The last house in the village on the road to Economy was the
Harricutt's. It was built of gray cement blocks that the elder had
taken for a bad debt, and had neither vine nor blossom to soften its
grimness. Its windows were supplied with green holland shades, and its
front door-yard was efficiently manned with plum trees and a peach,
while the back yard was given over to vegetables. Elder Harricutt
walked to Economy every day to his office in the Economy bank. He said
it kept him in good condition physically. His wife was small and prim
with little quick prying eyes and a false front that had a tendency to
go askew. She wore bonnets with strings and her false teeth didn't
quite fit; they clicked as she talked. She kept a watch over the road
at all times and very little ever got by her unnoticed.
In wholesome contrast next door was the trim little white cottage where
Tom McMertrie and his mother Christie lived, smothered in vines and
ablaze with geraniums all down the front walk. And below that, almost
facing the graveyard was a little green shingled bungalow. Mary
Rafferty kept her yard aglow with phlox, verbenas and pansies, and
revelled in vines and flowering shrubs.
These two women were wonderful friends, though forty years marched
between them. Mary's hair was black as a crow's wing above her great
pansy-blue eyes with their long curling lashes, while Christie's hair
was sandy silver and her tongue full of brrrs. They had opposite pantry
windows on the neighboring sides of their houses, where they often
talked of a morning while Christie moulded her sweet loaves of bread or
mixed scones and Mary made tarts and pies and cake for Jim's supper.
Somehow without much being said about it they had formed a combination
against their hard little knot of a neighbor behind the holland shades.
The first house on the side street that ran at right angles to the main
thoroughfare, just below Rafferty's, was Duncannon's. A picket fence at
the side let into the vegetable gardens of the three, and the quiet
little Mrs. Duncannon with the rippley brown hair and soft brown eyes
often slipped through and made a morning call under cover of the kindly
pole beans that hid her entrances and exits perfectly from any green
holland shaded windows that might be open that way. Jane Duncannon
formed a third in this little combination.
On the Monday morning following the session meeting Mary Rafferty and
Christie McMertrie were at their respective pantry windows flinging
together some toothsome delicacies for the evening meal, that all might
move smoothly during the busy day.