Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a wonderful cook, and Papa and Uncle Fisher and the hands and all us kids was wonderful eaters; if we ever left the table without feeling kind of bogged down and logy, we didn’t think we’d been fed right. Pie all the time. Pie for breakfast always, and fried potatoes and pork. And all kinds of preserves and homemade bread and peach shortcake with yellow cream and hot, hot pans of biscuit and sweet butter—”
    â€œIt’s a good thing John Doe can’t talk human,” Oliver said. “He’d be howling from hunger. Are there any cookies left?”
    â€œI made some fresh this morning, help yourselves. You might give me one, too.… Well, so, I don’t know just exactly how it happened, but what with Mama being the famous cook she was, and the farm so healthy and the milk so rich, the reputation spread, I guess, and one summer a family from Milwaukee came to board; a lady at least, and her two children; Mrs. Wellgrove, her name was, and her daughter, Ethel, was about Marcella’s age and her son, Francis, was about mine. Ethel had been sick, she was mighty frail and peaked—guess that’s why they come—and Francis he was a problem! In those days a lot of folks considered it stylish to dress their boys like Lord Fauntleroy—he was a boy in a storybook—and that meant they had to wear velvet pants and big lace collars and sometimes even a sash kind of dangling at the hip. Imagine! But the worst, awfullest feature about it was that they had to wear their hair long, too! Real long, down over their shoulders, like a girl, and, if possible, in curls besides. Course the curly-headed boys got the worst of it, and Francis, he was curly-headed; added to that his hair was red, so there he was, feeling like a boy and sure acting like one, but with all this mop, fiery red and hanging to his waist, and trimmed in fluffy bangs on his forehead into the bargain; well, you never saw anything like it. We never did. We’d heard about the Lord Fauntleroy book, of course, even out in the backwoods where we lived, but when we saw it come to life like that!—Homer, he was awful! He teased the poor boy so, and said even his name was a girl’s, so of course Francis he had to act double bad and double loud and get himself double dirty just to show folks he was a boy all right in spite of all them curls and croshay collars and black silk sashes! We didn’t understand that at the time; we just thought he was an awful nuisance. He tied the cows’ tails together, and threw stones at the bull to get him riled up and put salt in the sugar bowl and vinegar in the sorghum and broke the shed windows and put a live turtle in Marcella’s bed and ate half the marble cake that Mama had just baked for the Big Hollow Ladies’ Aid Collation; that’s only some of what he did, and we all got so we couldn’t hardly stand the sight of him. Mrs. Wellgrove didn’t seem to notice half of what went on; now and then she couldn’t help but see, like the time he tied my best hat, my only good one, onto our big black ram and sent him galloping, and then she only said: ‘Fran—cis, Fran—cis. What will the little Meinhardts think of you?’ Good thing she didn’t know. ‘Someday I’m going to tie up his precious curls in the flypaper,’ Homer said, and I believe he would have, too, only for what happened later.” Cuffy laughed heartily at her own memories.
    â€œWhat did happen later?” insisted Oliver.
    â€œGoodness, goodness, it don’t seem so long ago,” sighed Cuffy, still smiling. “What happened was this. There was lots of little islands in the Sac River; quantities of ’em in fact, but in the place where there was most of ’em the current was tricky; rapid and full of little whirlpools and eddies, and it was real deep, too. Papa and Mama never would let us swim or even wade in that part of the river. We knew