and dark. The beginning of this twilight period was when the trade that gave the town both its name and reason for being, owing to change of methods and market, vanished across the low gentian meadows of the Moosatuck to install itself anew in Bridgeton, fifteen miles away. The empty factory, long and vainly offered for sale, became a storage place for the hay that speculators bought on the field from the somnolent hillside farmers and held for the winter market. At the same time the hay gave the building a good reputation among the travelling brotherhood of the back roads, who work a week and tramp on again (an entirely distinct clan from the hoboes who follow the railroad through villages and alternate thieving with stolen rides upon freight trains), and the factory became a wayfarers’ lodging-house, until gradually the unpainted boards turned black and the building grew hollow-eyed as its window panes were shattered.
When man wholly forsook it, swallows and swifts brought primitive life to it again, the one nesting against its warped rafters, the others lining the chimney, now free from plaster and very hospitable, with their bracketed homes, until their flocks pouring forth from its mouth at dawn and swirling and settling at evening, seemed in the distance a curling column of smoke.
The row of cheap wooden houses where the factory hands had lived, had also mouldered away and joined the general ruin, only a starved grape-vine or rose-bush telling that they had once been homes; until, at the time I first saw the place, the most depressing of all palls seemed over it—the shadow of a dead industry.
It was an October morning when Lavinia Cortright and I drove up into the hill country with father, who went to see a woman who had applied for a free bed in the Bridgeton hospital, an aunt of Miranda Banks, she afterward proved to be; and while father went into the little farm-house, that had bright geraniums in the windows and wore more of a general air of thrift than any of those we had passed in the last mile of our uphill ride, Lavinia and I sauntered along the road and finally settled ourselves on a tumble-down stone wall in the midst of a wild grape-vine whose fruit was black with sun-ripeness and bore the moist bloom of the first light frost.
As we gazed idly over the fields toward the river, that seemed, as we looked down upon it, to filter through the glowing branches of the swamp maples, washing their colours with it, rather than to flow between banks of earth, we sipped the pure wild grape wine where alone it may be found—between the skin and pulp of the grape itself, a few drops to each globe—and fell to moralizing.
“You like to find a reason for everything, Barbara,” said Lavinia Cortright, after a long pause; “can you tell me exactly why the country hereabout seems so desolate and impossible? It has all the colour and atmosphere of the perfect autumn landscape, and yet the idea of living here would be appalling.”
I had been thinking the same thing as Lavinia spoke; there was something in the very wind that blew over the ruined factory settlement that was deterrent; funerals might take place there, but how could enough impetus ever exist to cause weddings or christenings?
At this moment the door of a small building, the schoolhouse at the cross-roads immediately below, opened, and a dozen or more children rushed out pell-mell, followed by the slim form of a young woman, evidently the teacher, who closed the door and prepared to take a cross cut through the fields, the worn track leading up to the pasture bars close to where we were sitting. No bell, no whistle, no exodus of labourers from the fields to mark the noon hour, the impulsive rush of childhood breaking bounds was the only clock.
The woman disappeared in a dip of the land, and then presently her head emerged from it and the whole figure appeared again walking between the deep green bayberry bushes that make the dark patches in the waste hillside fields. She walked without either energy or fatigue, looking neither to the right nor left; the freckled face, tending to thinness, interested me from the first glance, for though it wore very little expression, it was in no wise vacant; the chin was firm, and there was a good space between the eyes, which opened wide and had none of the squinting shrewdness I have met with in my wanderings with father among remote rural communities. It was an unawakened face, and as I began to wonder what could ever come to give it the vital touch, she reached the bars and seeing us for the first time, paused, scrutinized us slowly, and then said with a tinge of irritation in the tone:—
“I wish you wouldn’t spoil those grapes, I’m going to spice them on Saturday. I should have done it last week, but they are always better for a touch of frost.”
I straightway disentangled myself from the vine with a guilty feeling, and murmured the usual apology of the roadside depredators; that is, when they deign to make excuses, about the grapes being wild and not knowing that they belonged to any one, but my words fell upon deaf ears.
“There were full ten pounds of grapes here this morning, but with what you’ve eaten and more that you’ve shaken off, there isn’t more than six pounds left. How came you up here, anyhow? Nobody ever passes this way; even the mail-man turns ’round below at four corners. I’m Randy Banks.”
This gave me my chance to explain father’s errand. “Do you think Dr. Russell can get Aunt Lucy in?” she asked, eagerness bringing a pretty colour to her cheeks. “It isn’t the care of her we mind, Ma and I,” she added hastily, “but it’s the loneliness for her of days in winter when I’m at school and Ma out nursing mebbe; being chair-tied at best, there’s just nothing to break the time, for nothing ever happens.”
“Now that you have the Rural Free Delivery, you get your mail and papers every day without having to go down to the Hattertown post-office,” I said, trying to find a cheerful loophole.
“That’s no advantage to us, rather the other way. When town was alive and we drove down to the post-office, even if we had no mail, and we never do except the newspaper, somebody else had and maybe opened it right there and told the news for the sake of talking it over with some one else. Then market and store were in the same building and chances were you’d be reminded of something you needed by seeing it, or maybe a bit of fresh meat would look tempting and be sold reasonable, too, if it was near week-end. But to go to that box at cross-roads, though it’s only a step, and find it empty, it’s as lonesome and strange as a draught coming from a shut-up room.”
Then as she realized that she was in a way complaining of her lot to a stranger, a thing that the etiquette of the entire hill country quite forbade, she broke off, and turning toward the house, said in a perfectly unembarrassed way: “Won’t you come in? Mother will have dinner ready. She’d be pleased to see you. I have to hurry back to school to-day, for the committee man is coming to see if the old stove can be mended or if we must have a new one, for it’s never done well since Joel Fanton put a shotgun cartridge in it last winter.” Then we went in, wondering if events would ever so shape themselves that she would become an active factor on a wider path than that between the corner school and the old farm-house.
It was three years before I saw Miranda again; meanwhile, a far-away city had thrown a lariat of steel across country, and it had encircled Hattertown; a railway that ran down the valley needed a southern outlet. The survey ran by the ruined factory, and rounding Nob Hill, crossed the river below the Banks’ farm, and disappeared on trestles over “calf pastures,” a name given strangely enough to many a bit of waste river meadow, as if calves did not need the best of material to become successful cows.
At the sound of the first locomotive whistle, announcing that the branch road was a thing accomplished and neither a scare nor a phantom boom, the Rip Van Winkles awoke and rubbed their eyes. They had slept a half-famished sleep. Rather than push and plan a way to sell their produce, they had ceased producing.
The Sky Line Railroad had come. Cruft’s store was rented as a temporary station and the name Hattertown appeared in dazzling white letters on the black sign over the door. In one room were scales for weighing freight and a baggage truck, in the other, a ticket booth took the place of the old post-boxes, while on a shelf behind the little window, a telegraph instrument ticked and told the doings of the outer world to the only man in the neighbourhood that could interpret it. Time-tables were tacked above the two benches in a corner that made the waiting-room, but the greatest excitement of all was contained in a great poster that was not only stuck in conspicuous places in all the settlements along the line, but