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The postmaster predicted they would take to "dope." Then there was to be a sap-boiling over on the western mountain, to-morrow night, at old man Entriken's.... Everybody had been invited; if the weather was ugly it would take place the first clear spell. Sap-boilings, Gordon knew, held late in spring in the maple groves, lasted all night.
The Hammett sugar camp consisted of an open shed in which to boil the sap and an old cabin perhaps one of the first built in these New Hampshire grants in which dinner was to be cooked and eaten. Miss Blossom Hammett was already busy over the pots, and pans, and bake oven in the cabin; while her sister, the thin Miss Pussy, overseered the sap-boiling operations.
Somehow, Gordon, finding it upset me; I couldn't stop 'til I'd seen you and asked you about it. Somehow there didn't seem to be any time to lose. I asked for you last night in the village, but everybody had gone to the sap-boiling ... I sat up all night ... waiting ... I couldn't wait any longer, Gordon, somehow. I had to come out and find you, and everybody had gone to the sap-boiling, and "
The sap- bush was not very far away from the house, and the sap-boiling was under the direction of my mother, who mustered all the pots and kettles she could command, and when they were properly suspended over the fire on wooden hooks, she watched them, and rocked me in a sap-trough.
There, alone in the bedroom, he swiftly withdrew the necklace from its pasteboard box, and dropped it into the pocket of a coat hanging in the curtained wardrobe. It was, he noted, the checked suit with the red thread, the one he would wear to the sap-boiling.
"I don't know," he repeated wearily. Over her shoulder he saw a buggy approaching across the grass. It was disconcertingly familiar, until he recognized, beyond any doubt, that it was his own. Sim, he assured himself, had learned of his presence at the sap-boiling, and, in passing, had stopped to fetch him home. But there was no man in the buggy ... only two women.
Sometimes they were visitors to mind and sometimes they were not, but the laws of hospitality held good in the woods as in the house, and they were welcomed civilly at least. Once or twice, when particular friends of his came on sap-boiling days, Davie ventured on an impromptu sugaring-off on his own responsibility.
At his left, a grove of sugar-maples, sparsely set, climbed a long slope, over the ridge of which the descending sun glowed warmly. Somewhat back from the road, a rough shack which served as a sugar-house for the spring sap-boiling, stood with gaping door, open to all the winds that blew. These things he noted subconsciously, as he ran.
In the outcome his difficulty was unexpectedly solved for him a large farm wagon, with boards temporarily laid from side to side, was to convey a quantity of people, and among them Meta Beggs, from the village to the sap-boiling. He learned this from the idlers before the Bugle office.
For that night established values, life-long habits, negations, prudence, were set at naught. Gordon wondered whether Meta Beggs would be there? He would like to be with her at a sap-boiling, in the sooty shadows. With the necklace of seed pearls in his pocket he walked over the street revolving in his mind the problem of asking her to accompany him.
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