An open wagon, piled with blankets, carried Allen to Crabapple, and
Mrs. Kinemon and David followed in the buggy, a great bundle, folded in
the bright quilt, roped behind. They soon crossed the range and dropped
into a broader valley. Crabapple lay on a road leading from mountain
wall to wall, the houses quickly thinning out into meadow at each end.
A cross-roads was occupied by three stores and the courthouse, a square
red-brick edifice with a classic white portico and high lantern; and it
was out from that, where the highway had degenerated into a sod-cut
trail, that the future home of the Kinemons lay. It was a small somber
frame dwelling, immediately on the road, with a rain-washed patch
rising abruptly at the back. A dilapidated shed on the left provided a
meager shelter for the roan; and there was an aged and twisted apple
tree over the broken pump.
"You'll have to get at that shed, David," his mother told him; "the
first rain would drown anything inside."
She was settling Allen on the couch with the ragged sheepskin. So he
would; but there was something else to attend to first. He would walk
over to Elbow Barren, to-morrow. He involuntarily laid his hand on the
barrel of the rifle, temporarily leaned against a table, when his
mother spoke sharply from an inner doorway.
"You David," she said; "come right out into the kitchen."
There he stood before her, with his gaze stubbornly fixed on the bare
floor, his mouth tight shut.
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