CHAPTER II.

“One flew into the cuckoo’s nest.”

The letter for Jaynes’s Post-office reached the end of its journey first.  It wasn’t much of a post-office; only an old case of pigeon-holes set up in one corner of a cross-roads store.  A man riding over from the nearest town twice a week brought the mail-bag on horseback.  So few letters found their way into this, particular bag that Squire Jaynes, who kept the store and post-office, felt a personal interest in every envelope that passed through his hands.

“Miss Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis,” he spelled aloud, examining the address through his square-bowed spectacles with a critical squint.  “Now, who under the canopy might she be?”

There was no one in the store to answer the question but an overgrown boy who had stopped to get his father’s weekly paper.  He sat on the counter dangling his big bare feet against a nail-keg, and catching flies in his sunburned hands, while he waited for the mail to be opened.

The squire peered inquiringly at him over the square-bowed spectacles.  “Jake,” he asked, “ever hear tell of a Miss Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis up this way?”

“Wy, sure!” drawled the boy.  “That’s Betty.  The Appletons’ Betty.  Don’t you know?  She’s that little orphan they’re a-bringin’ up.  I worked there a while this spring, a-plowin’.”

“Hump!” grunted the squire, slipping the letter into the pigeon-hole marked “A.”  “If that’s who it is, I know all about her.  Precious little bringing up she’ll get at the Appletons’, I can tell you that.  They keep her because they’re her nearest of living kin, which isn’t very near, after all; fourth or fifth cousins to her father, or something like that.  Any-how, they’re all she’s got, and her father made some arrangement with them before he died.  Left a little money to pay her board, they say, but I’ve heard she works just the same as if she was living on charity.”

“That’s the truth,” said Jake; “she does.  Talk about bringin’ up.  She doesn’t get any of it.  Mrs. Appleton has her hands so full of cookin’ for farm hands and all, that she can’t half tend to her own children, let alone anybody else’s.  It’s Betty that ‘pears to be bringin’ up the little Appletons.”

“I’m glad there’s somebody takes enough interest in the child to write to her,” continued the gossipy old squire, who often talked to himself when he could find no other audience.  “I wonder who it is.  Lloydsboro Valley it’s postmarked.  Wish she’d happen down here.  I’d ask her who it’s from.”

Jake got up, dragged his bare feet across the floor, and leaned lazily on the counter as he reached for his paper.

“Little Betty will be mighty proud to get a real shore ’nuff letter all for herself.  I never got one in my life.  I’ll take it up to her, squire, if you say so.  I’m goin’ by the Appletons’ on my way home.”