II
But we will begin this story with a summer
morning long ago, when Mrs. Forrester
was still a young woman, and Sweet Water
was a town of which great things were expected.
That morning she was standing in the deep bay-window of her parlour, arranging old-fashioned
blush roses in a glass bowl. Glancing up, she saw
a group of little boys coming along the driveway,
barefoot, with fishing-poles and lunch-baskets.
She knew most of them; there was Niel Herbert,
Judge Pommeroy’s nephew, a handsome boy of
twelve whom she liked; and polite George Adams,
son of a gentleman rancher from Lowell,
Massachusetts. The others were just little boys
from the town; the butcher’s red-headed son, the
leading grocer’s fat brown twins, Ed Elliott
(whose flirtatious old father kept a shoe store
and was the Don Juan of the lower world of
Sweet Water), and the two sons of the German
tailor,—pale, freckled lads with ragged clothes
and ragged rust-coloured hair, from whom she
sometimes bought game or catfish when they
appeared silent and spook-like at her kitchen door
—14—
