Chapter V: In Wolcott’s Woods

“For the land sakes!” exclaimed Grandma Brown, knitting faster and faster, as was her wont when disturbed in mind. “Why don’t that Parker girl’s mother let her dresses down, I want to know? ’Pears to me her legs get longer an’ longer every day! I see her tearin’ down the hill a spell ago, with that outlandish dog o’ hers in full chase, and all I could think of was a hen-turkey with its wings spread out, tryin’ to get away from a fox.”

“Why, mother! Cynthia is only a little girl,” observed Doris’ mother, in quiet amusement.

“Same age as our Doris, ain’t she? When I was young, gals was women at fourteen, an’ expected to quit playin’ with the boys, wear their dresses to their shoe-tops an’ be pretty-behaved.”

“I wish mother’d let me wear _my_ dresses to the tops of my shoes,” put in Doris, demurely. “I’m three months older than Cynthia, anyway.” She had opened the sitting-room door just in time to hear the last speech, but was careful not to commit herself to the rest of her grandma’s program.

“You all going out to your uncle’s place again to-day, Doris?” asked her mother, indulgently. “I see Cynthia’s here, but where are the others?”

“Oh, Stella had her Saturday work to do, and couldn’t get ’round before two o’clock, she said. It’s most that, now,” and she turned again to the window. No one was in sight except Cynthia and Scotty, who were joyously running races up and down the yard.

Here Mother Brown disappeared into the pantry, possibly to put up a bag of her fat, brown cookies, and Doris hunted in the hall closet for her white sweater, while Grandma commented shrewdly:

“That gal’s more of a woman than any the rest of ye, if she _is_ an Injun.”

“Wolcott’s Woods” had become a favorite resort since that Thanksgiving ramble which had brought the three friends closer together, and the fact that the woods belonged to Doris’ Uncle Si, together with the further consideration that the “new teacher” usually went with the girls, had satisfied their respective mothers of their safety on these excursions. There was talk of snow-shoes and skis, and later of fishing-rods and flower-baskets, but just what went on in Wolcott’s Woods no one knew exactly, for the “Clover-Leaf” was a secret society of three, with Ethan Honey, Miss Morrison and Uncle Si as honorary members.

Presently Stella and her teacher appeared, and the four set out at once—or five, counting in the irrepressible Sir Walter, whose care-free bark voiced the adventurous spirit of the holiday party. It was a warm Saturday in April—one of the few days when our New England spring really opens her heart to the wayfarer, and from time to time they were overtaken by country teams whose occupants gazed curiously, even pityingly, upon them. Once a farmer returning homeward with an empty lumber wagon offered the whole party “a lift,” which proposal was gracefully evaded by Miss Morrison. It always amused her to note that the “natives” evidently could not conceive of any one’s walking for pleasure, or indeed walking at all, unless he were frankly too poor to ride.

“Let’s go round to the house, first,” whispered Doris, hanging to Miss Morrison’s arm, when they were almost there. The child had a coaxing way with her that was not easy to resist; and, moreover, Uncle Si’s late russet apples were not to be despised at this time of the year. So they all wandered up to the side door of the low, white farmhouse, with the square, forbidding front and homely, inviting back premises characteristic of its type.

The door into the summer kitchen stood wide open, and an inquisitive hen or two had actually crossed the threshold; yet repeated knocks brought no answer. Cynthia and Scotty had already dashed off in the direction of the barn-yard, from which there presently came sounds so suggestive of rustic revelry that the others precipitately followed.

“I told him he didn’t dast to ride one o’ the cows,” shrieked Sin, faint with laughter, “and he’s done it! Look, oh, look! It’s as good as the circus—better!”

Even Miss Morrison couldn’t resist the spectacle of Ethan Honey’s long legs gripping the sides of his reluctant horned steed, his face wearing a smile of mingled triumph and embarrassment as he was borne at a gallop round and round the enclosure, with Scotty yapping delightedly at his heels. In another minute or so, without slackening his speed, the young man had alighted quite informally at their feet. He rose and felt mechanically for his cap, which had disappeared, while he gravely remarked:

“Your house is quite finished. I think I saw a ‘For Rent’ sign in the window to-day!”

The great secret was out! The trio of friends had early felt the common need of a tangible house o’ dreams, and now the primitive shelter they craved had taken shape in Uncle Si’s hospitable woods, and chiefly under Ethan’s capable and willing hands.

