The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton Read Online Free

that it hung around my shoulders. Harriet’s boy Frank was tending the fire. Howell drove up in his wagon, and he and a tall fellow with pale hair and fair skin got out and went into the house. I can’t say that I made much of him. There was a creek down behind Roland Brereton’s farm, and I was thinking mostly about taking a swim back there if I could slip away from Harriet after the clothes were washed.
    But Harriet was thinking about something else, and not three minutes after Howell and this pale fellow went into the house, they came out again, with Harriet right behind them, and she had a tray in her hand and on that a jug of cold spring water. Pretty soon, she set them up on a cloth in the shade of a big hickory tree, went back in for glasses and a plate of cakes, and then she sang out to me, "Lidie! Surely those linens are clean by now. You better fix yourself up and come over here and have a glass of water in this heat! Isn’t it sweltering!" And the two men made themselves comfortable, all smiles.
    This neighbor, Roger Howell, hadn’t owned his farm long. He’d come down from Wisconsin, along the bluffs of the Mississippi, and was said to be consumptive, which was why he found the winters up there too much to bear. He had gingery whiskers and a bald head with a gingery fringe around the sides, and he was always taking his hat off and putting it on. Harriet told me that every night he smeared on his pate a mixture of hartshorn and oil, which Jonas Silk swore would grow hair on a stone, but no new shoots were as yet in evidence. The only thing I’d ever heard him talk about was his mare, which he was very proud of—he’d won her in a poker game from a Missouri man, and she was a long-legged, haughty-looking thing with a white circle around her left eye and a wide blaze.
    "Well, Tom," he was saying as I came up, "you were impressed. I saw you holding your hat, but that mare wasn’t even stretching out. On the one piece, that straightaway before you get to the gate here, she whipped Solomon Johnson’s colt, hardly even breathing. Broke that colt’s heart—"
    Thomas Newton started to stand up, but I sat down so quickly on the cloth that he didn’t have a chance. Harriet pushed a glass of water over to me and beamed on me as if I were her dearest child, while at the same time shooing away Frank, who was twelve at the time. "Yes, Mr. Newton, here is my sister, my baby sister Lydia, the last of us girls. Do you know, my father had thirteen daughters altogether?" She motioned to me to straighten my bodice and otherwise surreptitiously rearrange myself, but it was too hot for that. I sat down as I was. "Good land," Harriet went on. "It’s miserable weather for boiling clothes, but Lidie simply would do it. There was nothing I could do to stop her."
    Howell remarked, "My mare don’t notice the heat. She hardly turns a hair in this heat. Tom Newton, you ever seen a mare like this one? I swear!"
    Frank stood opposite us, under the hickory tree, with his thumbs notched in his braces.
    Now Thomas Newton spoke for the first time. His voice was low and agreeable. "You know I’m not a horseman, Howell. And you weren’t, either, the last time I saw you. You’ve been transformed by this Missouri mare!"
    Howell grinned at this as if it were praise. Harriet grinned to be agreeable. Howell said, "Now look at her just stand there. She—"
    "Miss Harkness, are you fond of horses?"
    "When there’s one to be fond of I am."
    "Lidie’s just a miracle worker with dumb creatures," said Harriet. "More of our delicious spring water, Mr. Newton? Will you be with us long?"
    Very slowly and with much aplomb, Frank pulled the stub of a seegar from his pocket and put it between his lips. A moment later, he pulled out a lucifer and lit it. He sucked through it and then let the smoke pillow out of his mouth. Harriet, I could see, was trying to ignore him. Mr. Howell seemed to be ignoring him, too, except that he turned suddenly and spat