Lucas, “these ’ere what they call ‘Dutch ovens’ ain’t so bad. I kin remember before dad bought maw the stove, she used a Dutch oven–an’ she’s got it yet. I know she’d lend it to you gals.”

“That’s real nice of you, Lucas,” said ’Phemie, briskly. “But what is it?”

“Why, it’s a big sheet-iron pan with a tight cover. You set it right in the coals and shovel coals on top of it and all around it. Things bake purty good in a Dutch oven–ya-as’m! Beans never taste so good to my notion as they useter when maw baked ’em in the old Dutch oven. An’ dad says they was ’nough sight better when he was a boy an’ grandmaw baked ’em in an oven like that one there,” and Lucas nodded at the closet in the chimney that ’Phemie had opened to peer into.

“Ye see, it’s the slow, steady heat that don’t die down till mornin’–that’s what bakes beans nice,” declared this Yankee epicure.

Lucas had a “knack” with the axe, and he cut and piled enough wood to last the girls at least a fortnight. Lyddy felt as though she could not afford to hire him more than that one day at present; but he was going to town next day and he promised to bring back a pump leather and some few other necessities that the girls needed.

Before he went home Lucas got ’Phemie off to one side and managed to stammer:

“If you gals air scart–or the like o’ that–you jest say so an’ I’ll keep watch around here for a night or two, an’ see if I kin ketch the fellers you heard talkin’ last night.”

“Oh, Lucas! I wouldn’t trouble you for the world,” returned ’Phemie.

Lucas’s countenance was a wonderful lobster-like red, and he was so bashful that his eyes fairly watered.

“’Twouldn’t be no trouble, Miss ’Phemie,” he told her. “’Twould be a pleasure–it re’lly would.”

“But what would folks say?” gasped ’Phemie, her eyes dancing. “What would your sister and mother say?”

“They needn’t know a thing about it,” declared Lucas, eagerly. “I–I could slip out o’ my winder an’ down the shed ruff, an’ sneak up here with my shot-gun.”

“Why, Mr. Pritchett! I believe you are in the habit of doing such things. I am afraid you get out that way often, and the family knows nothing about it.”

“Naw, I don’t–only circus days, an’ w’en the Wild West show comes, an’–an’ Fourth of July mornin’s. But don’t you tell; will yer?”

“Cross my heart!” promised ’Phemie, giggling. “But suppose you should shoot somebody around here with that gun?”

“Sarve ’em aout jest right!” declared the young farmer, boldly. “B’sides, I’d only load it with rock-salt. ’Twould pepper ’em some.”

“Salt and pepper ’em, Lucas,” giggled the girl. “And season ’em right, I expect, for breaking our rest.”

“I’ll do it!” declared Lucas.

“Don’t you dare!” threatened ’Phemie.

“Why–why – ”

Lucas was swamped in his own confusion again.

“Not unless I tell you you may,” said ’Phemie, smiling on him dazzlingly once more.

“Wa-al.”

“Wait and see if we are disturbed again,” spoke the girl, more kindly. “I really am obliged to you, Lucas; but I couldn’t hear of your watching under our windows these cold nights–and, of course, it wouldn’t be proper for us to let you stay in the house.”

“Wa-al,” agreed the disappointed youth. “But if ye need me, ye’ll let me know?”

“Sure pop!” she told him, and was only sorry when he was gone that she could not tell Lyddy all about it, and give her older sister “an imitation” of Lucas as a cavalier.

The girls wrote the letter to Aunt Jane that evening and the next morning they watched for the rural mail-carrier, who came along the highroad, past the end of their lane, before noon.

He brought a letter from Aunt Jane for Lyddy, and he was ready to stop and gossip with the girls who had so recently come to Hillcrest Farm.

“I’m glad to see some life about the old doctor’s house again,” declared the man. “I can remember Dr. Polly–everybody called him that–right well. He was a queer customer some ways–brusk, and sort of rough. But he was a good deal like a chestnut burr. His outside was his worst side. He didn’t have no soothing bedside mannerisms; but if a feller was real sick, it was a new lease of life to jest have the old doctor come inter the room!”

It made the girls happy and proud to have people speak this way of their grandfather.

“He warn’t a man who didn’t make enemies,” ruminated the mail-carrier. “He was too strong a man not to be well hated in certain quarters. He warn’t pussy-footed. What he meant he said out square and straight, an’ when he put his foot down he put it down emphatic. Yes, sir!

