Nobody never
saw him any more, and nobody wanted to.

"So that's the way I hit my stake, son, just as I'd always
expected--by not knowing what I was doing any part of the time--and
now, there comes my iron-horse coughing up the track! I'll write
you sure, boy, and you let old Reddy know what's going on--and on
your life, don't forget to give it to the lads straight why I
sneaked off on the quiet! I've got ten years older in the last six
months. Well, here we go quite fresh, and damned if I altogether
want to, neither--too late to argue though--by-bye, son!"

When the Chinook Struck Fairfield

I

Miss Mattie sat on her little front porch, facing the setting sun.
Across the road, now ankle deep in June dust, was the wreck of the
Peters place: back-broken roof, crumbling chimneys, shutters
hanging down like broken wings, the old house had the pathetic
appeal of ship-wrecked gentility. A house without people in it,
even when it is in repair, is as forlorn as a dog who has lost his
master.

Up the road were more houses of the nondescript village pattern,
made neither for comfort nor looks. God knows why they built such
houses--perhaps it was in accordance with the old Puritan idea that
any kind of physical perfection is blasphemy. Some of these were
kept in paint and window glass, but there were enough poor
relations to spoil the effect.

Down the road, between the arches of the weeping willows, came
first the brook, with the stone bridge--this broken as to coping
and threadbare in general--then on the hither side of the way some
three or four neighbour's houses, and opposite, the blacksmith's
shop and post-office, the latter, of course, in a store, where you
could buy anything from stale groceries to shingles.

In short, Fairfield was an Eastern village whose cause had
departed. A community drained of the male principle, leaving only
a few queer men, the blacksmith, and some halfling boys, to give
tone to the background of dozens of old maids.

An unsympathetic stranger would have felt that nothing was left to
the Fairfieldians but memory, and the sooner they lost that, the
better.

Take a wineglassful of raspberry vinegar, two tablespoonsful of
sugar, half a cup each of boneset and rhubarb, a good full cup of
the milk of human kindness, dilute in a gallon of water, and you
have the flavor of Fairfield. There was just enough of each
ingredient to spoil the taste of all the rest.

Miss Mattie