When I see how you act
with money and business, and how you let folks take advantage of
you, then I think you're a plain dum fool. And yet when you bob up
and do somethin' like gettin' Leander Babbitt to volunteer and
gettin' me out of that row with his father, then--well, then, I'm
ready to swear you're as wise as King Solomon ever was. You're a
puzzle to me, Jed. What are you, anyway--the dum fool or King
Solomon?"
Jed looked meditatively over his spectacles. The slow smile
twitched the corners of his lips.
"Well, Sam," he drawled, "if you put it to vote at town meetin' I
cal'late the majority'd be all one way. But, I don't know"--; he
paused, and then added, "I don't know, Sam, but it's just as well
as 'tis. A King Solomon down here in Orham would be an awful
lonesome cuss."
CHAPTER III
Upon a late September day forty-nine years and some months before
that upon which Gabe Bearse came to Jed Winslow's windmill shop in
Orham with the news of Leander Babbitt's enlistment, Miss Floretta
Thompson came to that village to teach the "downstairs" school.
Miss Thompson was an orphan. Her father had kept a small drug
store in a town in western Massachusetts. Her mother had been a
clergyman's daughter. Both had died when she was in her 'teens.
Now, at twenty, she came to Cape Cod, pale, slim, with a wealth of
light brown hair and a pair of large, dreamy brown eyes.
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