ive them, that day, and Mrs. Fabian escorted them,
in the seven-passenger car. They took the turnpike road as far as White
Plains and then turned to the left to follow a country road that would
lead past the farm.

The sale was advertised for eleven o'clock, but the girls did not arrive
on the premises until twelve. Still no auctioneer was to be seen or
heard. Groups of farmers stood around, gossiping about their crops that
season, and their wives sat indoors exchanging notes on canning, new
neighbors, or babies.

Polly gazed curiously at the types assembled for that sale, and whispered
to Eleanor: "Wouldn't you say these farmers had been picked up from Oak
Creek ranches and dropped down here in this front door-yard?"

Eleanor smiled and nodded. Then she said in a low voice: "They don't look
as if they were here to buy. We seem to be the only folks here with a
pocket-book."

A young farmer who had been leaning against the old well now came forward
to welcome the strangers who stood looking about.

"I be the clerk fer the auctionair, but he hain't come, yit. His baby
swallered a shet safety-pin an' they had an orful time wid ippycak tryin'
to git it that way. Now the doctor's thar sayin' that stuff is all wrong.
He'll git the pin, all right, 'cause I swallered a quarter, onct, and he
got it, but it costed me a hull dollar extra to pay him fer his
docterin'. Ye's kin go in and peer aroun' to see ef you wants anything."

Mrs. Fabian expressed her sympathy for the parents of the baby and said
she knew just how frightened the mother must be.

"Not much!" was the clerk's astonishing reply. "She's young Kit Morehouse
what ain't got a grain of sense in her bean. This baby's mother died when
it was a week old, and Lem had to have someone look affer it. Thar warn't
no sensible woman about what would hev him, 'cause he don't make salt fer
a red herrin', seein' his professhun is auctionin' an' folks ain't
sellin' out like-as-much as they ust to be, years ago. But this crazy Kit
was onny nineteen, with no fam'ly, er no payin' job, so she hired out to
take keer of the kid. Don't it allus end like this? The gal marries the
father an' gets mad cause another woman's kid is cryin' around!"

The girls were intensely interested in this bit of local gossip, but Mrs.
Fabian thought they had heard enough about "Kit," so she bid the clerk
good-by and started for the low one-story-and-a-half house.

The interior presented a different a