“But he had a sight more friends than enemies when he died. And lots o’ folks that thought they hated Dr. Polly could look back–when he was dead and gone–an’ see how he’d done ’em many a kind turn unbeknownst to ’em at the time.

“Why,” rambled on the mail-carrier, “I was talkin’ to Jud Spink in Birch’s store only las’ night. Jud ain’t been ’round here for some time before, an’ suthin’ started talk about the old doctor. Jud, of course, sailed inter him.”

“Why?” asked ’Phemie, trying to appear interested, while Lyddy swiftly read her letter.

“Oh, I reckon you two gals–bein’ only granddaughters of the old doctor–never heard much about Jud Spink–Lemuel Judson Spink he calls hisself now, an’ puts a ‘professor’ in front of his name, too.”

“Is he a professor?” asked ’Phemie.

“I dunno. He’s been a good many things. Injun doctor–actor–medicine show fakir–patent medicine pedlar; and now he owns ‘Diamond Grits’–the greatest food on airth, he claims, an’ I tell him it’s great all right, for man an’ beast!” and the mail-carrier went off into a spasm of laughter over his own joke.

“Diamond Grits is a breakfast food,” chuckled ’Phemie. “Do you s’pose horses would eat it, too?”

“Mine will,” said the mail-carrier. “Jud sent me a case of Grits and I fed most of it to this critter. Sassige an’ buckwheats satisfy me better of a mornin’, an’ I dunno as this hoss has re’lly been in as good shape since I give it the Grits.

“Wa-al, Jud’s as rich as cream naow; but the old doctor took him as a boy out o’ the poorhouse.”

“And yet you say he talks against grandfather?” asked ’Phemie, rather curious.

“Ain’t it just like folks?” pursued the man, shaking his head. “Yes, sir! Dr. Polly took Jud Spink inter his fam’bly and might have made suthin’ of him; but Jud ran away with a medicine show – ”

“He’s made a rich man of himself, you say?” questioned ’Phemie.

“Ya-as,” admitted the mail-carrier. “But everybody respected the old doctor, an’ nobody respects Jud Spink–they respect his money.

“Las’ night Jud says the old doctor was as close as a clam with the lockjaw, an’ never let go of a dollar till the eagle screamed for marcy. But he done a sight more good than folks knowed about–till after he died. An’ d’ye know the most important clause in his will, Miss?”

“In grandfather’s will?”

“Ya-as. It was the instructions to his execketer to give a receipted bill to ev’ry patient of his that applied for the same, free gratis for nothin’! An’ lemme tell ye,” added the mail-carrier, preparing to drive on again, “there was some folks on both sides o’ this ridge that was down on the old doctor’s books for sums they could never hope to pay.”

As he started off ’Phemie called after him, brightly:

“I’m obliged to you for telling me what you have about grandfather.”

“Beginning to get interested in neighborhood gossip already; are you?” said her sister, when ’Phemie joined her, and they walked back up the lane.

“I believe I am getting interested in everything folks can tell us about grandfather. In his way, Lyddy, Dr. Apollo Phelps must have been a great man.”

“I–I always had an idea he was a little queer,” confessed Lyddy. “His name you know, and all – ”

“But people really loved him. He helped them. He gave unostentatiously, and he must have been a very, very good doctor. I–I wonder what Aunt Jane meant by saying that grandfather used to say there were curative waters on the farm?”

“I haven’t the least idea,” replied Lyddy. “Sulphur spring, perhaps–nasty stuff to drink. But listen here to what Aunt Jane says about father.”

“He’s better?” cried ’Phemie.

The older girl’s tone was troubled. “I can’t make out that he is,” she said, slowly, and then she began to read Aunt Jane’s disjointed account of her visit the day before to the hospital:

“I never do like to go to such places, girls; they smell so of ether, and arniky, and collodion, and a whole lot of other unpleasant things. I wonder what makes drugs so nasty to smell of?

“But, anyhow, I seen your father. John Bray is a sick man. Maybe he don’t know it himself, but the doctors know it, and you girls ought to know it. I’m plain-spoken, and there isn’t any use in making you believe he is on the road to recovery when he’s going just the other way.

“This head-doctor here, says he has no chance at all in the city. Of course, for me, if I was sick with anything, from housemaid’s knee to spinal mengetus, going into the country would be my complete finish! But the doctors say it’s different with your father.

“And just as soon as John Bray can ride in a railroad car, I am going to see that he joins you at Hillcrest.”

