The Road Winds On by Francena H. Arnold

Author:Francena H. Arnold [Arnold, Francena H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8024-9087-2
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 1955-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

HOUSEKEEPING IN THE CABIN was little more than play to the strong, young girl who, ever since she could remember, had worked for her keep in a house where she was at the beck and call of a busy and fretful woman. From the hour when she had arisen in the darkness until she had been allowed to go to bed after all the family had retired, she had known nothing but labor. Life as an orphaned “hired girl” had not been easy, and freedom from the dominance of a scolding mistress was almost more than she could comprehend. She felt a fresh joy every day in the possession of her own home. She who had had only a third of a trundle bed each night, and no place to keep even a pretty ribbon she might have acquired, now had an entire house to call her own.

And, more than all other joys combined, she had the love of the most “grand and fine” man on earth. She could not forget the marvel of that. Sometimes when she sat alone by the fire hemming sheets from the bolt of cotton that Thomas’ mother had given, or when she lay by his side on the featherbed that kept them warm on the cold nights, she thought back over it all, and it seemed like a story—the kind of a story that might be written in a picture book someone would give to a child for a lovely present, but a story that could never, never happen to anyone.

She remembered that day many months ago when two young men had stopped at the Kearney home and asked for help. One of them, Henry Putney, had cut his foot with his ax, and the wound needed attention. They had been allowed to sleep in the loft of the barn, and Mrs. Kearney provided hot water and old cloths for dressing the cut. Hester, seeing that it was badly inflamed, ventured the information that a peach leaf poultice would help, and had gathered the leaves, pounded them to a pulp and helped to apply them. For three weeks the young men waited there, and when they were ready to go on to the West where they would homestead some of the land the government was selling, Thomas Lewis had won Hester’s promise that when he came east again she would go back with him.

During the time of waiting, while she had tried to acquire with her meager wages the clothing and linens a bride would need, she could hardly convince herself that she was not dreaming. Yet here she was. The house was real, the farm was real, and most real and wonderful of all was Thomas Lewis with his kind, sweet smile and his never-failing devotion to her. She would wonder at it all, and thrill at it, and go to sleep with Thomas’ arm around her.

It was on one such night when the snow lay in deep drifts around the cabin

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