Country life -- Fiction; New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
"My, my!" ejaculated Martha. "I guess you think you’re a en*gine*,
don’t you? Pantin’ like that, ’s if you was luggin’ a train o’ cars
behind you? Hats off to ladies. Don’t you see Mrs. Peckett? Say how de
do, like a gen’lman."
Sammy bobbed an awkward pate. "Say, mother-r-r," he stammered.
"Well?"
"There’s that big place, ’way along up the little side street, I mean
road, past the cimiterry. You can’t but just see the house, it’s so far
back, an’——
"He means old lady Crewe’s, I reckon," explained Mrs. Peckett. "She’s
one of the summer folks, I’ve just been telling you about. Rolling in
money, but as hard and close as a clinched fist. Nobody knows how much
she’s worth."
"P’raps she’s the kind that don’t let her right hand know what her left
hand’s got."
"Well, I don’t know about that, but she has considerable of a place.
Enough to keep a whole regiment of regular hired help busy, an’ every
summer she comes up from the city, with just her young gran’-daughter,
and they make out to get along, as best they can, trusting to get hold
of parties, hereabouts, willing to accommodate. That’s no proper way to
do."
Martha smoothed back the hair from Sammy’s damp forehead, making it out,
somehow, that he had more to say, and calming his impatience to say it.
"An’, mother-r-r, I was walkin’ along the road, an’ a awful pretty lady,
she called out to me from the garden, an’ I went, an’ she said her
gran’ma was took sick, or somethin’, an’ there wasn’t nobody she could
send to get the doctor, but ’ceptin’ me, coz I was goin’ along, an’, I
said I’d tell the doctor, an’ she said——"
"I don’t envy you your job," Mrs. Peckett interposed. "It’ll be like
hunting a needle in a haystack to find Dr. Driggs, this time of day. He
may be ’most anywheres out in the open kentry. But one thing’s pretty
certain, he won’t be home."
"Is he the one lives down in the village, on the main street, with a
office which the door is ’round the corner as you go to the station?"
Martha inquired. "We’re such a husky crowd, the lot of us, we don’t
ever need a doctor, and I wouldn’ta knew, except I happened to notice
oncet, passin’, he had such a funny doormat. There was _Salve_ done
into it—white pebbles stuck in the wire nettin’. Now, what do you think
o’ that! It didn’t say what kind, either. Just _Salve_. Wouldn’t you
think _Pills_ woulda been better? There’s more pills used, any day in
the year, ’n salve. But, if he’s stuck on salve, why, he’s the doctor!
Only—that don’t help us get him, does it? You won’t mind my runnin’
off, an’ leavin’ you, Mis’ Peckett? But I guess I better be movin’ in
the direction o’ the Crewe place. An’, father, s’pose you get a move
on, like a good fella, an’ see if you can’t scare up somethin’
somewheres that’ll answer to the name o’ doctor, when you call it. If
you use the auta, you’ll make better time, an’ you might overtake me,
walkin’."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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