Читать книгу The Hermit of Proud Hill - Lilian Garis - Страница 3

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Kay Findley, breathless and excited, tossed her library book down on her mother’s busy-looking desk, gave her battered hat a twirl that landed it on the Boston rocker.

“Oh, I’m so glad they came. Now we can do things.”

“Who are they?” asked her mother.

“Carol and Cecy Duncan. You know, Mums. The girls who used to live in Melody Lane. Don’t you remember? They’re back this summer.”

“Should I remember? Why, Kay?”

“Oh, Mums. You’re just terrible. Why do you have to be so—so up to date and smart? If you had lovely silver hair and delphinium blue eyes and wore dripping laces——”

Mrs. Findley touched her offending chestnut hair and pretended to rub reprovingly her fine brown eyes.

“Would you really like me better, dear?”

“Silly. Of course I wouldn’t but it would be easier to——”

“Fool me?”

“See? That’s how it is. You always get ahead of me.” Kay was showing, in this round about way, her own concern about something she was about to propose. But she need not have worried about her mother’s interference. Mrs. Findley was not like that. She trusted her daughter and tried to guide her prudently.

“You were saying something about the Duncan girls? I do remember, of course. They used to live on the old Becker estate, and their father, Felix Duncan, was one of our town’s best citizens.”

“That’s it, Mums; and the girls are that way too. They’re best citizens and not a bit queer, either. Just girls like the rest of us. I met Cecy for just a few minutes and I could only tell her a few things.” The last remark was intended to inspire confidence. Mrs. Findley tapped her fountain pen a little impatiently. She had a lot of business to attend to and even Kay should not interrupt her needlessly.

“There you are at those old bills, and you’ll be off to your other desk down in the Center as soon as you finish,” grumbled Kay. “You work hard and I just—play around and wait for school to reopen.”

“But Nannie has a lot to do, Kay, and she is not as strong as you are. But I know, housework has no thrills,” admitted Kay’s mother with a little sigh. She was once again trying to show her daughter, gently but firmly, that to help Nannie, their reliable housekeeper and friendly maid, might be a nobler aim than that of earning a few vacation dollars.

“What is it you want to do now, dear? I really must finish these monthly reports for Mr. Burke. That’s why I brought them home last night.” The mother waited, and the daughter straightened up “all ready to go.”

“Jane Halliday has closed up her real estate office; right in the middle of the best part of the season,” announced Kay, sharply.

“It probably didn’t pay to keep it open,” her mother replied calmly.

“She probably didn’t know how to make it pay,” snapped back Kay.

“And you would know how?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be too nice to go out with people and show them places for sale. Jane just sat in that ducky little office behind a vase of stale flowers and watched the telephone. I guess it got so sick of her staring at it, it wouldn’t ring for spite.”

“That wasn’t it at all, dear,” her mother told her. “The ducky little office, as you call it, was set up there to take care of the new development, Cedar Set. When most of those pretty places were sold of course the business got very slow. It takes new attractions to entice people away out here, you know.” Again Mrs. Findley poised her pen over a sheet of figures on her desk.

“But there are lots of good places still unsold, aren’t there? Just because they were built maybe twenty years ago, doesn’t put them out of the market,” said Kay. This statement, so business-like and wisely spoken, put Kay right where she was aiming to go—into the real estate field.

“I see,” smiled her mother. “You have it all fixed up. The real estate business here in Melody Lane is as good as booming. You, Kay Findley, have the sign on Jane’s deserted office all dusted off and swinging gaily in the breeze.”

“Now, Mother!”

“And the Duncan girls? You were just going to say something about them, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was,” drawled Kay. “I was going to say that Carol Duncan is assistant director of the children’s camp out at Beaverbreak, and her sister Cecy, she’s the one I know, we went to school together in the sixth grade, helps her sister with the camp work there. Her father, he’s the one you know, has taken the Dawson House for the summer. It’s right at the station and he commutes to his newspaper office in Newkirk.”

“So you girls could all work together selling the old places you just spoke of? Don’t mind if I rush, dear, I just have to.” Mrs. Findley was picking up her papers and slipping them into her brief case. “I see what you mean. You would have the Duncan girls to help you as that camp is not too far from the Cedar Set office. Is that it, dear?”

“No wonder they think you’re smart down at the brokerage office, Mums,” said Kay, retrieving her hat from the old rocker but not bothering about the library book Mrs. Findley had put over on the end table. “You know what I think before I know myself. Yes, that’s exactly it. Cecy and Carol have lots of time to ramble; their camp is right in the woods. We all have bicycles and I’m going down to old Spike Johnson and tell him I’ll take over Jane’s leavin’s.”

“Spike Johnson? His name is Thomas, isn’t it?”

“Used to be before he grew up. Now he’s so tall they call him Spike and it suits him, too. But, I had better be careful if I want to do business with him. Perhaps I had better forget the Spike part,” Kay decided.

“But, really, Kay, why should he turn his business over to a couple of girls?” There was a hint of warning in Mrs. Findley’s voice.

“Because I already have a prospective purchaser for a big place and if I can sell one place, I’ll bet my brand new tennis racket, Spike will let me try some more. Don’t you think that’s a good business approach, Mums?”

“Couldn’t be better. But who and what is the prospect? For a big place? Do I see the catch in this new plan of you girls? There is a big place that never holds its tenants; could it be the Morgan Manor?”

