Macraven, with his butterfly nets and his microscopes beside him, peered uneasily up and down the lonely little station platform. From a near-by clover field, in full bloom, echoed the call of bobolinks. From somewhere in the remoter distance came the sound of pounding; then a dog barked, and the morning grew silent again. The only figure in sight was that of a much bewhiskered and ferret-eyed workman, placidly squatting beside a row of track lamps, at the far end of the bald little platform.
“Can you tell me if I am right in assuming that this is Cedar Hills?” asked Macraven, weighed down by the loneliness of the place and some wordless sense of impending calamity.
“It be!” responded the lamp cleaner, with a gently forgiving nod toward the station sign, where the name stood in letters a foot high.
“If I am not mistaken, the fruit farm of Doctor Ezra Shotwell is somewhere in this neighborhood?”
“It be!”
“Then could you please tell me about how far away?”
The lamp cleaner sat and studied for a moment or two.
“'Bout four mile!”
The distant sound of hammering broke forth again, and a dog barked dismally once more through the morning quietness. All the world, it seemed to the Dean of Amboro, had fallen asleep. He turned again to his uncommunicative companion.
“Could you tell me the best way of getting there?”
“Be yuh goin' there?”
“I be!” retorted the professor, exasperated.
The old lamp cleaner slowly wheeled about and pointed to a clump of willows beyond the clover field.
“The Harkins boy is waitin' for yuh there with the Shotwell team, I guess. Scart to death o' the train, he says. Ain't takin' no chances on another runaway!”
Even as he spoke, a team of prancing bays, with heads high and ears forward, emerged from the shadow of the willows. Macraven looked at them with gathering distrust. The youth who was holding the reins could have been little more than twelve or thirteen years of age. The professor promptly decided that if only four miles separated him from the Shotwell farm, he preferred to walk.
“Air yuh the man from Amboro they was lookin' for yisterday?” languidly inquired the lamp cleaner.
“Yesterday?” echoed Macraven, in alarm. “Surely I wired the right date!”
He peered through his pocket note-book with a sigh of distress. His friend viewed him with forbearance modified by compassion, slowly wagging his head up and down.
“She said as yuh might be a little queerlike.”
“Who said I'd be 'queerlike'?” demanded the other.
“That gurl o' Shotwell's. She druv through with that team o' bays o' theirs yisterday. Waited a hull hour and a half for the up train. When the train did pull in, that team o' hers run away, lickety-split. Smashed a hind spring afore the gurl could git 'em sawed off 'n the wind!”
“Was she hurt?”
“No, but she was mad!” He wagged his head again, in silent memory of the scene. She's a high-stepper, that gurl! Then she cooled down and said I was to hev yuh sent over to the farm, if yuh got in when nobody was round—said I was to try and git some little wits in my head—he-he—and look out for a middle-aged gen'leman with thin legs!”
An inconsequential feeling of irritability crept over the young professor of anthropology. He was, obviously, in the land of the Barbaroi, where worth went unrecognized.
He left instructions for the Harkins boy to carry his traps on to the farm, whither he would follow on foot. A walk of four miles through the fresh country air would brush the cobwebs from his brain and give him a chance to think things out and perhaps swing back to a more cheerful point of view.
He sighed as he resumed his journey down the little winding roadway, between slopes of resinous pine, through orchard lands stippled with light and shade, and along rolling pasture fields threaded with a flashing and tumbling little rivulet; for he had suddenly thought of his telegram and his arrival one day too late. After all, it was just as well that he was getting away from his work. Twice, old Ramsdell, the professor of Greek, had accused him of absently carrying off his gold-headed umbrella. Once, too, he had worn his house coat into the lecture hall—a very comfortable garment that Anne Appleby had quilted and trimmed with scarlet military braid for him. He had been grinding too hard. The quiet life of the country had much to be said in its favor.