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Eliza cleared her throat and answered with the same irrelevance: "He's fixed up the pinies real nice. See 'f you remember which the white one was." Sophy stepped over the dividing line, and the two sisters walked away to the peony settlement. Gardener Jim touched Wilfred on the arm. "You go along," said he. "I'll finish here. You 'tend to Annie's gardin.
He had gone straight over to the spot where the juicy red-brown stalks were pushing up among the grass. "Well, if I don't git round this fall an' feed up them pinies I sha'n't have a wink o' sleep all winter." Eliza had followed him, and now she stood regarding the peonies absently and with almost a wistful curiosity, as if they recalled something she had long forgotten to enjoy.
The visiting woman sniffed covertly, and a retort which seemed to her exceedingly witty was loud in her own consciousness. "Them that likes beets and pinies is welcome to them," she thought, but she did not speak. "Well," said she, "folks must do as they think best about their own children. I have always thought a good deal of an education myself. I was brought up that way."
I promise ye that. His outfit ain't any better'n Peg himself." "Who is the contractor?" asked Tom. "It's the Dusenbery outfit. Dusenbery is always timber-lookin', peekin' about the Pinies to find a cuttin' that he kin steal, and he's stole a lot of it, Cap'n Gray. Ye lookin' for timber thieves?" "That is a part of my job up here," answered Tom smilingly.
"Now you stop thinkin' gardins for a minute an' pay some heed to me," said Mrs. Marshall. "How was I goin' to look out for the pinies, when I only come into the property this spring? Uncle'd ha' seen 'em mowed down for fodder before he'd ha' let you or anybody else poke round over anything 'twas his.
She was thinner, her eyes were sharp, and her chin was square and firm. "Well," said she, "what is it?" Jim hardly seemed to see her. "Where's your pinies?" he asked. Eliza resolutely refrained from looking at the grassy plot where they sat in their neglected state. "I dunno 's they're comin' up this year," she returned speciously. "Yes, they be, too," said Jim, with vigor.
"It's going t' look pretty near's it used to. Only I remember Mis' Bolton used to have a flower garden all along that stone wall over there; she was awful fond of flowers. I remember I gave her some roots of pinies and iris out of our yard, and she gave me a new kind of lilac bush pink, it is, and sweet! My! you can smell it a mile off when it's in blow." "Then you knew the Bolton family?"
"I dunno," said Jim. Abstraction had settled upon him. "Say, Mis' Marshall, what if I should drop in an' 'tend to them pinies?" "Fush on the pinies!" said Mrs. Marshall heartily. "You can, if 't'll be any comfort to ye. 'Twas they that made me think o' the Miller twins. Husband never got over talkin' about their pinies. I'd ruther have a good head o' lettuce than all the pinies that ever blowed."
He was merely an old resident likely to clear up a matter that had been blurred during her years of absence in the West. Jim's eyes traveled past her to the garden in the rear of the house, where yellow flower-de-luce was beginning to blow. "They'd ought to put some muck on them pinies last fall," said he, in a soft voice which his gnarled aspect had not foretold.
In front of the "store" was a hay-scale, across the way a tavern, and, at respectful distances along the street, white or red houses, with the inevitable front-door, south-door, kitchen-and shed-floor, lilacs and altheas before the windows, fennel, tiger-lilies, sweet-brier, and Bargundy rosebushes, with red "pinies" and livid hydrangeas, or now and then a mat of stonecrop and "voilets" along the posy-bed that edged cabbage and potato-plots, while, without the fence, Bouncing-Bets adorned the road-side, or blue sea-pinks from the pasture-lot strayed beyond its rails.
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