“Let’s go right over now and have our housewarming,” demanded practical Doris. “Where’s Uncle Si?”

“He went to the store right after dinner,” Ethan answered, “and I’ll have plenty of time to finish my chores after you go. I’ve been helping afternoons and Saturdays for quite a while. Would any of you care for a drink of fresh buttermilk? I churned this morning.”

Well, there are worse things than the soothing acid of that velvet drink to wash the dust from one’s throat after a three-mile tramp. It wasn’t many minutes before Ethan was leading the way to the woods, his pockets sagging with apples, while Sin had stuffed her sailor blouse, and Doris’ sweater was quite knobby with the same.

There were more shrieks of rapture, naturally, when the girls spied their ingenious shack of fresh-cut evergreen boughs, which had been thrust into the ground in a circle and cleverly interlaced so as to make the hut all but water-tight. There was an opening left for a door—rather small, it is true, but still satisfactory—with another, smaller and higher up, for a window; and so neat and careful had been the young builder’s craftsmanship that the ferns on the threshold were scarcely more disturbed than they might have been by the nest-building of a bird.

The party stooped one by one to the oval door, and exclaimed over the fascinations of the shadowy interior, which reminded Yellow Star vividly of the conical wigwams of her people. The little house was quite bare and empty, and redolent of the scent of fern and pine.

“We ought to have a couch of fir-balsam,” suggested Miss Morrison, who had spent a summer in the Adirondacks.

Cynthia proposed an armful of thick moss, while ease-loving Doris declared that for her part she preferred to bring out a hammock.

“What makes you so quiet, Jibby?” demanded Sin, as they stepped forth into the open, under the skyey roof.

“I feel in my heart what I have no words to say,” murmured the Indian girl.

“Our neighbors would be quite as well pleased, perhaps, if we were all as quiet as Stella,” suggested Ethan, quickly.

“What neighbors do you mean? Uncle Si doesn’t care how much noise we make,” remarked literal Doris.

“No; but my oven-bird does,” and the boy pointed out a shy, golden-crowned bird that was apparently reconnoitering the gay party with some anxiety, from behind a sheltering clump of laurel.

“Is its nest near by?” “Oh, show us, do!” came from one and another.

The nest was a curious one, oven-shaped, as the bird’s name would suggest, with an opening at the side through which the first of four speckled eggs could be dimly seen. But Ethan would not allow them to come too near, or linger too long. The little mother was already uttering cries of distress, and feigning lameness to draw them away from her treasure.

“How is your crow doing?” queried Miss Morrison, as they all sat down on the threshold of their “House in the Woods” to christen it with the first social meal. It had been settled that there was to be a stone hearth laid for coffee-boiling before the next Saturday.

“Fine,” Ethan responded, throwing an apple high in the air, and catching it skilfully as it fell. “He can walk ’most as well as ever, and eats out of my hand. I’m thinking of slitting his tongue and teaching him to talk,” he added.

“Ethan found a young crow with his leg broken, by stone-throwing boys, probably, and set it quite successfully,” the teacher explained to Stella, who glowed visibly, but said nothing.

“Well, Doctor, I promise to send for you next time I fall out of the cherry-tree,” crowed Sin, whose climbing days were by no means over, in spite of Grandma Brown.

“Uncle Si is getting ready to go to bed by this time, and we ought to be going home to supper,” announced Doris, soberly, as the April sun dropped into a bank of haze in the quiet west.

“‘Silas Wolcott is dreadful sot,’ as Grandma Brown says,” chimed in Ethan. “Many’s the time he’s been offered a good price, in hard cash, for this bit of pine, but his answer is always the same. ‘It’s been in the family for quite some time: I guess I won’t sell just yet.’

“You know, don’t you, that he’s never missed being in his bed by seven o’clock in the evening, winter or summer, for forty years? That’s just one of his little ways. He’s got lots of them; one’s drinking buttermilk three times a day, and another is never setting foot inside a church. I forget how that started, but they say he stood just outside an open window at Doris’ mother’s wedding! But for all that he’s a good-hearted old chap as ever lived, and I wish he was _my_ uncle,” the boy ended, honestly enough.

And the stranger, who was already forgetting her strangeness, secretly echoed the wish.

“Oh, these dear, real people!” she said to herself, as they all turned homeward together, leaving the darling House in the Woods to its invisible neighbors and companions of the night. “They are all so—so _folksy_, as Grandma Brown says. It really does begin to seem as if I _belonged_!”