“Bully!” cried ’Phemie, the optimistic. “Oh, Lyddy! he’s bound to get well up here.” For this chanced to be a very beautiful spring day and the girls were more than ever enamored of the situation.

“I am not so sure,” said Lyddy, slowly.

“Don’t be a grump!” commanded her sister. “He’s just got to get well up here.” But Lyddy wondered afterward if ’Phemie believed what she said herself!

They finished cleaning thoroughly the two rooms they were at present occupying and began on the chambers above. Dust and the hateful spiderwebs certainly had collected in the years the house had been unoccupied; but the Bray girls were not afraid of hard work. Indeed, they enjoyed it.

Toward evening Lucas and his sister appeared, and the former set to work to repair the old pump on the porch, while Sairy sat down to “visit” with the girls of Hillcrest Farm.

“It’s goin’ to be nice havin’ you here, I declare,” said Miss Pritchett, who had arranged two curls on either side of her forehead, which shook in a very kittenish manner when she laughed and bridled.

“I guess, as maw says, I’m too much with old folks. Fust I know they’ll be puttin’ me away in the Home for Indignant Old Maids over there to Adams–though why ‘indignant’ I can’t for the life of me guess, ’nless it’s because they’re indignant over the men’s passin’ of ’em by!” and Miss Pritchett giggled and shook her curls, to ’Phemie’s vast amusement.

Indeed, the younger Bray girl confessed to her sister, after the visitors had gone, that Sairy was more fun than Lucas.

“But I’m afraid she’s far on the way to the Home for Indigent Spinsters, and doesn’t know it,” chuckled ’Phemie. “What a freak she is!”

“That’s what you called Lucas–at first,” admonished Lyddy. “And they’re both real kind. Lucas wouldn’t take a cent for mending the pump, and Sairy came especially to invite us to the Temperance Club meeting, at the schoolhouse Saturday night, and to go to church in their carriage with her and her mother on Sunday.”

“Yes; I suppose they are kind,” admitted ’Phemie. “And they can’t help being funny.”

“Besides,” said the wise Lyddy, “if we do try to take boarders we’ll need Lucas’s help. We’ll have to hire him to go back and forth to town for us, and depend on him for the outside chores. Why! we’d be like two marooned sailors on a desert island, up here on Hillcrest, if it wasn’t for Lucas Pritchett!”

The girls spent a few anxious days waiting for Aunt Jane’s answer. And meantime they discussed the project of taking boarders from all its various angles.

“Of course, we can’t get boarders yet awhile,” sighed ’Phemie. “It’s much too early in the season.”

“Why is it? Aren’t we glad to be here at Hillcrest?” demanded Lyddy.

“But see what sort of a place we lived in,” said her sister.

“And lots of other people live hived up in the cities just as close, only in better houses. There isn’t much difference between apartment-houses and tenement-houses except the front entrance!”

“That may be epigrammatical,” chuckled ’Phemie, “but you couldn’t make many folks admit it.”

“Just the same, there are people who need just this climate we’ve got here at this time of year. It will do them as much good as it will father.”

“You’d make a regular sanitarium of Hillcrest,” cried ’Phemie.

“Well, why not?” retorted Lyddy. “I guess the neighbors wouldn’t object.”

’Phemie giggled. “Advertise to take folks back to old-fashioned times and old-fashioned cooking.”

“Why not?”

“Sleeping on feather beds; cooking in a brick oven like our great-great-grandmothers used to do! Open fireplaces. Great!”

“Plain, wholesome food. They won’t have to eat out of cans. No extras or luxuries. We could afford to take them cheap,” concluded Lyddy, earnestly. “And we’ll get a big garden planted and feed ’em on vegetables through the summer.”

“Oh, Lyddy, it sounds good,” sighed ’Phemie. “But do you suppose Aunt Jane will consent to it?”

They received Aunt Jane’s letter in reply to their own, on Saturday.

“You two girls go ahead and do what you please inside or outside Hillcrest,” she wrote, “only don’t disturb the old doctor’s stuff in the lower rooms of the east ell. As long as you don’t burn the house down I don’t see that you can do any harm. And if you really think you can find folks foolish enough to want to live up there on the ridge, six miles from a lemon, why go ahead and do it. But I tell you frankly, girls, I’d want to be paid for doing it, and paid high!”

