This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4) by Brainard Cheney

Author:Brainard Cheney [Cheney, Brainard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
Publisher: MM John Welda BookHouse
Published: 2012-07-07T05:00:00+00:00

When she had returned from the missionary society meeting an hour and a half later, Mrs. Hightower found it necessary to go to the barn in search of an egg for the charlotte russe. None of her children was at hand. She and Lena—before Lena left—had made the dessert for supper and put it in the milk box to chill, but they had not whipped the cream to put on top of it and she now found that the cream wouldn’t whip; she needed the white of an egg.

Mrs. Hightower changed her almost-new white shoes for old black ones for the trip. She would have changed all of her clothes on her arrival at home but for the fact that she expected visitors in after supper. Mr. Littleton was going to bring Mr. Lincoln and his attorney, Mr. Slater, around for a preliminary talk before what they hoped might be the closing of the big land deal on the morrow. To the old shoes she now added a straw hat of Marse’s to protect her pompadour against cobwebs. And, tightening the strings to the gingham apron she had put on earlier, she set forth.

As she reached the chicken yard, Mrs. Hightower was startled by a flash of lightning and looked up to find, to her astonishment, prodigious piles of dark, lowering clouds. Her surprise bore some realization that events might be making up about her of which she, in her absorption with the ills and contingencies of the moment, was unaware—indeed, that these events might be beginning to transpire. For she perceived the encircling gloom. But how could she have anticipated where the Light would lead her? A sense of the sky’s portentousness hastened her step across the chicken yard and hastily she opened the barnlot gate. At a distance, amid the bog of mud and manure about the cow brake by the back fence, she saw the empty milk bucket on the milking block, as on an altar, gleaming immaculately in the ghostly light. So that was why Marse hadn’t answered her call! But she saw merely the familiar bucket and turned away in her hurry, thinking only that it was early for him to be milking, and moved toward the first stable on the near side of the tall unpainted barn. She opened the door and looked in the hen nest under the feed trough, but it was empty. She made a similar search of two other stalls, as she moved toward the far end of the building.

Beyond the barn, she met the force of the storm and, glancing up, was frightened by the tossing tree. The outspreading boughs of the giant oak at the outside entrance of the barnlot churned tortuously and she—in her alarm, pausing for an instant to stare—saw Sook, the cow, beyond the paling gate of the tall framed gateway. She wondered where Marse could have got to, but another lightning flash, followed immediately by jarring thunder, spurred her on toward the stalls on the breezeway.

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