“Oh, Mums,” sighed Kay, “there you go again. As if anyone believed in haunted houses these days.”

“Nevertheless, folks like to sleep nights, same as ever, even these days,” laughed Mrs. Findley. “But I don’t like Tom Johnson. When your father and I had a piece of land in the Cedars when we were first married, he managed to get it away from us. Well, he certainly is not an example of the honest business man,” Mrs. Findley sighed, and Kay saw her bite her lips to restrain that memory.

Kay turned her head away so her mother would not notice how this remark affected her. If her mother suspected why Kay was determined to get the best of Tom Johnson in a deal she might not let her go into it.

But Mrs. Findley, too, seemed lost in thought for the moment. Finally she said a little wearily: “All right, dear. You made out well last summer. Sold a piano and actually got a commission——”

“Oh, well, Regans wanted a piano. I knew they did and I only told Ogden’s salesman. He was a good sport to give me a commission. He didn’t have to, you know.”

“I know,” her mother agreed proudly. “Well, Kay darling, I’ve always been a business woman so I can’t blame you. Not that I want to. Good bye, Bunnie. And watch out for spooks. They may exist. No one has ever been able to prove that they don’t, you know, and those woods over by Proud Hill were always supposed to be thick with them.”

“It isn’t the spooks, Mummy dear, but the spookers. Melody Lane girls have been after them for a long time, you know.”

Scarcely had Mrs. Findley’s little car moved out onto the road than Kay was on her bicycle pedaling away in the opposite direction. First, she must see that old fellow they called Spike Johnson. He was known to be “an old crab with a lot of money,” and it was also said he now owned half of Melody Lane. He had sold enough land for the Cedar Set development, and it was for that transaction “the ducky little office,” with all the tricky rustic trellises and silly arbors leading like a tunnel from the old road to the right spot in the lovely wooded place, had been built. That’s where Jane Halliday took the orders and sent some out, and that was where Kay Findley hoped to do something just as interesting if not more so.

Kay Findley was a big girl; she looked much older than her high school years; tall, square shouldered, robust and even good looking. One could not call her pretty, she was a little too much on the athletic side to be pretty, but she was certainly going to be a handsome young woman when she grew up. Her good-natured, generous mouth was especially attractive, and she had one playful dimple that just pinched itself every time she smiled. Her eyes were blue and her hair true brown. She liked a short bob and didn’t care a thing about the little curls that got away both from the bob and being short.

Kay loved business; she liked to accomplish things, and she also liked to earn money. But what really stirred her the most was the daring to do things that most girls would be afraid to undertake.

The afternoon was going and Kay had little time to spare, so she swung on her wheel and started merrily off to find Spike Johnson, the man who owned half of Melody Lane, which included the little real estate office set just far enough in the woods to give Cedar Set development an alluring perspective.

“I’ve got to be smart with him,” the girl was bolstering up her own resolve. “The one important thing is to convince him I really have a prospective buyer for that lovely big place, and at the same time not give him the slightest idea as to who that buyer might be. A delicate situation—” So delicate that she herself did not care to dwell upon it. What might that passing remark in the hotel lobby amount to? The handsome stranger, who said to the clerk, Win Vernon, that “he liked it out here and if he could find the right place, quiet and away from things, he might buy it and come out here to write.” That was all, except that she, Kay, who had been at the hotel collecting the last of her charity money from a recent cake sale, jumped at the idea. Maybe a buyer for that big Morgan place! And maybe—oh, it was too wonderful even to think about.

Turning in now to where the path became dangerously narrow, Kay guided her wheel expertly, humming a tune defiantly. She was expecting to meet Tom Johnson on any of these paths that led to the old farm place. The same paths went to the pretentious Morgan estate but the properties were as different as if miles separated them. Kay could see the Morgan house now, a fine, squarish brick place with beautiful oak trees towering above it. She could also glimpse beyond that bare spot in the landscape the shabby red barns and the old gray house that marked the Johnson home. But over and above all this loomed Proud Hill.

“That’s where the hermit lives, all alone,” she was reflecting. “But he minds his own business so I’ll mind mine, as far as he is concerned.”

Clutching her handle bars, Kay gave a push to her pedals to get over something in the road.

“Oh!” she screamed the next moment. “Oh! What—was that?”

The words were as broken as her precious bicycle seemed to be, for at that moment Kay was tangled in the spokes of her front wheel, and was feeling a sharp pain, like a knife jabbing her some place.

“Help! Help!” she cried out, realizing that the slightest move would make that wire go deeper into the flesh. “Here, in the path.”

“Stay where—you are. I’ll send—help,” came a deep voice, hidden somewhere. “Wait, wait a minute.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” breathed Kay, “someone heard—me.”

Then she knew why she had called out. There had been a stirring in the thick bushes near the white birches a short distance from where she had fallen.

The girl, so suddenly tangled up in the spokes of her wheel, was feeling about the ground with her hands, while she tried to lift the weight of the wheel without stirring that jabbing spoke in deeper.

“There, that’s it,” she said aloud. “I fell over a log, and it’s—why, it’s half buried in a little trench and covered with leaves! Looks like a trap just set to trip a person. Here! Here I am!” she called again, as now she knew someone was coming to her. The leaves and sticks were crackling as two strong, young feet were beating their way to her rescue.