A Busy Year at the Old Squire's Part 14

But there had.

Toward the middle of July a letter of complaint came--the first we had ever received. "This barrel of water from your spring is not keeping good," were the exact words of it. I remember them well, for we read them over and over again. Addison replied at once, and sent another barrel in its place.

Before another week had pa.s.sed a second complaint came. "This last barrel of water from your spring is turning 'ropy,'" it said. Another customer sent his barrel back when half full, with a letter saying, "It isn't fit to drink. The barrel is slimy inside."

Addison examined the barrel carefully, and found that there was, indeed, an appreciable film of vegetable growth on the staves inside. The taste of the water also was quite different.

Within a fortnight four more barrels and kegs were returned to us, in at least two cases accompanied by sharp words of condemnation. "No better than pond water," one customer wrote.

We carefully examined the inside of all these barrels and kegs as soon as they came back. Besides invisible impurities in the water, there was in every one more or less visible dirt, even bits of gra.s.s and slivers of wood.

There was only one conclusion to reach: Jim Doane had not been careful in filling the kegs and had not properly cleansed and scalded them. As nearly as we could discover from bits of information that came out subsequently, there were days and days when he was too "hazy" to know whether he had cleansed the barrels or not. He had filled them and sent them off in foul condition.

Addison wrote more than fifty letters to customers, defending the purity of Rose-Quartz Spring water, relating the facts of this recent "accident" and asking for a continued trial of it. I suppose that people at a distance thought that if there had been carelessness once there might be again. Very likely, too, they suspected that the water had never been so pure as we had declared it to be. Owners of other springs who had put water on the market improved the opportunity to circulate reports that Rose-Quartz water would not "keep." We got possession of three circulars in which that damaging statement had been sent broadcast.

There is probably no commodity in the world that depends so much on a reputation for purity as spring water. By September the orders for water had fallen off to a most disheartening extent. Scarcely three hundred gallons were called for.

In the hope that this was merely a temporary set-back, and knowing that there was no fault in the water itself, the old Squire spent a thousand dollars in advertis.e.m.e.nts to stem the tide of adverse criticism. So far as we could discover, the effort produced little or no effect on sales.

The opinion had gone abroad that the water would not keep pure for any great length of time. By the following spring sales had dwindled to such an extent that it was hardly worth while to continue the business.

Considered as a commercial a.s.set, the Rose-Quartz Spring was dead.

Regretfully we gave up the enterprise and let the spring fall into disuse. It was then, I remember, that the old Squire said, "It takes us one lifetime to learn how to do things."

CHAPTER XIII

FOX PILLS

ABOUT this time an affair which had long been worrying Addison and myself came to a final settlement.

Up in the great woods, three or four miles from the old Squire's farm, there was a clearing of thirty or forty acres in which stood an old house and barn, long unoccupied. A lonelier place can hardly be imagined. Sombre spruce and fir woods inclosed the clearing on all sides; and over the tree-tops on the east side loomed the three rugged dark peaks of the Stoss Pond mountains.

Thirty years before, Lumen Bartlett, a young man about twenty years old, had cleared the land with his own labor, built the house and barn, and a little later gone to live there with his wife, Althea, who was younger even than he.

Life in so remote a place must have been somewhat solitary; but they were very happy, it is said, for a year and a half. Then one morning they fell to quarreling bitterly over so trifling a thing as a cedar broom. In the anger of the moment Althea made a bundle of her clothing and without a word of farewell set off on foot to go home to her parents, who lived ten miles away.

Lumen, equally stubborn, took his axe and went out to his work of clearing land for a new field. No one saw him alive afterwards; but two weeks later some hunters found his body in the woods. Apparently the tops of several of the trees he had been trying to cut down had lodged together, and to bring them down he had cut another large tree on which they hung. This last tree must have started to fall suddenly. Lumen ran the wrong way and was caught under the top of one of the lodged trees as it came crashing down. The marks showed that he had tried, probably for hours, to cut off with his pocket knife one large branch that lay across his body. They found the knife with the blade broken. He had also tried to free himself by digging with his bare fingers into the hard, rocky earth. If Lumen had been to blame for the quarrel, he paid a fearful penalty.

Afterwards, however, Althea declared that she had been to blame; and if that were true, she also paid a sad penalty. During the few remaining years of her life she was never in her right mind. She used to imagine that she heard Lumen calling to her for help, and several times, eluding her parents, she made her way back to the clearing. Every time when they found her she was wandering about the place, stopping now and then as if to listen, then flitting on again, saying in a sad singsong, "I'm coming, Lumen! Oh, I'll come back!"

Naturally, persons of a superst.i.tious nature began to imagine that they, too, heard strange cries at the deserted farm, for no one ever lived there subsequently. Very likely they did hear cries--the cries of wild animals; that old clearing in the woods was a great place for bears, foxes, racc.o.o.ns and "lucivees."

A year or two before we young folks went home to live on the old farm the town sold this deserted lot at auction for unpaid taxes. Some years before, vagrant woodsmen had accidentally burned the old house; but the barn, a weathered, gray structure, was still intact. Since the land adjoined other timber lots that the old Squire owned, he bid it off and let it lie unoccupied except as a pasture where sheep, or young stock that needed little care, could be put away for the summer. The soil was good, and the gra.s.s was excellent in quality.

