May the Best Man Win by Gail Hamilton

Author:Gail Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: hamilton, road to avonlea, gail hamilton
Publisher: Davenport Press

Chapter Seven

When Jasper was troubled in his mind, he usually threw himself into some project that involved a lot of complicated tinkering to distract him from his problem. Today, fighting hard against the image of Olivia gazing up into the face of Edwin Clark, he took to fiddling with a weighted device that would close a barn door by itself. It would be a labor-saving device—very handy for a fellow who regularly forgot to close doors behind himself. The clever weighting mechanism was working fine, but it did a poor job of taking Jasper’s mind off Olivia. The corners of his mouth were pulled down, his forehead wrinkled, his expression woebegone in the extreme when Felix came running up, huffing and red in the face.

“Mr. Dale! Mr. Dale!” he shouted, as if half the world were on fire and Jasper Dale the only soul who could do anything about it.

Jasper let go of the door weight, which bounced against the barn wall on the end of its rope.

“Felix?”

“You’re needed at Rose Cottage right away,” Felix panted. “Aunt Olivia...”

The mere name galvanized Jasper. He took in Felix’s panicky state and fell into a fright himself.

“What, wh-what’s happened?”

In his hurry to gallop over to Golden Milestone, Jasper’s farm, Felix hadn’t got round to thinking about what he’d actually say when he got there. Now here Jasper Dale was staring at him, looking as though he wouldn’t be able to take his next breath until Felix spilled what the big emergency was.

“She’s...um...”

Felix searched frantically around in his mind, knowing he could hardly say a magic potion had just been activated and would erupt in Olivia’s life with terrible effect if Jasper didn’t get to Rose Cottage when he was supposed to.

“She’s taken ill, deathly ill!” Felix croaked, blurting out the only thing that came to him in the heat of the moment.

Poor Jasper! Felix thought the man was going to faint away before his very eyes. But Jasper couldn’t allow himself such a luxury, not with Olivia in the throes of goodness knows what horrible complaint! He turned pale, dragged his fingers through his hair and tried desperately to gather his wits.

“Oh, good Lord, urn, well, come on, Felix, help me hitch the buggy.”

As the two raced into the barn, Jasper forgot all about his ingenious door. It thudded shut with such efficiency that Jasper was caught on the wrong side of it and got whacked smartly on the head as he struggled to rush through.

Inside Rose Cottage, there wasn’t the least sign of deathly illness, unless it was the trepidation thumping inside Sara Stanley’s bosom. Sara was feeling positively frantic, while Hetty hummed maddeningly to herself in the kitchen, rearranging yet more of Olivia’s flowers, and Olivia herself was nowhere in sight.

Keeping a wary eye on her aunt, Sara poured out a glass of sarsparilla from the pitcher and dumped the potion furtively in. She managed this just in time, for at that very moment Olivia stepped into the house through the front door, all bright-eyed and rosy.

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