Through this medium, they read of a country sale advertised for the following Thursday, to take place at an old farm home-stead way back in the hills of Westchester. The items mentioned included a mahogany four-poster bed, and other old bits.
Polly and Eleanor had not attended an auction since the days in Paris, and neither of them had ever heard of, or witnessed a back-farm country auction, so they were not prepared for what they really experienced.
Carl was detailed to drive 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!"