One year, in May, after we had repaired the brush fence, we turned into it our three Morgan colts along with two Percherons from a stock farm near the village, a Morgan three-year-old belonging to our neighbors, the Edwardses, three colts owned by other neighbors, and a beautiful sorrel three-year-old mare, the pet of young Mrs. Kennard, wife of the princ.i.p.al at the village academy. Her father, who had recently died, had given her the colt.

All four Morgans were dark-chestnut colts, lithe but strong and clear-eyed. And what chests and loins they had for their size! They were not so showy as the larger, dappled Percherons, perhaps, but they were better all-round horses. Lib, Brown and Joe were the names of our Morgans; Chet was the name that the Edwards young folks gave theirs. Yet none of them was so pretty as Mrs. Kennard's Sylph. She was, indeed, a blonde fairy of a mare, as graceful as a deer.

On the afternoon that we took Sylph up to the clearing, Mrs. Kennard walked all the way with us, because she wished to see for herself what the place was like. When she saw what a remote, wild region it was, she was loath to leave her pet there, and Mr. Kennard had some ado to rea.s.sure her. At last, after giving the colt many farewell pats and caresses, she came away with us. On the way home she said over and over to Addison and me, "Be sure to go up often and see that Sylph is all right." And, laughing a little, we promised that we would, and that we would also give the colt sugar lumps as well as her weekly salt.

"Salting" the sheep and young cattle that were out at pasture for the season was one of our weekly duties. When we were very busy we sometimes put it off until Sunday morning. Sometimes it slipped our minds altogether for a few days, or even for a week; but Mrs. Kennard's solicitude for her pet had touched our hearts, and we resolved that we should always be prompt in performing the task.

The colts had been turned out on Tuesday; and the following Sunday morning after breakfast Addison and I, with the girls accompanying us, set off with the salt and the sugar lumps. It was a long walk for the girls, but an inspiring one on such a bright morning. The songs of birds and the chatter of squirrels filled the woodland. Fresh green heads of bosky ferns and wake-robin were pushing up through the old mats of last year's foliage.

"How jealous the rest of them will be of Sylph!" said Ellen, who had the sugar lumps. "I believe I shall give each of them a lump, so that they won't be spiteful and kick her."

As we neared the bars in the brush fence we saw several of the colts at the upper side of the clearing beyond the old barn. At the first call from us, up went their pretty heads; there was a general whinny, and then they came racing to the bars to greet us. Perhaps they had been a little homesick so far from stables and barns.

"One--two--three--four--why, they are not all here!" Theodora said.

"Here are only seven. Lib isn't here, or Mrs. Kennard's Sylph."

"Oh, I guess they're not far off," Addison said, and began calling, "Co'

jack, co' jack!" He wanted them all there before he dropped the salt in little piles on the gra.s.sy greensward.

But the absent ones did not come. Ellen ventured the opinion that they might have jumped the fence and wandered off.

"Oh, they wouldn't separate up here in the woods," Addison said. "Colts keep together when off in a back pasture like this."

But when he went on calling and they still did not come, we began really to fear that they had got out and strayed.

"Let's go round the fence," Addison said at last, "and see if we find a gap, or hoofprints on the outside, where they have jumped over."

He and Theodora went one way, Ellen and I the other. We met halfway round the clearing without having discovered either gaps in the fence or tracks outside. Remembering that horses, when rolling, sometimes get cast in hollows between knolls, we searched the entire clearing, and even looked into the old barn, the door of which stood slightly ajar; but we found no trace of the missing animals and began to believe that they really had jumped out.

We gave the seven colts their salt and were about to start home to report to the old Squire when Ellen remarked that we had not actually looked among the alders down by the brook, where the colts went for water.

"Oh, but those colts would not stay down there by themselves all this time with us calling them!" Addison exclaimed.

"But let's just take a look, to be certain," Ellen replied, and she and I ran down there.

We had no more than pushed our way through the alder clumps when two crows rose silently and went flapping away; and then I caught sight of something that made me stop short: the body of one of the Morgan colts--our Lib--lying close to the brook!

"Oh!" gasped Ellen. "It's dead!"

Pushing on through the alders, we saw one of the Percherons near the Morgan. The sight affected Ellen so much that she turned back; but I went on and a little farther up the brook found the sorrel lying stark and stiff.

A moment later Ellen returned, with Addison and Theodora. Both girls were moved to tears as they gazed at poor Sylph; they felt even worse about her than about our own Morgan.

"Oh, what will Mrs. Kennard say?" Ellen cried. "How dreadfully she will feel!"

Addison closely examined the bodies of the colts. "I cannot understand what did it!" he exclaimed. "No marks. No blood. It wasn't wild animals.

It couldn't have been lightning, for there hasn't been a thundershower this season. Must be something they've eaten."

We looked all along the brook, but could see no Indian poke, the fresh growths of which will poison stock. Nor had we ever seen ground hemlock or poisonous ivy there. The clearing was nearly all good, gra.s.sy upland such as farmers consider a safe pasturage. Truly the shadow of tragedy seemed to hover there.

We bore our sorrowful tidings home, and the old Squire was as much astonished and mystified as every one else. None of us had the heart either to carry the sad news or even to send word of it to Mrs. Kennard; but we notified the owner of the Percherons at once. He came to look into the matter the next morning.