"If you take my advice, you'll leave Molly Peterkin alone," he wrote in his big, unformed hand, "for as far as I can see you are too good a match to get on well together.She's a fool, you know, and from the way you're going on just now it looks very much as if you were one also.At any rate, I'm not your man for gallantries.I'd rather hunt hares than women, any day--and game's plentiful just now."It was a long winter that year, and for the first time since her terrible illness Mrs.Blake was forced to keep her bed during a bitter spell of weather, when the raw winds whistled around the little frame house, entering the cracks at the doors and the loosened sashes of the windows.Cynthia grew drawn and pinched with a sickly, frost-bitten look, and even Lila's rare bloom drooped for a while like that of a delicate plant starving for the sunshine.Christopher, who, as usual, was belated in his winter's work, was kept busy hauling and chopping wood, shovelling the snow away from the porch and the paths that led to the well, the stable, and the barn.Once a day, most often after breakfast, Jim Weatherby appeared, smiling gaily beneath his powdering of snow; and sometimes, in defiance of Cynthia, he would take Lila for a sleigh-ride, from which she would return blossoming like a rose.
Mrs.Blake, from her tester bed, complained bitterly of the cold, and drew from the increasing severity of the winters, which she declared became more unbearable each year, warrant for her belief in the gradual "decline of the world as a dwelling-place.""You may say what you please, Tucker," she remarked one morning when she had awakened with an appetite to find that her eggs had frozen in the kitchen, "but you can hardly be so barefaced as to compliment this weather.I'm sure I never felt anything like it when I was young.""Well, at least I have a roof over my head now, and I didn't when I marched to Romney with old Stonewall," remarked Tucker from the hearth, where he was roasting an apple before the big logs.
"Many's the morning I waked then with the snow frozen stiff all over me, and I had to crack through it before I could get up."The old lady made a peevish gesture.
"It may sound ungrateful," she returned, "but I'm sometimes tempted to wish that you had never marched to Romney, or that General Jackson had been considerate enough to choose a milder spell.I really believe when you come to die you will console yourself with the recollection of something worse that happened in the war."Tucker laughed softly to himself as he watched the apple revolving in the red heat on its bit of string."Well, I'm not sure that I shan't, Lucy," he said.
"Habit's mighty strong, you know, and when you come to think of it there's some comfort in knowing that you'll never have to face the worst again.A man doesn't duck his head at the future when he's learned that, let be what will; it can't be so bad as the thing he's gone through with and yet come out on top.It gives him a pretty good feeling, after all, to know that he hasn't funked the hardest knock that life could give.Well, my birds are hungry, I reckon, and I'll hobble out and feed 'em while this apple is roasting to the core."Raising himself with difficulty, he got upon his crutches and went to scatter his crumbs from the kitchen window.
By the first of March the thaw came, and the snow melted in a day beneath the lavish spring sunshine.It was a week later that Christopher, coming from the woods at midday, saw Tucker sitting on his old bench by the damask rose-bush, in which the sap was just beginning to swell.The sun shone full on the dead grass, and the old soldier, with his chin resting in the crook of his crutch, was gazing straight down upon the earth.The expression of his large, kindly face was so radiant with enjoyment that Christopher quickened his steps and slapped him affectionately upon the shoulder.
"Is Fletcher dead, Uncle Tucker?" he inquired, laughing.
"No, no; nobody's dead that I've heard of," responded Tucker in his cheerful voice; "but something better than Bill Fletcher's death has happened, I can tell you.Why, I'd been sitting out here an hour or more, longing for the spring to come, when suddenly I looked down and there was the first dandelion--a regular miracle--blooming in the mould about that old rose-bush.""Well, I'll be hanged!" exclaimed Christopher, aghast."Mark my words, you'll be in an asylum yet."The other chuckled softly.