Then the kind, if brusk, old lady went on to tell them where to find many things packed away that they would need if they did succeed in getting boarders, including stores of linen, and blankets, and the like, as well as some good china and old silver, buried in one of the great chests in the attic.

However, nothing Aunt Jane could write could quench the girls’ enthusiasm. Already Lyddy and ’Phemie had written an advertisement for the city papers, and five dollars of Lyddy’s fast shrinking capital was to be set aside for putting their desires before the newspaper-reading public.

They could feel then that their new venture was really launched.

CHAPTER XI

AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE

It was scarcely dusk on Saturday when Lucas drove into the side yard at Hillcrest with the ponies hitched to a double-seated buckboard. Entertainments begin early in the rural districts.

The ponies had been clipped and looked less like animated cowhide trunks than they had when the Bray girls had first seen them and their young master in Bridleburg.

“School teacher came along an’ maw made Sairy go with him in his buggy,” exclaimed Lucas, with a broad grin. “If Sairy don’t ketch a feller ’fore long, an’ clamp to him, ’twon’t be maw’s fault.”

Lucas was evidently much impressed by the appearance of Lyddy and ’Phemie when they locked the side door and climbed into the buckboard. Because of their mother’s recent death the girls had dressed very quietly; but their black frocks were now very shabby, it was coming warmer weather, and the only dresses they owned which were fit to wear to an evening function of any kind were those that they had worn “for best” the year previous.

But the two girls from the city had no idea they would create such a sensation as they did when Lucas pulled in the ponies with a flourish and stopped directly before the door of the schoolhouse.

The building was already lighted up and there was quite an assemblage of young men and boys about the two front entrances. On the girls’ porch, too, a number of the feminine members of the Temperance Club were grouped, and with them Sairy Pritchett.

Her own arrival with the schoolmaster had been an effective one and she had waited with the other girls to welcome the newcomers from Hillcrest Farm, and introduce them to her more particular friends.

But the Bray girls looked as though they were from another sphere. Not that their frocks were so fanciful in either design or material; but there was a style about them that made the finery of the other girls look both cheap and tawdry.

“So them stuck-up things air goin’ to live ’round here; be they?” whispered one rosy-cheeked, buxom farmer’s daughter to Sairy Pritchett–and her whisper carried far. “Well, I tell you right now I don’t like their looks. See that Joe Badger; will you? He’s got to help ’em down out o’ Lucas’s waggin’; has he? Well, I declare!”

“An’ Hen Jackson, too!” cried another girl, shrilly. “They’d let airy one of us girls fall out on our heads.”

“Huh!” said Sairy, airily, “if you can’t keep Joe an’ Hen from shinin’ around every new gal that comes to the club, I guess you ain’t caught ’em very fast.”

“He, he!” giggled another. “Sairy thinks she’s hooked the school teacher all right, and that he won’t get away from her.”

“Cat!” snapped Miss Pritchett, descending the steps in her most stately manner to meet her new friends.

“Cat yourself!” returned the other. “I guess you’ll show your claws, Miss, if you have a chance.”

Perhaps Sairy did not hear all of this; and surely the Bray girls did not. Sairy Pritchett was rather proud of counting these city girls as her particular friends. She welcomed Lydia and Euphemia warmly.

“I hope Lucas didn’t try to tip you into the brook again, Miss Bray,” Sairy giggled to ’Phemie. “Oh, yes! Miss Lydia Bray, Mr. Badger; Mr. Jackson, Miss Bray. And this is Miss Euphemia, Mr. Badger–and Mr. Jackson.

“Now, that’ll do very well, Joe–and Hen. You go ’tend to your own girls; we can git on without you.”

Sairy deliberately led the newcomers into the schoolhouse by the boys’ entrance, thus ignoring the girls who had roused her ire. She introduced Lyddy and ’Phemie right and left to such of the young fellows as were not too bashful.

Sairy suddenly arrived at the conclusion that to pilot the sisters from Hillcrest about would be “good business.” The newcomers attracted the better class of young bachelors at the club meeting and Sairy–heretofore something of a “wall flower” on such occasions–found herself the very centre of the group.

Lyddy and ’Phemie were naturally a little disturbed by the prominent position in which they were placed by Sairy’s manœuvring; but, of course, the sisters had been used to going into society, and Lyddy’s experience at college and her natural sedateness of character enabled her to appear to advantage. As for the younger girl, she was so much amused by Sairy, and the others, that she quite forgot to feel confused.

