The Boss of Little Arcady Part 39

"Good name for a tooth powder, or a patent necktie, or an egg-beater.

But a butcher-shop!--why, it's a _h.e.l.l_ of a name for a butcher-shop!"

The wanderer expressed perfect sympathy with this view of the shop legend, and remarked, "By the way, whose big house is that with the columns in front, up where the Prouse and old Blake houses used to be?"

The face of Mr. Keyts became pleasanter.

"Oh, that?--that's Cal Blake's--Major Blake's, you know. He married a girl that come in here from the South with her mother. I guess that was after you got out of here. They tore down the two houses and built that big one. They say it's like them Southern houses, but I don't know. It seems awful plain up the front of it. Cal's all right, though. I guess mebbe he built the house kind of bare that way to please his wife and his mother-in-law. I'll bet if he'd had his own way, there'd be some brackets and fret work on the front to liven it up some. But I'd a done just like him in his place, I would, by Gee! So would you if you seen his wife. _Say!_ but never mind; you wait right here. She'll drive up to git Cal from his office at four-thirty--it's right across there over the bank where that young fellow is settin' in the window--that's young Cal Denney, studyin' law with Blake. You just wait and see--she'll drive up in about six minutes."

The wanderer waited, out of pure cordiality to Mr. Keyts. The prospect was not exciting, but the simple faith of the villagers that outsiders must share their interest in local concerns has always seemed too touching a thing to wreck.

Within the six minutes mentioned by Mr. Keyts the diurnal happening to which he attached such importance was observed. A woman (the younger of the two seen in the phaeton) drove up for Major Calvin Blake; a youngish rather than a young woman, slight, with an effect of stateliness, and not unattractive. Her husband, a tall and pleasant enough looking man, came down the stairs, and when he saw the woman his face lighted swiftly--and rather wonderfully, when one considers that she was not unexpected. They drove away.

The wanderer was not disposed to minimize the incident, however far he might fall short of Westley Keyts's appreciation. But he had been long absent from the Little Country, and the people of to-day were strange and unimportant. He preferred to revive, as best he might, the days of his own simple faith in the town's sufficiency; days when the world beyond the Little Country was but a place from which to order merchandise, or into which, at the most, adventurous Arcadians dared brief journeys for profit or a doubtful pleasure; the days of a boy's Little Arcady, that existed no more save as a wraith in remembering minds.