Mother Elsie was not at home. The door to the Little House was wide
open, as it always is when cold or rain does not close it, and huge old
Tabby with one eye purred on the doorstep in the sun. A bird was nesting
in the wisteria vine above the door and her soft whirring bespoke an
interesting domestic event as near at hand. It did not in the least
disturb Tab, and I wondered at the harmony between traditional enemies
that I met on Mother Spurlock's very doorstep. I went in and drew myself
a drink of fresh cool water from the cistern at the back door, looked in
a tin box over the kitchen table and took three crisp tea cakes
therefrom. I picked up a half knitted sock from beside the huge split
rocker in the shade of the gnarled old apple tree, which was a rooftree
in every sense of the word, for it crowded close against the door and
hovered in the whole tiny house. Just before I left I put all the loose
change I had in my white linen skirt pocket in an old lacquered tea
canister which had a slit in it cut with a can opener, and that stood
on the shelf of the old rock chimney in the low living room. I had
never heard that canister mentioned by Mother Spurlock and I don't know
how I knew that out of it came the emergency funds for many a crisis in
the Settlement. Then last I picked a blush rose from the monthly bloomer
trailing up and over the window and laid it on the empty, worn old Bible
on the wide arm of the rocker beside a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.
Then I hesitated. I had been so sure of finding Mother Spurlock at home
and having her hunt up Martha for me that I found it difficult to adjust
myself to my first complexity of plans. And while I hesitated a resolve
came into my mind with the completeness of a spoken direction.
"She lives at the Last Chance and I'll go right down there and find
her," I said to myself, as I started along the peony-bordered path to
the front gate of the Little House, over which a huge late snowball was
drooping, loaded down with snowy balls that would hold their own until
almost the time for frost. At my own decision I had a delicious little
feeling of fear, which was at least justifiable when I thought of that
huge drunken figure wrestling with Billy in the darkness and whom I
knew to be the proprietor of the resort into which I had determined to
penetrate. Also, from my early youth I had heard Jacob Ensley and the
Last Chance spoken of in tones of dread disapproval. Before I should
become really frightened I hurried down the hill, past the squalid and
tumble-down mill cottages which I had never really seen before, where it
seemed to me millions of children swarmed in and around and about, and
at last arrived at the infamous social center of the Settlement.