Indeed, she found that just by looking at most of these young men, and smiling, she could throw them into spasms of self-consciousness. They were almost as bad as Lucas Pritchett, and Lucas was getting to be such a good friend now that ’Phemie couldn’t really enjoy making him feel unhappy.

She was, indeed, particularly nice to him when young Pritchett struggled to her side after the girls were settled in adjoining seats, half-way up the aisle on the “girls’ side” of the schoolroom.

These young girls and fellows had–most of them–attended the district school, or were now attending it; therefore, they were used to being divided according to the sexes, and those boys who actually had not accompanied their girlfriends to the club meeting, sat by themselves on the boys’ side, while the girls grouped together on the other side of the house.

There were a few young married couples present, and these matrons made their husbands sit beside them during the exercises; but for a young man and young girl to sit together was almost a formal announcement in that community that they “had intentions!”

All this was quite unsuspected by Lyddy and ’Phemie Bray, and the latter had no idea of the joy that possessed Lucas Pritchett’s soul when she allowed him to take the seat beside her.

Her sister sat at her other hand, and Sairy was beyond Lyddy. No other young fellow could get within touch of the city girls, therefore, although there was doubtless many a swain who would have been glad to do so.

This club, the fundamental idea of which was “temperance,” had gradually developed into something much broader. While it still demanded a pledge from its members regarding abstinence from alcoholic beverages, including the bane of the countryside–hard cider–its semimonthly meetings were mainly of a literary and musical nature.

The reigning school teacher for the current term was supposed to take the lead in governing the club and pushing forward the local talent. Mr. Somers was the name of the young man with the bald brow and the eyeglasses, who was presiding over the welfare of Pounder’s District School. The Bray girls thought he seemed to be an intelligent and well-mannered young man, if a trifle self-conscious.

And he evidently had an element that was difficult to handle.

Soon after the meeting was called to order it became plain that a group of boys down in the corner by the desk were much more noisy than was necessary.

The huge stove, by which the room was overheated, was down there, its smoke-pipe crossing, in a L-shaped figure, the entire room to the chimney at one side, and it did seem as though none of those boys could move without kicking their boots against this stove.

These uncouth noises interfered with the opening address of the teacher and punctuated the “roll call” by the secretary, who was a small, almost dwarf-like young man, out of whose mouth rolled the names of the members in a voice that fairly shook the casements. Such a thunderous tone from so puny a source was in itself amazing, and convulsed ’Phemie.

“Ain’t he got a great voice?” asked Lucas, in a whisper. “He sings bass in the church choir and sometimes, begum! ye can’t hear nawthin’ but Elbert Hooker holler.”

“Is that his name?” gasped ’Phemie.

“Yep. Elbert Hooker. ‘Yell-bert’ the boys call him. He kin sure holler like a bull!”

And at that very moment, as the bombastic Elbert was subsiding and the window panes ceased from rattling with the reverberations of his voice, one of the boys in the corner fell more heavily than before against the stove–or, it might have been Elbert Hooker’s tones had shaken loose the joints of stovepipe that crossed the schoolroom; however, there was a yell from those down front, the girls scrambled out of the way, the smoke began to spurt from between the joints, and it was seen that only the wires fastened to the ceiling kept the soot-laden lengths of pipe from falling to the floor.

CHAPTER XII

THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER

The soot began sifting down in little clouds; but the sections of pipe had come apart so gently that no great damage was done immediately. The girls sitting under the pipe, however, were thrown into a panic, and fairly climbed over the desks and seats to get out of the way.

Besides, considerable smoke began to issue from the stove. One of the young scamps to whose mischievousness was due this incident, had thrown into the fire, just as the pipe broke loose, some woolen garment, or the like, and it now began to smoulder with a stench and an amount of smoke that frightened some of the audience.

“Don’t you be skeert none,” exclaimed Lucas, to ’Phemie and her sister, and jumping up from his seat himself. “’Taint nothin’ but them Buckley boys and Ike Hewlett. Little scamps – ”

“But we don’t want to get soot all over us, Lucas!” cried his sister.

“Or be choked by smoke,” coughed ’Phemie.

There was indeed a great hullabaloo for a time; but the windows were opened, the teacher rescued the burning woolen rag from the fire with the tongs and threw it out of the window, and several of the bigger fellows swooped down upon the malicious youngsters and bundled them out of the schoolhouse in a hurry–and in no gentle manner–while others, including Lucas, stripped off their coats and set to work to repair the stovepipe.