Chapter 25

The summer that followed the People’s Bank failure was one of those uncompromising summers that arrive in May and depart only with the last leaf in October. The river dwindling to a feeble stream staggered between distant banks, and the countryside lay parched and panting beneath an unrelenting sun.

In the city Noah Wicker toiled laboriously over his first case which had been granted a rehearing, and set for November the sixth. At the Capitol, Donald Morley sat day after day, coatless, collarless, in the torrid confines of his small bedroom, furiously covering reams of paper with compact handwriting. At Thornwood Miss Lady, who had been left in command of a sinking ship, struggled heroically to bring it into port.

One day early in July, Myrtella Flathers sat just inside the screen door of the summer kitchen, armed with a fly-spanker and a countenance of impending gloom. She was evidently rehearsing a speech, for her lips moved in scornful curves, and her bristling black locks were tossed in defiance. Mike, venturing out of a shady corner and catching a glimpse of her face, thought her inaudible remarks were addressed to him and retired with guilty eyelid and drooping tail to the woodshed.

Myrtella’s bitter reflections were interrupted by the appearance of Miss Lady on the vine-covered porch. She looked absurdly young in her widow’s weeds, in spite of the fact that her color was gone and her eyes beginning to look too big for her face.

“They’ve come to stay a week!” she announced, sinking wearily on the top step and casting a desperate glance at the closed shutters of the guest room above. “And it’s Friday, and Mr. Gooch will be here to supper. Do you see how we are ever going to hold out?”

“I ain’t!” declared Myrtella, spanking a fly into eternity with deadly precision. “I’m sick and tired of company. There ain’t been a day in the three months since the Doctor died that we ain’t had his kin folks on our hands. It beats my time how half the world gits a prowlin’ fit every summer, and goes pestering them that stays at home. As to these old maids that come to-day, if they had a eye in their heads they’d see you was plumb wore out. I wouldn’t ‘a’ ast ‘em to stay.”

“But I had to. They are the Doctor’s cousins. They said they’d been coming to see him every summer for years, and they don’t want to lose sight of the children.”

“Umph! The children wouldn’t mind losing sight of them! Miss Hattie got sent to bed onct for sassing the thin one that wants special dishes and all her water boiled. I bet she’ll ast you to change her mattress.”